After promising FSR 4.1 support several weeks ago, Valve has officially introduced AMD's latest upscaling technology to the Steam Machine. In a Steam blog post, Valve states that FSR 4.1 is now available for Steam Machine owners to take advantage of in compatible games with the introduction of FSR 4.1 to the experimental branch of its Proton compatibility layer. Valve has also introduced a CAD file featuring the Steam Machine's external geometry for users who want to make their own accessories for the console.

Valve also provided an update on the Steam Machine's reservations and Waitlist, noting that they are fulfilling orders on a daily basis. Valve also expects everyone in the reservation queue to have the option to purchase a Steam Machine by the end of this year.

FSR 4.1 is AMD's latest upscaling technology that was originally aimed at RDNA 4 GPUs, but several weeks ago AMD finally announced official FSR 4.1 compatibility with RDNA 3 GPUs, with RDNA 2 support debuting in 2027. Around this time period, Valve also announced collaboration with AMD to bring FSR 4.1 support to the Steam Machine.

Microsoft has made a big U-turn on its path to exclusive games and now sees them as a major growth indicator for Xbox.

Microsoft recently posted its FY26 results, showing a $1 billion+ decline in Xbox earnings. The drop in gaming was driven by softening demand for Xbox hardware, increased costs and an overall reduction in subscription and sales. Microsoft's SEC filings also give some clues into how the group is now thinking about Xbox.

Following instrumental shifts from new CEO Asha Sharma, the games division is no longer referred to as "Gaming" in Microsoft's earnings reports, and is now simply called "Xbox." There's also a new definition of how growth will actually be determined at Xbox and exclusive games are quizzically a part of this metric.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that Xbox is expected to "return to growth" in FY27, but what does that actually mean?

Microsoft has pulled all the levers to ensure Xbox has a clear runway for growth. The group has held mass layoffs (Xbox let go of over 1,600 people in FY26 alone), cancelled projects, and divested studios, all while laying out new targets to help measure and quantify this so-called growth.

These drastic calls are expected to start paying off this fiscal year, company CEO Satya Nadella says: "When it comes to XBOX, we are making the necessary decisions required across our content portfolio, platform, and operations to reset the business for long-term growth. We have the best IP in the industry, and talented studios around the world, and believe we can bring these strengths together and expect to return the business to growth in fiscal 2027."

Today, KIOXIA has announced its new CM10 Series SSDs, which represent its first PCIe 6.0 enterprise SSDs built for demanding AI workloads like inference and Key Value (KV) cache. The KIOXIA CM10 Series also sports the company's latest BiCS FLASH generation 10 TLC flash memory technology that achieves the highest bit density and smallest chip size for 1Tb products, delivering 332 stacked layers with power-efficient performance.

And with direct-cold-plate liquid cooling, the KIOXIA CM10 Series is built for the next generation of AI infrastructure and systems. The PCIe 6.0 SSDs also support NVIDIA CMX context memory storage, expanding GPU memory on NVIDIA Rubin for AI inference. Compared to the previous-generation CM9 Series, which leverages PCIe 5.0 NVMe technology, the KIOXIA CM10 Series reportedly delivers 92% higher sequential read performance and approximately 85% higher random read performance.

These are impressive stats, as the KIOXIA CM9 Series of SSDs is still considered cutting-edge as far as enterprise storage goes. That said, with the complexity of AI systems growing, with millions of tokens, the demand for high-performance KV (Key Value) cache storage is rising. And this is where the KIOXIA CM10 Series fits in, leveraging the company's latest BiCS FLASH technology and PCIe 6.0 to deliver a solution for large-scale AI.

Fans of Grand Theft Auto VI are convinced that Rockstar Games is about to drop the next trailer - and the evidence is piling up. Internet sleuths discovered recent activity on the official GTA VI website and the Rockstar Instagram account, sparking a frenzy among fans that GTA 6 marketing season and the highly anticipated next trailer are arriving in the coming weeks.

X user Videotech discovered the GTA VI site was updated with font and layout changes, the first such update in over a month. Then, Rockstar's Instagram account began following new profiles, which some see as an early step in prepping for a large-scale reveal. Industry insider Tom Henderson predicted the trailer will land around August 6, likely tied to Take-Two's investor call schedule and the need for a final marketing push before the November 19 launch.

It was recently confirmed Take-Two will be holding its shareholders' meeting on September 17, which it will hopefully use as an opportunity to showcase how successful the ongoing marketing for GTA 6 is going, and perhaps some pre-order numbers.

Xbox earnings were down -7% year-over-year, representing a decrease of around $1.7 billion as the Xbox Series records its worst sales revenue of the generation.

Microsoft has reportedly its full-year revenues, showing sharp declines in Xbox earnings. Based on company data, Xbox made an estimated $21.76 billion in FY26, compared to $23.45 billion the previous year. Increased costs and a topline revenue reduction were the major culprits.

According to our estimates, FY26 wasn't just the lowest annual earnings for the gen 9 Xbox Series console generation. FY26 represents the lowest year of Xbox console revenues in more than a decade. The last all-time yearly low for Xbox hardware sales was in FY20 with $1.66 billion earned, and in FY26, Microsoft made an estimated $1.51 billion from Xbox Series sales.

Hackers known as ExfilSquad have stolen over 740,000 records from the UK Department for Education (DfE) and a police legal database, including personal and professional contact details of thousands of individuals.

The breach, as reported by The Guardian, involves 607,000 lines of data from the DfE's help-desk portal and 135,000 records from the Police National Legal Database. The stolen data includes names, email addresses, phone numbers, and job titles of parents, staff, government officials, university workers, and police officers. Additionally, another 135,000 pieces of data were extracted from the police national legal database (PNLD).

The cybercriminals are demanding ransom from the DfE and other victims to prevent the full release of the data. "Be smart and just pay," the hackers wrote in a message seen by Sophos, a cybersecurity company that provided the screenshots to The Guardian, adding that the payment would be a "rounding error" compared to the financial cost of litigation.

The new COLORFUL Rimbook L1 Plus is a lightweight, portable, and powerful new laptop built for creators, everyday users, and students. It's powered by the 8-core, 16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS processor, which features clock speeds of up to 4.75 GHz, and integrated Radeon 680M graphics. As a lightweight 16-inch laptop weighing just 1.4kg and measuring 16.65 mm thin, the Rimbook L1 Plus is all about portability for those looking for an on-the-go solution.

In addition to the Ryzen CPU, the Rimbook L1 Plus ships with 16GB of LPDDR5-6400 memory and a 512GB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD. It's also equipped with two SSD slots so users can expand the internal storage as needed. Rounding out the hardware, the Rimbook L1 Plus also sports a large 16-inch IPS display with a 120 Hz refresh rate, 100% sRGB color gamut rating, and 300 nits of peak brightness.

It also sports a 2560x1600 (2.5K) resolution, which COLORFUL notes makes the Rimbook L1 Plus a device for creators and professionals. And on that note, in addition to coming with Windows 11 pre-installed, it also ships with WPS Office for quick access to a wide range of productivity tools like word processing and spreadsheet creation.

In a forum post titled 'I've Spent A Month With NVIDIA's RTX Spark in Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra,' a TechPowerUp forum user by the name of Fouquin details how they've been in possession of an RTX Spark-powered Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra laptop for about a month. With that, they're ready to share their "review" of the device, albeit with benchmarks and analysis based on the recent RTX Spark 616.00 preview driver NVIDIA released for developers, which added CUDA 13.4, OpenGL, and Vulkan support.

Formally announced at Computex 2026, RTX Spark refers to NVIDIA's N1X Arm-based CPU and RTX Blackwell GPU all-in-one chip that's set to power a new wave of powerful AI-ready premium Windows on Arm laptops and mini PCs on track for release later this year. With an optimized version of Windows, up to 128GB of unified memory, and powerful graphics reportedly on par with a desktop GeForce RTX 4070, there's a lot of hype surrounding the arrival of these RTX Spark devices.

This makes this early "review" notable; however, Fouquin notes in their post that they're not an AI person. Even so, they attempted to run the Phoronix AI test suite, albeit with some issues due to the pre-release nature of the software and drivers - with the Phoronix CUDA tests failing. That said, for the tests that did work, performance was in the range of the desktop GeForce RTX 4070.

One of the biggest advances in the AI space over the past year has come from its ability to speed up development and programming, to the point where "vibe coding" means people can create apps and software without any formal coding experience or background. This is why we've got a story like this, where a developer (Kahris) was able to port the Nintendo 64 classic The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to iOS and iPadOS.

And it's a native port, too, which means support for touch controls, high-resolution widescreen display, and a smooth 60FPS. Compared to the N64 original's 240p resolution and 20FPS or so gameplay, it's a massive improvement. With porting duties handled by Codex 5.6 Sol, OpenAI's flagship GPT-5.6 model, it's an impressive feat, but also one that sits on the shoulders of existing work by talented human coders.

Although Codex 5.6 Sol impressively rebuilt the game for iOS as a native ARM64 app, rendered by Metal, it's based on the decompiled Ship of Harkinian source port of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, written in the programming language C.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has admitted that the platform added over 200 million new players in fiscal year 2026, but despite this increase in players, its business did not grow proportionally.

In a statement posted to X, Sharma acknowledged there is a widening gap between new Xbox users and revenue generation. "We need to close that gap by investing in what players value," she said. "That will take time, but we expect to return to growth by the end of FY27." This statement from Sharma comes on the heels of Xbox publishing its financial results, where it was revealed its earnings are down 10% in FY2026.

The numbers highlight a growing challenge for Microsoft and Xbox: attracting users is one thing - monetizing them is another. Though the platform continues to expand its reach, internal metrics suggest a disconnect between player base growth and financial performance.

According to a new report from 404 Media, AI companies are not only using books to build and train powerful AI models, but they're also destroying them. Yes, to digitize millions of books in a way that saves them time and money, AI companies are removing spines and individual pages to make the whole process faster.

It's a system referred to as 'destructive scanning,' where the source material is effectively destroyed. This process came to light a year ago, when Anthropic's "Project Panama" initiative was taken to court in the United States for this very reason. Even though the court ruled in favor of Anthropic because it legally purchased these books to turn them into digital copies, it led to widespread backlash because it meant that millions of books were destroyed, everything from paperbacks to rare prints and editions.

Even though destructive scanning is viewed as 'fair use' by federal courts, AI companies are now looking to shield themselves from criticism by working with intermediaries to acquire books at scale on their behalf.

SK hynix is one of the big three when it comes to memory, so it's no surprise that the company's latest earnings report for Q2 2026 reflects a record-high operating profit thanks to the demand for HBM and other high-performance memory. With KRW 60.5 trillion in profit, this represents a 557% increase year-over-year; however, even this astronomically high figure failed to meet expectations.

Throw in overall revenue of KRW 79.3 trillion, a 257% increase from a year ago, and SK hynix's share price still managed to drop by over 9% on Wednesday. One reason the company's Q2 performance fell short is continued DRAM price increases and SK hynix's inability to pass them on because it has long-term supply agreements (LTAs) with key customers already in place. Reporting indicates approximately 50% of the company's total sales were made via these long-term contracts.

But these lower prices are temporary, with several of these contracts concluding. And with SK hynix beginning to mass produce and ship next-gen HBM4 memory, it's expected that demand from the AI and data center markets will continue to increase as next-gen systems like NVIDIA's Vera Rubin begin to roll out in volume. HBM4 memory is widely viewed as a critical component in this next generation of AI hardware, with all of the big three (SK hynix, Samsung, and Micron) on board to supply HBM4 to NVIDIA.

The new ROG NUC 16 Edition 20, created in part to celebrate 20 years of ASUS's Republic of Gamers (ROG), represents the company's most powerful and premium gaming-focused NUC to date. It's part of a limited edition Edition 20 lineup of gear, all sporting a custom ROG 20th anniversary design with black, gold, and red accents, which you can see here on the semi-transparent chassis.

It's stylish, bold, and premium, with the ROG 20th anniversary edition gear also representing the company's most premium offerings. The ROG NUC 16 Edition 20 is definitely that, with a compact 3-liter size, a removable stand for both vertical and horizontal orientation, and the flagship Intel Core Ultra 9 Processor 290HX and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU with 24GB of GDDR7 memory. With a combined 300W of power, it's definitely a high-end enthusiast-class hardware configuration.

It also ships with dual 32GB DDR5-6400 CSO-DIMM memory modules, with the option for 128GB of memory capacity when pairing two 64GB DDR5-6400 CSO-DIMM modules. Storage-wise, it also ships with a 2TB M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe 5.0 SSD, with additional PCIe 5 and PCIe 4 slots for expansion.

Humans have been exploring the surface of the Red Planet for many years now, and one of the vehicles still on that mission has shared some images at the cost of that pursuit.

Launched in 2012, Curiosity has traversed over just 20 miles of rocky, unforgiving terrain, and the cost of that exploration is now clearly visible on the rover's tires. Jagged holes in the wheels and entire missing parts suggest the rover could easily become immobilized if it encounters a particularly sharp obstacle that wedges itself in an unfavorable spot. Engineers have been monitoring the damage since 2013, with wheel checks now a routine part of operations.

The wheels of NASA's Curiosity rover are showing the scars of 14 years of relentless Martian travel, during which invaluable scientific data and testing have been gathered. Throughout its life on the Red Planet, NASA has rerouted the rover to avoid the most hazardous terrain and developed software to improve traction and reduce wear. What is good to know is that, given Curiosity's current state, NASA has indefinitely extended the rover's mission, indicating the space agency will simply run Curiosity until the wheels fall off.

Claude AI has cracked a post-quantum encryption test scheme and discovered a 200 - 800 times faster attack on a reduced-round version of AES-128.

The breakthrough, achieved using Anthropic's Mythos Preview AI, comes just as the field of post-quantum cryptography is gaining critical attention ahead of NIST standardization. So, for those who don't know, AES-128 is the encryption standard used throughout modern computing, and full AES-128 performs 10 rounds of mathematical transformations. Claude attacked a research version of HAWK-256, a digital signature system designed to remain secure even against quantum computers. The system is currently being tested by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Claude attacked the research version of HAWK with only seven rounds and discovered hidden symmetry in the HAWK-256 lattice-based algorithm, reducing its effective key strength and enabling a full key recovery in about 3 hours and 42 minutes on a 96-core server. Separately, Mythos found a way to streamline a seven-round AES-128 attack by eliminating a 256-way guessing step, though both remain infeasible for real-world systems.

Logitech has confirmed it will ship wireless mice with user-replaceable batteries in Europe to comply with EU battery legislation taking effect in February 2027. The rest of the world will continue to receive the sealed versions it sells today. The company is doing something similar to Nintendo's approach with the Switch 2, where the change is limited to markets where the law requires it.

Robin Piispanen, Logitech's new head of gaming, explained the decision in an interview with The Verge. Logitech's current wireless mice use lightweight soft-pack lithium batteries, which the company says are not safe for users to replace themselves. To comply with the EU rules, Logitech will switch to hard-pack batteries housed in a more rigid casing that's less prone to punctures, while also selling certified replacement batteries.

The trade-off is that the European version will cost more to manufacture and weigh more. Since low weight is one of Logitech's biggest selling points for its gaming mice, the EU-compliant model sacrifices one of the company's core design priorities in exchange for repairability. Piispanen was candid about that trade-off, framing the change as a regulatory requirement rather than a consumer-focused feature.

Halo: Campaign Evolved launched on PC on July 28 without local split-screen co-op, a feature available on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. NexusMods user JPurd123 found that the PC version of the game never had split-screen removed at all.

The feature is technically sitting right there, enabled in the config files. "The PC build never had it stripped out," JPurd123 wrote in the mod description. "It ships with split-screen already enabled in config (bUseSplitscreen=True), and the split-screen HUD layouts, the sign-in UI, the split-screen VFX variants and the audio parameters are all still cooked into the game files. It just isn't exposed in the menus. This mod calls the code that is already sitting there."

In other words, the mod doesn't recreate split-screen or modify the game's executable. It simply calls functionality that's already present, adding a second local player through UE4SS and bypassing the menu restriction that hides the feature.

AMD just released the RX 9050 8GB, its latest entry-level graphics card based on the RDNA 4 architecture. However, rumors and product pages (that have now been taken down) revealed that AMD was also planning to release a 4GB trim of the card with significantly lower memory performance. According to an X post by Hassan Mujtaba, AMD officially confirmed that the RX 9050 4GB is a real SKU, but it will only be available to one system integrator in the US.

VideoCardz found the system integrator that the RX 9050 4GB is being shipped to, that being CyberPowerPC. Unsurprisingly, CyberPowerPC put the RX 9050 4GB in one of their cheapest pre-built machines, featuring a Ryzen 5 5500, 8GB of DDR4 memory and a 500GB M.2 PCIe SSD.

AMD reportedly introduced the RX 9050 4GB in this unorthodox way to "deliver strong overall value for entry-level gaming customers". We will likely never get the card's pricing, as the card is being sold exclusively as an OEM-only product, but it's likely being sold well under the RX 9050 8GB's $279 MSRP (not considering extra discounts OEMs typically get from buying GPUs in bulk).

Sandfall Interactive has confirmed it is interested in bringing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to the Nintendo Switch 2. However, the studio is being upfront about why it is not a straightforward port. In an interview with Automaton, the team described it as a "big technical challenge" and made clear that nothing is ready to announce yet.

"It's a big technical challenge because we tried to do something beautiful with the game, but of course, the Switch 2 is not as powerful as the PlayStation or the Xbox Series X," said studio co-founder and CTO Tom Guillermin.

"So, it's an important thing for us to consider, especially given the size of our studio." CEO Guillaume Broche said the studio is genuinely interested in bringing the game to Switch 2, but stressed that it is far too early to announce any concrete plans.