Things get political this week on The TT Show when Jak and Kosta dig into the recent controversy surrounding Elon Musk, X, and the Australian government's attempt to censor specific content. Then, it gets even more political when the topic switches to the US government deeming Microsoft a security risk because all agencies depend on its software.

Plus, Intel partners with the Pentagon to develop microchips for what we can only assume is stuff you'd consider "not good." But hey, that's just the show's second half, as the first half is full of in-depth impressions for No Rest From the Wicked. Thel attest game from the studio behind the excellent Ori series blends Diablo with Dark Souls to deliver something special.

Jak and Kosta also talk about the upcoming rumors surrounding Ubisoft's Far Cry 7, which will feature Mr. Oppenheimer himself, Cillian Murphy, as the villain. Plus, Sony has announced a new PlayStation overlay with PSN Friends and Trophies for its PC games.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang gave a hand-written note that he wrote for SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, which said: "To our partnership and creating the future of AI and humanity together".

Chey posted the photo of him with Jensen on his personal Instagram account, with SK Group's memory affiliate -- SK hynix -- supplying NVIDIA with its ultra-fast HBM3 and new HBM3E memory for its AI GPUs. NVIDIA uses HBM3 on its industry-leading Hopper H100 AI GPU while throwing on ultra-fast HBM3E memory on its new Blackwell B200 AI GPU.

In the future, we can expect HBM4 to appear in 2025 while being used on future-gen AI GPUs in 2026 and beyond, and SK hynix is at the center of that. SK hynix recently announced a $14.6 billion investment on a new memory chip fab plant to meet the "soaring demand" of HBM, while it plans to work with TSMC on next-gen HBM4 memory, which will be used on future-gen AI GPUs from NVIDIA.

OpenAI is the first company to receive the powerful new NVIDIA DGX H200 GPU for accelerating generative AI, which was hand-delivered to CEO Sam Altman and president and co-founder Greg Brockman by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. And for those interested in the leather jacket count, two out of three (Greg Brockman and Jensen Huang, natch) were donning stylish black leather jackets.

Jokes aside, the DGX H200 is NVIDIA's and the world's most powerful AI GPU hardware. Jensen Huang signed the hardware with a simple message: "To advance AI, computing, and humanity."

The DGX H200 includes the new H200 Tensor Core GPU, with the Hopper-based hardware equipped with 141GB of HBM3e GPU memory and speeds of up to 4.8TB/s. Designed to accelerate AI workloads, the DGX H200 is more efficient than its DGX H100 predecessor and substantially more powerful.

We've extensively discussed AMD's Fluid Motion Frames technology at TweakTown. It presents a driver-based version of frame generation, meaning it can be enabled in countless games without needing game developers to integrate it per game.

It's a different approach to NVIDIA's DLSS 3 Frame Generation, requiring bespoke AI hardware only found in the GeForce RTX 40 Series and game integration. It's also a different approach to AMD's FSR 3 Frame Generation, which improved considerably in 2024, as AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF) doesn't have access to a game's temporal data.

Like other forms of frame generation AFMF, its technology generates frames between those rendered natively by hardware. Thanks to latency reduction measures, it delivers a 2X boost to perceived performance while maintaining fluid movement. The good news? AFMF is now supported by ASUS's powerful ROG Ally PC gaming handheld.

The Senate officially passed new legislation that declares TikTok a national security threat, which forces the popular app's owner ByteDance to sell the software within 270 days.

If ByteDance doesn't find a US government-approved buyer within the designated timeframe TikTok will be removed from both app stores. The reasoning behind the new classification of a national security risk is the US government believes that TikTok could be used to scrape data on 170 million Americans for China while also being an avenue to spread misinformation.

Due to ByteDance being a Chinese company the US government believes there's a good chance that TikTok is sharing its data on US citizens with the Chinese government, hence ByteDance being forced to sell the US version of the app to a US government-approved entity. However, The Guardian has reported that ByteDance would rather shut down the US app if it has exhausted all other legal options to fight the legislation that would remove it from US app stores.

When it comes to physics-driven sandbox games with community mods and creations, PC classic Garry's Mod is up there as an all-timer. It's been a Steam staple for decades, with the game's history tied to the release of Valve's own iconic Half-Life 2 from 2004.

And now, in a very strange and out-of-nowhere move, Garry's Mod creator Garry Newman and Facepunch Studios have confirmed that they have received DCMA copyright takedown requests from none other than Nintendo. At first, many believed this was a hoax orchestrated by a copyright troll, but Garry Newman has taken to X to confirm that the takedown requests are "legit" and have been "verified by Nintendo."

What does this mean? Any mod or creation for Garry's Mod, including Nintendo content, characters, or IP, must be removed. And when you're talking about decades and thousands of uploads, it's "an ongoing process" with "20 years of uploads to go through."

The process of naturally making a diamond takes billions of years, as minerals under extreme pressure deep beneath the Earth's surface get mashed together to form the most popular gemstone made entirely out of carbon.

Waiting for new diamonds to form simply isn't feasible, which is why researchers have turned to synthetic diamond manufacturing to keep up with the global demand for diamonds. It still typically takes a few weeks to synthetically produce a diamond, but a team of researchers with an innovative approach to the problem has shaved a few weeks down to just a few minutes. Researchers from the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea have devised a new method that can also be scaled up for mass production.

The researchers have proposed a mix of liquid metals: gallium, iron, nickel, and silicon, which are enclosed in a custom-made vacuum system that's within a graphite casing. This casing is then rapidly heated and cooled while being exposed to methane and hydrogen, creating the pressure needed to make a diamond. How does it work? These conditions force the carbon atoms within the methane to move into the liquid metal, creating little diamond "seeds" within the liquid.

Valve has changed Steam's refund policy, which featured a loophole that was undoubtedly abused by at least thousands of gamers.

Steam's refund policy is quite straightforward; at its most rudimentary, a user can purchase a game and play it for up to two hours. Before the two-hour mark, the buyer was able to refund the game at zero cost, and as you can probably imagine, this loophole was easily abusable by the millions of Steam users. However, Valve has now changed its policy by partially patching up the loophole, specifically in regard to titles that are in pre-purchase and offer "Advanced Access."

For those that don't know, Advanced Access can be granted to a player that pre-purchases a title. Sometimes developers and publishers will give early access to a game to those who pre-order. The duration of this access can sometimes be as long as a week or just 24 hours. Steam's refund policy didn't count any hours played of an Advanced Access title, and only began counting after it was officially released.

TSMC has announced its development of next-generation Compact Universal Photonic Engine (COUPE) technology, which will support the "explosive growth" in data transmission associated with the "AI boom."

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) unveiled its newest semiconductor process, advanced packaging, and 3D IC technologies for the next-generation of AI innovations with silicon leadership at TSMC's 2024 North America Technology Symposium.

At the event, TSMC unveiled its new A16 technology, which packs industry-leading nanosheet transistors with an innovative backside power rail solution for production in 2026, with "greatly improved logic density and performance." TSMC also introduced its new System-on-Wafer (TSMC-SoW) technology, which is an innovative solution that delivers "revolutionary performance to the wafer level" in addressing the future AI requirements for hyperscaler datacenterrs.

We somehow missed this, but ASUS recently launched its own external 4K game capture box, the new TUF Gaming Capture Box-4K Pro. This box supports full HDMI 2.1 4K 144 Hz HDR passthrough, variable refresh rates, and up to 4K 60 FPS capture. It's a stylish little unit with RGB flourishes and that signature rugged all-aluminum ASUS TUF Gaming look.

The TUF Gaming Capture Box-4K Pro supports a wide range of input signals, making it an excellent option for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X capture. On the PC side, it supports 1080p and 1440p 120 FPS capture and 1080p 240 Hz and 1440p 144 Hz passthrough. On top of this, there's VRR or Variable Refresh Rate support, so you can game with G-SYNC or FreeSync enabled.

All of this is handled via a single USB 10 Gbps port that connects to a compatible PC for recording and capture. The TUF Gaming Capture Box-4K Pro is also a certified OBS-compatible device. In addition, ASUS has announced that it has won a prestigious IF Design award.

Sony's gaming patents are now starting to coalesce into exciting new features for PlayStation consoles, and today's new addition could help pave the way for major next-gen upgrades on the PlayStation 6.

Community Game Help is now live on PS5, turning PlayStation users into tipsters along the way. The new feature is an evolution of the PS5's Game Help feature that gives users video and/or picture tutorials on how to complete certain activities in a game (e.g. boss fights). Think of it as a digital version of those old NES secrets books from the 1990s.

What does the Community Game Help feature actually do? How does it work? Sony explains: "Once you turn on the settings, your PS5 will automatically capture a video when you complete a certain activity in a game. Then, it will be reviewed by a moderator, and if approved, your video will be published as a Game Help hint for PlayStation players to watch, learn from, and rate."