Latest News - Page 90

Xbox's hardware revenues are down to their lowest point in the Xbox Series generation, and Microsoft's latest results actually represent the second quarter in a row that this has occurred.

In a not so surprising development, the latest price hike is continuing to impact Xbox console sales. Consumers may be shying away from Microsoft's gen 9 console duo as Xbox hardware earnings recently delivered their lowest results throughout the Xbox Series lifetime.

Based on numbers from Xbox expert and Install Base admin John Welfare, Xbox made around $221 million in quarterly revenues, down more than -30% year-over-year. "Xbox hardware revenue decreased 33% driven by lower volume of consoles sold," Microsoft's latest 10Q report said.

Newly-discovered DRM on the PlayStation Store has triggered controversy among Sony faithful, and now the company has finally issued a statement on the matter.

After days of diligent research, gamers and media enthusiasts put together evidence of DRM on the PlayStation Store that could lock players out of a digital purchase if they stayed offline for too long. The reports grew, with indications that the license timer was a way to thwart fraudulent refunds.

Sony has now made a statement, confirming that online checks are required to access games...but these verifications only have to be made one time.

Countdown begins for the highly-awaited "The Blood of Dawnwalker", which finally has a release date. The new game from Rebel Wolves and Bandai Namco will launch on September 3rd, 2026. Rebel Wolves recently revealed a new story trailer, the release date, and the full system requirements for the game in a "Road to Launch" stream.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is a single-player, open-world, action RPG game developed by Rebel Wolves, a studio that was co-founded by Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, the director of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Not only that, but the studio also has several developers who worked previously with CD Projekt Red on Cyberpunk 2077. It is easy to see why The Blood of Dawnwalker is highly anticipated in the gaming community.

We already know that the game will be set in a medieval Eastern European setting, much like The Witcher 3. The player will take on the role of a half-man, half-vampire named Coen. The narrative will revolve around Coen's struggle to save his loved ones by using his dynamic vampire powers. It has been reported that the game will deliver a "narrative sandbox," loaded with choices that will impact both the story and the world itself. If this sounds familiar, that is exactly why players fell in love with The Witcher 3 in the first place.

At a time when buying DDR5 RAM is a tough call given current prices, ASUS is making it easier to mix DDR5 memory on its Intel Z890 and B860 motherboards. In a Reddit post, ASUS community manager MKTLeeM highlighted the company's automatic overclocking tool, AEMP, and why it could be worth trying for users running mixed memory setups.

For those unfamiliar with JEDEC RAM, these modules don't come with fancy lighting or aluminum heatsinks. They are bare green PCBs with DRAM ICs stacked on top, which is why they are often called "green" RAM. They typically run at lower clock speeds out of the box than Intel XMP- or AMD EXPO-enabled modules, and operate at fixed frequencies, timings, and voltages.

The main drawback of JEDEC modules isn't the transfer rate - it's the memory timings. Even compared to cheap XMP kits, JEDEC modules run incredibly loose timings. A DDR5-6000 kit might have a CAS latency of 34, while JEDEC timings for DDR5-5200 can be 46 cycles or higher, resulting in memory access latencies that can noticeably hurt gaming performance.

Switching to a new phone should feel like an upgrade - not a stressful process filled with data loss risks. For many users, WhatsApp holds years of conversations, photos, and business-critical messages. Yet migrating that data, especially between Android and iOS, remains one of the most frustrating parts of switching devices.

Official solutions often come with limitations, from ecosystem restrictions to unstable transfer processes. As a result, users frequently encounter incomplete migrations, missing media, or failed backups. Against this backdrop, tools like Wondershare MobileTrans position themselves as an ultimate solution designed to simplify WhatsApp data transfer, backup, and restoration with a more streamlined, single-click experience.

Despite its everyday use, WhatsApp data migration is far from straightforward. Several technical and structural limitations make the process more complex than expected. One of the biggest barriers is ecosystem incompatibility. Android relies on Google Drive for backups, while iOS uses iCloud, and these systems are not interoperable. This creates a digital barrier that prevents direct, native transfer of chat history between platforms.

Google's upcoming Tensor G6 SoC, the chipset expected to power the Pixel 11 family this August, is shaping up to be a tale of two extremes. Fresh leaks paint a picture of an SoC that pairs cutting‑edge Arm CPU cores with a GPU that first saw the light of day half a decade ago. This choice seems hard to justify in a flagship product, unless you view it strictly through the lens of cost control.

A leak originating from the Mystic Leaks Telegram channel has shed light on the internal architecture of the Tensor G6 SoC. The chip is expected to debut inside the Pixel 11 lineup, which Google will likely announce in August if it sticks to its typical launch timeline. The three devices (internally codenamed Cubs, Grizzly, and Kodiak) correspond to the standard Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro, and Pixel 11 Pro XL, respectively.

On the CPU side, the news is encouraging. The Tensor G6 reportedly features a 7-core configuration: one ARM C1 Ultra core running at 4.11 GHz, four C1-Pro cores at 3.38 GHz, and two additional C1-Pro cores at 2.65 GHz. This is a generational leap over the Tensor G5, which used ARM's older Cortex-X4, Cortex-A725, and Cortex-A520 cores.

Last month, security engineer and modder Andy Nguyen (@theflow0 on X) began experimenting with running Linux on the PS5 and successfully ran Grand Theft Auto V: Enhanced Edition on his console under Ubuntu. Since then, Andy has been testing and refining the project privately and has now released PS5-Linux on GitHub, allowing users to turn their console into a functional Linux gaming PC.

According to the official GitHub notes, PS5-Linux uses a patched hypervisor vulnerability to unlock the console's hardware. Once installed, the console acts like a desktop PC with 8 CPU cores running at 3.5 GHz and a GPU clocked at 2.23 GHz. It also supports 4K at 60Hz over HDMI, audio output, and runs Steam games and emulators smoothly.

The tool currently works only with PS5 Phat models on specific firmware versions. Firmware versions 3.00, 3.10, 3.20, and 3.21 are supported without M.2, while 4.00, 4.02, 4.03, 4.50, and 4.51 are supported with M.2. Support for older firmware versions might be added later, but it is not a priority. Firmware 5.xx is also under consideration, but may not perform as well, as Ubuntu would have to run in the GameOS virtual machine rather than have full hardware access.

HUDIMMs are a new type of DDR5 module designed to make DDR5 more affordable, but at the cost of memory performance and density. YouTuber Tech Yes City benchmarked a simulated HUDIMM memory configuration with a single UDIMM DDR5 module in games to see if gaming performance takes a hit when using these lower-performing modules.

To recap, HUDIMM memory stands for Half-Unbuffered DIMM, and as the name states, it cuts the amount of subchannels a traditional DDR5 module has in half. Instead of two 32-bit subchannels, HUDIMMs only have one 32-bit subchannel. This helps memory manufacturers make cheaper sticks, as HUDIMMs only need half the amount of memory ICs to make a working product, but it also cuts memory bandwidth in half, making DDR5 HUDIMMs barely any better than DDR4 memory (depending on memory speeds).

For testing, Tech Yes City used a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Core Ultra 7 265K paired with a single DDR5 UDIMM. He initially tried to simulate HUDIMM memory by taping off half of the pins on a DDR5 UDIMM, but couldn't get it to work. Luckily, using a single fully functioning DDR5 UDIMM (with no tape) was still sufficient for testing, as one DDR5 UDIMM has the same amount of subchannels as two HUDIMMs paired together in a traditional dual-channel configuration.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has once again reinforced Grand Theft Auto VI's tightly controlled marketing strategy, now teasing that the next phase will begin "soon," sparking immediate conversation about Trailer 3.

During a recent interview with Variety, cited in a report from Game File, Zelnick declined to lock in a specific date for when GTA VI marketing would ramp up, simply stating it would begin "soon." The vague wording is classic Take-Two, aligning with the company's long-standing approach of avoiding extended marketing cycles in favor of shorter, high-impact campaigns closer to launch. In Take-Two and Rockstar fashion, silence with very little to go on is typically the course of action.

Moreover, it fits perfectly with what we have seen from Rockstar so far. After the record-breaking Trailer 1 drop in December 2023, the studio has gone completely quiet, despite massive global anticipation. A recent viral post from GameRoll highlights this silence, suggesting that Rockstar is intentionally holding back before unleashing a concentrated wave of trailers, gameplay reveals, and previews.

DVD collections don't age gracefully. Even if you've kept your discs in cases and away from sunlight, time still takes its toll, scratches build up, layers degrade, and sooner or later, playback becomes unreliable. At the same time, the hardware needed to watch them is quietly disappearing. Most modern Windows laptops and ultrabooks no longer ship with optical drives, leaving good movie collections stuck on a format that's harder to access every year. And when you do manage to play them, DVDs rarely hold up on today's 4K or 8K displays.

The fix is straightforward: convert DVDs to MP4 using a DVD ripper tool for universal playback, then upscale the video to 4K to restore clarity and make it suitable for modern screens. It's the easiest way to preserve your collection and actually enjoy it again.

Free tools like HandBrake and VLC are often the first stop for users trying to convert DVDs to MP4, but real-world experience quickly exposes their limits. Encoding can be painfully slow, especially on longer movies, and the settings aren't exactly beginner-friendly.

Corsair has announced and launched a new 12V-2x6 GPU power cable called ThermalProtect that it says features "innovative technology that monitors the temperature of a GPU's power cable in real time to help prevent damage to the GPU." This Over Temperature Protection (OTP) is included in the seemingly normal cable comb that sits 30mm from the connection point.

The cable comb actively measures and monitors cable temperatures and, when an issue is detected, shuts down the GPU's power to prevent potential damage to the card or cable. This is the latest in what feels like a string of new power supply and cable technologies being introduced in response to several cases of cables melting due to incorrect power loads and overheating on modern GPUs in the GeForce RTX 50 Series.

Corsair notes that the ThermalProtect 12V-2x6 GPU power cable, available in Black or White for $24.99 USD, is compatible with any power supply with a native 12V-2x6 connector. Adding that this "broad compatibility with modern systems" helps give PC gamers peace of mind with a simple plug-and-play solution.

GALAX has been a notable GeForce brand for several years, with the company's Hall Of Fame models renowned for pushing performance to the limit and breaking world records in the process. It's a series that we've gone hands-on in the past, and for a little trip down memory lane, be sure to revisit our review of the impressive, for the time, GALAX GeForce GTX 1080 Ti HOF Edition graphics card.

Today, we got some relatively shocking news via Wccftech: the GALAX brand and company are no more, and the entire global team has been dismissed. And with that, in a statement provided to the outlet, Palit has "assumed full control and operations of the GALAX brand." Palit is now "solely responsible for all activities and commitments related to the brand," covering existing retail stock still out there, as well as warranties and RMA services.

"Following the closure of the previous organizational structure and the dismissal of its team, all management and operations will now be handled exclusively through Palit's official channels," the statement reads. As for the reason for the closure, an additional notification sent to Palit's customers confirms it's due to "supply constraints of various raw materials caused by the AI era."

NVIDIA has released GeForce Game Ready Driver 596.36 for GeForce RTX gamers, and in terms of new game support, this one is all about Conan Exiles Enhanced. This Unreal Engine 5 update to the long-running survival, crafting, action-RPG includes 9 years of expansions and additional content, with enhanced visuals.

The game is set to launch on May 5, with support for DLSS Multi Frame Generation, DLSS Super Resolution, and NVIDIA Reflex. Rebuilt on Unreal Engine 5, the game takes advantage of Lumen Global Illumination for improved lighting and Nanite Geometry to dramatically increase environmental detail and fidelity. Best of all, it's also a free upgrade for existing players.

In addition to Conan Exiles Enhanced support, the big thing with GeForce Game Ready Driver 596.36 is support for the new GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU with 12GB of VRAM, which is now available. Plus, a few gaming and general bug fixes. Here's a look at the full Release Notes.

Ubisoft's next mainline Assassin's Creed game, codenamed "Hexe," has been in the news cycle lately. It has been a bit of a tumultuous time for the game's development team, as it has now lost two directors in as many months. Creative director Clint Hocking left the team in February, and more recently, game director Benoit Richer also left the Hexe project to co-found an indie studio.

It seems like the ship is not out of troubled waters yet, as we have more bad news to report from the Hexe development circle. According to a report by Insider Gaming (citing leaker @xj0nathan), the game's new creative director, Jean Guesdon, has removed 50 developers from the Assassin's Creed Hexe team. These developers are reported to have been moved to Ubisoft's Interproject team, which hosts Ubisoft workers when they have no projects assigned to them.

This change can significantly impact the game's development cycle and the eventual launch date. Assassin's Creed Hexe was reportedly initially slated for a 2026 launch, but recent events and the lack of information about the game give us no confidence that Ubisoft will be able to hit that target. It seems increasingly clear that the game's launch will be pushed deep into 2027, if not later, which will throw off Ubisoft's announced roadmap.

Following NVIDIA's announcement of the GeForce RTX 5070 12GB laptop GPU, Framework is adding it as a new Graphics Module for the Laptop 16. However, launching a 12GB VRAM option in the middle of a DRAM crisis is going to sting Framework fans, as this version is apparently much more expensive than its lower-VRAM counterpart.

The Framework Laptop 16 RTX 5070 12GB Graphics Module is now available for pre-order at $1,199. This puts it at a 72% premium, or a whopping $500 extra, for just 4GB of additional VRAM over the existing RTX 5070 8GB model. The two chips are otherwise identical. Both feature 4,608 CUDA cores, boost clocks of up to 2.4 GHz, 384 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and a maximum TGP of 100W. NVIDIA has simply swapped the 2GB memory modules for 3GB chips and made no other changes. So, unless you are running VRAM-intensive tasks, you are unlikely to notice much difference between the two.

On top of that, Framework has also warned that the $699 RTX 5070 8GB module may not stay at its current price for long. In an X reply, the company said the price hikes it is seeing come directly from silicon suppliers, and once its current GDDR7 inventory depletes, the 8GB configuration is highly likely to increase in price as well.

It almost seems like all the problems in the PC hardware space nowadays are somehow linked to the global DRAM shortage. Every other day, another component becomes more expensive due to the crippling supply-demand mismatch in both DRAM and CPU chips. The AI boom and its resulting global memory crisis seem to have taken another victim, this time being Valve's Steam Machine.

Valve officially announced the Steam Controller earlier this week, with a $99 price tag and a May 4th launch date. However, the keen-eyed among you might have remembered the earlier rumors that Valve was supposedly preparing the Steam Controller to launch alongside the Steam Machine, and the Steam Frame for that matter. After all, a controller being paired with a gaming machine makes perfect sense, right? So why the staggered launch?

Turns out, all roads lead to our old buddy, the DRAM shortage. In a recent interview with Polygon, Valve hardware engineer Steve Cardinali confirmed that the Steam Machine and Steam Frame are being held back by the ongoing memory crisis, and that the controller was ready to be shipped since it doesn't have any RAM in it.

NVIDIA is expanding its Blackwell laptop lineup with the GeForce RTX 5070 12GB Laptop GPU. Confirmed by a quiet driver update blog post, this GPU aims to address longstanding user feedback about the VRAM limitations of NVIDIA's mid-range mobile silicon.

Rather than a direct replacement, the 12GB model will serve as a higher-tier alternative to the existing 8GB model. In other words, laptops with the larger memory capacity model will carry a price premium.

This is not a new GPU core with a wider memory bus. At its core is the same GB206 chip, featuring 4,608 CUDA cores and a 128-bit interface made up of four 32-bit channels. For the 12GB version, NVIDIA is using higher-density GDDR7 modules, with each channel populated by a 3GB chip, for a total of 12GB. By comparison, the original 8GB version uses 2GB modules per channel, for a total of 8GB across the same bus.

FinalWire has released AIDA64 version 8.30, the latest update to its widely used Windows system diagnostic, benchmarking, and monitoring tool. The update introduces several changes, including a new AIDA FPS module that captures real-time FPS data from DX11 and DX12 games. It is exclusive to the Extreme edition and works similarly to other monitoring tools, such as MSI Afterburner, with FPS data displayed across all available outputs, including SensorPanel, OSD, tray icons, and logging.

Here is a list of all the new features and improvements in version 8.30:

Version 8.30 adds improved support for Intel's next-gen Nova Lake CPUs, which are expected to launch later this year. FinalWire has also added a new SHA3 benchmark optimized for APX architectures, covering both Intel Diamond Rapids Xeon and Nova Lake Core Ultra processors.

PC build videos are a fairly common thing to stumble upon on YouTube, especially when the algorithm is well aware that you're a PC gaming enthusiast. That said, there was one recent upload from the channel GPUSpecs that immediately stood out during one of our recent 'let's kill some time on YouTube' breaks. And the title sums it up perfectly - 'Building a Gaming PC Without Using Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA.'

A functioning gaming x86 PC running Windows and playing games like Forza Horizon 5 without any Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA hardware is a fascinating project to take on, and the result is exactly that. As expected, GPUSpecs sourced parts from China, with the 8-core Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-7000 CPU being of particular interest, as it's an officially licensed x86 CPU thanks to Zhaoxin's ties to companies like VIA and Cyrix that made x86 processors back in the Pentium days.

In the video, we learn that he was able to purchase the CPU, which arrived pre-installed on a custom, compact ASUS motherboard, even though it doesn't feature any ASUS branding. The good news is that the CPU socket is basically identical to an Intel socket, so Intel mounting for an air cooler worked just fine.

In recent years, we've seen the rise in popularity of magnetic or analog keyboards in the PC gaming space. Magnetic switches open the door to adjustable actuation points and dual-mode action, and are highly sought after for that very reason. That said, the more tactile feel of mechanical switches is still highly sought after, and with its new G512 X gaming keyboard, Logitech is saying, 'Why not have both?'

Yes, the impressive new Logitech G512 X TMR Analog and Mechanical Gaming Keyboard ships with 39 Dual Swap hybrid TMR switch beds, meaning that you can hot-swap between analog/magnetic switches and traditional 5-pin mechanical switches on the same keyboard. It's an impressive achievement, and the new Logitech G512 X comes with 9 premium Gateron KS-20 analog switches for those seeking a competitive edge.

That isn't the only notable hardware innovation that the Logitech G512 X brings to the table, as you can add SAPP (Second Actuation Pressure Point) Rings to one of the analog switches secondary actions (programmable and assigned to a specific actuation point) so you get a tactile bump on that second trigger point. Throw in TMR (Tunnel Magneto Resistance) sensor technology for the analog side of the keyboard, a more advanced and accurate technology, and the Logitech G512 X stands out long before you take in its stylish physical design.