From developer S-GAME, Phantom Blade Zero is a new Unreal Engine 5-powered cinematic action role-playing game out on October 28, 2026 for PC and consoles. The highly anticipated game has been garnering a lot of attention for its classic Wuxia storytelling and fluid combat (with the developer working with martial arts legend Donnie Yen), so it could be this year's big Black Myth Wukong-style breakout hit. For a closer look at how it plays, check out this 11-minute gameplay demo that was released earlier this week.

With the game coming to both PC and consoles, NVIDIA has confirmed that the PC version of Phantom Blade Zero will feature ray-traced reflections, shadows, and caustics to enhance cinematic visuals and lighting. And with that, on day one it will launch with native DLSS 4.5 support, including Super Resolution and Multi Frame Generation to enhance performance and smoothness.

This Phantom Blade Zero announcement was made during NVIDIA's latest DLSS roundup, which covers new games launching or adding DLSS support. For something a little closer, the massive multiplayer first-person shooter Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, which is out this week, is also launching with DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution and Dynamic Multi Frame Generation support.

If you're aware of Artisan Keycaps, these are custom and often handmade keycaps for keyboards that are basically collectibles or mini tabletop figurines. With intricate designs, there's a large aftermarket for Artisan Keycaps, as they often tie into pop culture, adding another layer of customization to modern mechanical and magnetic keyboards. And now, after several years of creating highly sought-after keyboards, Razer has announced its first Artisan Keycap.

Razer Artisan Keycap - Triple-Headed Snake Edition is described as the "ultimate expression of keyboard customization," with each keycap sporting a hand-finished green triple-headed snake. Created from a highly detailed 3D model and resin-cast, each Triple-Headed Snake Edition is hand-painted to showcase the textures and details of the triple-headed snake.

Now, like most Artisan Keycaps, this is something of a collector's item, with Razer noting that it will be produced in highly limited quantities. And with that, as something created for hardcore PC gamers and Razer fans, the Razer Artisan Keycap - Triple-Headed Snake Edition does carry a high price tag for what's essentially a single keycap.

Although the current GPU crisis has led to price increases and some scarcity, on the plus side we are still getting some impressive new variants. Case in point, the new ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 5080 SOLID CORE OC 20th Anniversary Edition, created to celebrate the company's anniversary milestone.

This custom GeForce RTX 5080 takes ZOTAC's new SOLID CORE design, which debuted with the GeForce RTX 50 Series, and gives it an anniversary makeover. This includes a titanium colorway, which gives the card a stylish, brushed-metal bronze look, and a magnetic mirror-like backplate that can be attached to the existing metal backplate.

The ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 5080 SOLID CORE OC 20th Anniversary Edition features a 2.5-slot physical design, so when it comes to flagship or premium GeForce RTX 50 Series cards, it's on the smaller side. That said, the 303.5 x 115.8 x 55.7mm dimensions and metal build still mean that it comes with a DUO ARGB GPU stand, which, as the name suggests, has an LED light bar integrated into the stand.

NVIDIA's GeForce NOW cloud streaming service is getting an upgrade this week, with an interactive Linux app officially leaving beta. After months of testing and responding to community feedback, NVIDIA notes that the app is now in a stable, polished state and supports Ubuntu 24.04 and later. This version is now available for download via the official GeForce NOW site.

In addition to launching the Linux app, NVIDIA has announced this week that it has optimized DLSS Frame Generation on GeForce NOW, reducing latency to make games feel more responsive when streaming at 1440p and 4K at 60 or 120 FPS. In addition, NVIDIA has made server- or cloud-side optimizations for its Performance tier members, improving performance in CPU-intensive games.

GeForce NOW's library is also expanding this week, with cloud streaming support for eight new games, including Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, a new multiplayer shooter in the series that shifts its focus to the Vietnam War. Here's the full list of games added.

Twitch has added a new feature that automatically opts streamers into generative AI training, allowing all channel content like streams, clips, and even user chats to be used for AI training.

Twitch and Amazon are facing strong backlash from the gaming community due to their new controversial use of AI tech. Amazon is using Twitch to train generative AI based off of user-created content, including streams, videos, and live viewer chat interactions. It's an opt-out feature, meaning it's on by default and streamers have to go into Twitch settings and opt out.

"Your stream and the stream's chat, your VODs, your Clips, Highlights, and any text or images on your Channel may be used," Twitch says.

No Man's Sky has changed tremendously over the last 10 years, but creator Sean Murray still enjoys the game's humble 2016 beginnings.

Sean Murray still plays the original launch version of No Man's Sky. Yeah, that one--the controversial one, the vilified launch version that was released way back when in August 2016. I actually reviewed this game, and at the time, I noted it was a somber experience about getting lost in the cosmos. It's decidedly barebones and lacks tons of quality of life features that modern NMS players take for granted. This was the baseline for No Man's Sky, NMS 1.0, the rough cut.

In a recent interview with GamesRadar+, Murray says that he taps into a kind of esoteric galactic wavelength when playing NMS 1.0, that kind of in-between space that exists in the borders of indies, AA, and AAA.

Yangtze Memory Technologies has climbed to third place in global NAND flash shipments, according to Counterpoint Research's Q2 2026 memory and storage tracker. YMTC now holds a 14% share of the market, narrowly edging out Kioxia and sitting behind only Samsung at 25% and SK Hynix at 22%.

YMTC grew its bit shipments 22% year over year and 5% quarter over quarter, capitalising on widespread shortages while expanding supply to domestic OEMs. The company is currently mass-producing 267-layer 3D NAND using its Xtacking 4.0 architecture, with 300-plus-layer technology expected next year.

Its combined production capacity currently sits at around 200,000 wafers per month across two fabs in Wuhan. A third facility is expected to come online later this year, adding another 100,000 wafers per month. Two additional fabs with 50,000 wafers per month of capacity each are also in the pipeline, which would take YMTC's total capacity to around 400,000 wafers per month, putting it in the same territory as Samsung's estimated 390,000 to 450,000 wafers per month.

GTA 6's expensive $100 Ultimate Edition made up an overwhelming majority of pre-orders, new data indicates.

Trends indicate that consumers are now more willing to buy higher-priced versions of games if the content value is right. This is especially true for GTA 6, and a bit ago, I noticed that more PlayStation gamers were pre-ordering the $100 Ultimate Edition than the $80 base version. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick confirmed this was indeed the case, and since then, analyst firm Sensor Tower has tallied up some estimates for the game.

According to the figures, GTA 6's $100 version comprised an estimated 89% of pre-orders on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Sensor Tower's Karl Kontus tells Games Industry.biz that this is unprecedented--similar to the language that Zelnick has used about these pre-order figures. "I have never seen a 90% premium share before," he says. "A 50% premium share during preorders is a great number. Typical premium shares for games tend to be at around 10 - 20%."

Intel's answer to AMD's Ryzen AI Max Halo processors has surfaced in HWiNFO's upcoming changes list, with the hardware monitoring software preparing preliminary support for a platform called Razor Lake-AX. The entry does not reveal CPU configuration, graphics specifications, memory details, or a launch date, but it does confirm that Intel is actively developing the platform.

HWiNFO has a track record of picking up Intel hardware well before launch. It added early Nova Lake support in August 2025 and continued expanding it through subsequent releases. Razor Lake-AX now appears to be following a similar path.

Leaks so far suggest that Razor Lake-AX is a large SoC built around a BGA4326 package measuring 37.5 by 56.5 millimetres, considerably larger than Intel's current desktop CPU packages. Two integrated graphics configurations are reportedly in the works, one with 16 Xe3 cores and a flagship version with 32 Xe3 cores.

Nintendo is now warning shoppers about the upcoming Switch 2 price increase directly on in-store demo kiosks, with a message appearing between demo sessions at retailers like Walmart. The notice reads: "The suggested retail price of the Nintendo Switch 2 system will increase to $499.99 on September 1. Actual price may vary."

The increase takes the Switch 2 from $449.99 to $499.99 in the US, from $629.99 to $679.99 in Canada, and by €30 to €469.99 in Europe. Japan has already seen the new prices take effect. Nintendo announced the change back on May 8, giving US buyers 115 days of notice before the September 1 effective date.

When PlayStation last raised the PS5 price, it gave buyers six days' notice, and Xbox gave 37 days. Neither offered the kind of extended runway Nintendo has given here, and neither went to the effort of putting the warning on store kiosks where undecided buyers would actually see it. Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa also publicly apologised for the increase when it was announced.

GIGABYTE has launched a pair of new AM4 motherboards featuring the B450 chipset despite it being 8 years old by this point. Spotted by VideoCardz, GIGABYTE has released the new B450M D3HP and B450M D3HP Wi-Fi 6E, featuring some modern upgrades over GIGABYTE's outgoing B450M DS3H motherboards, helping bring these boards up to par with more modern entry-level AM5 motherboards.

The new motherboards come with more USB ports, support for Q-Flash Plus, more display outputs, and more M.2 ports. Both of the D3HP models come with updated USB Type-C support through an internal header and dual USB 3.2 Gen 1 port support through the internal USB header as well. Both models also ditch the PS/2 port found on the DS3H and implement two HDMI connectors and one DisplayPort connector aimed at AM4 CPUs featuring integrated graphics. Four of the back USB ports have also been upgraded from USB 3.1 Gen 1 to USB 3.2 Gen 1. Finally, the rear I/O gets access to Q-Flash Plus, GIGABYTE's latest BIOS flashing feature.

For storage, GIGABYTE has also improved the number of M.2 connectors from one to two, giving users more M.2 storage expandability. However, the second M.2 port on the D3HP series is limited to just a PCIe 2.0 x2 interface. PCIe 2.0 x2 is still much faster than SATA 3, but will substantially bottleneck any modern M.2 SSDs, including older ones using PCIe 3.0. GIGABYTE also added support for RGB Gen 2 LED strip headers, which are newer ARGB headers that enable more features, including detecting the exact amount of LEDs on a compatible device, automatic calibration, and more precise effects. Arguably, the biggest update on the B450M D3HP WIFI-6E is the inclusion of WiFi-6E support, which is one of the fastest wireless standards out right now.

Microsoft has apparently settled on an answer to a question it's been asking itself for years: where does Copilot actually belong? According to a new support document, the standalone Copilot app and Microsoft 365 Copilot are merging into a single app, with the rollout starting on mobile this week, followed by Windows and macOS as an opt-in over the coming weeks.

The unified app keeps chat and image generation while adding direct access to Word, Excel, Outlook, and other Microsoft 365 apps and files, plus support for personal, work, and school accounts in one place, logically separated for data purposes. Group Chat, Podcasts, and Deep Research are all being retired for consumers starting August 18, with existing content still downloadable beforehand.

Free users keep basic chat and image creation, while a Microsoft 365 subscription apparently still unlocks higher limits and more advanced tools. CEO Satya Nadella has reportedly said a fuller "super app," which will also bring Copilot's coding and agentic tools, is coming later this quarter under exec Jacob Andreou.

A repair job on an older PS5 has turned into a warning about how the console's cooling solution ages. Polish repair technician Modyfikator89 shared images of an older CFI-1116 PS5 model that came in with severe overheating, and once opened up, the liquid metal between the APU and heatsink had hardened into a crust that was causing major problems.

According to the technician, gallium from the liquid metal had eaten through the heatsink's protective plating and formed a rock-hard alloy layer over parts of the contact surface. The APU itself reportedly came out fine. Once the residue was scraped off, the die underneath looked mirror smooth and undamaged. The heatsink wasn't so lucky, however, as it was left with permanent scarring where the plating had been compromised, exposing bare copper underneath.

Sony has used liquid metal cooling since the PS5 launched in 2020, and the material is genuinely good at moving heat. Gallium, though, reacts with certain metals over time. Nickel plating on the heatsink is meant to act as a barrier against that reaction, but apparently once that layer breaks down, the gallium can start working directly on the copper beneath it. That looks like exactly what happened here after roughly five years of daily use.

Another Ryzen 7 7800X3D has apparently burned out, but this time it happened on a motherboard running the latest available BIOS. A user on Reddit says their system shut down mid-game after about three months of use, then got stuck in a boot loop. The CPU was paired with an MSI PRO X870-P Wi-Fi board, which also stopped working afterward.

According to the owner, there was no manual tuning involved. EXPO was the only setting changed, cooling came from a 360mm AIO, and temperatures looked normal right up until the failure. It is important to note that this wasn't an overclocker pushing the limits of their PC. It was a fairly standard AM5 build running a BIOS that was supposed to already include AMD's protections. The only catch is that the user had previously delidded the CPU.

This isn't a new problem, unfortunately. Back in 2023, AMD traced early Ryzen 7000X3D burnout cases to CPUs running outside their voltage spec, mostly with EXPO enabled. The fix was an AGESA update that capped SoC voltage at 1.30V across AM5 boards. That was supposed to close the book on it, but it didn't.

A new overclocking tool has been developed that improves the crossbar frequency of an RTX 5090, giving the GPU faster interconnect speeds. Spotted by VideoCardz, a new tool called melonVolt has been published on an overclock.net forum thread that gives users direct control over the MSVDD voltage offset found on modern NVIDIA GPUs. Changing this voltage automatically increases or decreases the crossbar frequency, giving users a way to overclock their GPU's interconnect.

Based on user reports from the overclock.net forum, tinkering with the MSVDD voltage can improve the RTX 5090's crossbar frequency by over 100MHz depending on how far the voltage is pushed and how good the silicon quality is on the GPU. At least eight different users with various RTX 5090 models tested melonVolt with varying levels of success. The lowest GPU achieved 90MHz higher clocks from 2670MHz to 2760MHz, while the best GPU achieved 142MHz higher clocks going from 2625MHz to 2767MHz.

There is not a lot of benchmarking information to judge just how effective overclocking an RTX 5090's interconnect can be. But one of the overclock.net members who tried melonVolt did share a 3DMark Steel Nomad benchmark result showing their RTX 5090 outperforming a top 27 Hall of Fame RTX 5090 result while operating at a 120MHz lower GPU clock and memory clock. Unfortunately, 3DMark does not show the crossbar frequency for each individual result, but the top 27 result was achieved well before melonVolt came out.

Warner Bros. is finally putting an end to the rumours and has officially confirmed that Hogwarts Legacy 2 is in development. The confirmation came in a shareholder letter dated August 6, where the company named the sequel as part of its games pipeline while outlining its strategy going forward.

The letter reads: "We expect Games to more meaningfully contribute to segment profitability going forward as our pipeline expands, including the second installment of Hogwarts Legacy." Beyond that, there is not much new information, but an official acknowledgment that the sequel exists is still more than Warner Bros. had offered before.

Warner Bros. has refocused its games division around four key franchises that it believes can each generate more than a billion dollars: Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Mortal Kombat, and DC. Hogwarts Legacy is the crown jewel of that strategy, as the original sold more than 40 million copies. It was also the best-selling game of 2023, and became the first non-Call of Duty or Rockstar title to hold that distinction since 2009.

Apple's MacBook Neo shook up the budget laptop market when it launched earlier this year, and Windows manufacturers have been scrambling to respond ever since. Lenovo appears to be next in line, with leaked renders obtained by Windows Latest showing an unannounced laptop called the IdeaPad Vibe.

Lenovo's attempt is positioned directly against the MacBook Neo in both price and personality, and you can see that in the IdeaPad Vibe's colour options. Seven of them are reportedly planned: blush pink, bright yellow, terracotta orange-brown, sage green, navy blue, silver, and mint teal.

Each has a matching Lenovo logo on the lid, while the keyboard deck stays dark grey across all variants. Unlike the MacBook Neo's four colour options, Lenovo is going much wider here, which makes sense given how much the Neo's colourful design has contributed to its appeal among students.

AI-generated text, images, and video have all reached that level where it's becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between what's human-generated versus stuff spat out by hardware sitting in a data center somewhere. This is why the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) requires AI companies to implement identification measures to ensure there's a simple check, while offering a Code of Practice.

And on that note, Anthropic has posted a new article on its Claude support portal titled: How Claude marks AI-generated content. Here it details how Claude will begin to embed watermarks in AI-generated text, which the company describes as imperceptible and injected directly into the text itself. It will reportedly persist even with some editing, meaning that for those who do some light editing and reword Claude-generated text, the result will still include the watermark identifying it as AI-generated content.

"Because the watermark is part of the text, it will travel with the text when it's copied and pasted elsewhere, and may persist through some editing," Anthropic confirms. "Watermarking will be applied at the model level, which means it will be present no matter which Claude product or surface the text comes from."

The PlayStation Portal is a handheld device that combines the PS5's Dual Sense controller with a large 8-inch 1080p 60 Hz LCD screen. On its own, it lacks the hardware to be a standalone portable gaming handheld, but as an affordable companion to the PS5 and PS5 Pro consoles, it offers remote play over Wi-Fi as well as cloud-gaming for PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers.

Asobi: Remote Play is a new app available on SteamOS and coming soon to Windows 11 (check out the store page here), which essentially turns a Steam Deck into a PlayStation Portal. Asobi: Remote Play is a free-to-play app offering both PS5 and PS4 remote streaming over Wi-Fi, as well as cloud gaming for PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers. So yeah, it's PlayStation Portal for Steam.

Now, it's worth noting that the app has a premium tier via a single in-app purchase that unlocks its full potential. This takes the 1080p, 30 FPS SDR streaming of the free version and upgrades that to 1080p 60 FPS, with HDR and the option to upscale the image to 4K with additional 120 FPS support, too.

The NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition graphics card launched last year, and it's basically a souped-up dual-slot GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition built for AI. In addition to an expanded CUDA Core count of 24,064 compared to the RTX 5090's 21,760, the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell also features 96GB of GDDR7 memory, with a similar 512-bit interface as the RTX 5090 offering up a massive 1,792 GB/s of bandwidth.

Even when it launched last year, the AI boom and memory crisis were still a thing, albeit not quite as insane as it is right now. An RTX 5090-class workstation GPU with 96GB of fast GDDR7 memory meant it sold for $8,565 at launch, making it NVIDIA's most expensive desktop-class graphics card for workstations. Cut to 2026, and that's still the case, except that it's now almost double the price.

On NVIDIA's own marketplace and storefront, the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell is now priced at $16,000 USD (via Videocardz), an 87% increase over the launch MSRP and a 20% increase over the $13,250 price point in June. The main reason for the price increase, which we safely assume, is the sharp increase in component costs, specifically for memory. For the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU, which features 32 x 3GB GDDR7 modules, the memory price increases we've seen in recent months are multiplied by 32.