This week's news recap is here, with Microsoft bringing big improvements and user-requested features to Windows 11, new preview builds, new tools in PowerToys, emergency updates for Windows 11, the MacBook Neo beating Windows laptops, and more.

Quick links:

1. Windows 10 and 11
2. Windows Insider Program
3. Updates are available
4. Gaming news

Windows 11 and Windows 10

Here, we talk about everything happening around Microsoft's latest operating system in the Stable channel and preview builds: new features, removed features, controversies, bugs, interesting findings, and more. And, of course, you may find a word or two about older versions.

The biggest news story of this week was about Microsoft unveiling its plan to fix Windows 11. It was not just a vague promise: Microsoft announced specific features and fixes that are coming this year (some will be available for testing this month). Those include the ability to change the taskbar's position, File Explorer improvements, performance improvements, a big rework of Windows Update, less annoying AI features, and perhaps even the ability to set up Windows 11 with an offline account (another highly-requested feature related to the initial setup is already available for testing).

In addition, Microsoft confirmed that the forced rollout of the Microsoft 365 Copilot app had been paused.

While all of that sounds exciting and cool, Microsoft still has things to fix in the operating system right here and right now. To do so, the company released several out-of-band updates, including KB5084897, which fixes broken Bluetooth, and KB5085516 to address broken internet access in apps. Microsoft also published a guide about fixing the bug that recently crippled drive C on certain Samsung laptops. Microsoft confirmed that it was not Windows' fault, though.

Finally, Microsoft revealed Windows 11 version 26H1 lifecycle details and the end-of-support date.

Windows Insider Program

Here is what Microsoft released for Windows Insiders this week:

Updates are available

This section covers software, firmware, and other notable updates (released and coming soon) delivering new features, security fixes, improvements, patches, and more from Microsoft and third parties.

This week, Microsoft released PowerToys 0.98. It is a big feature update for everyone's favorite set of tools for Windows 11, and its latest update adds a new taskbar-like module, a big revamp for the Keyboard Manager tool, improvements to the recently introduced CursorWrap tool, an easier way to make windows always on top, and more. If you want more useful tools for Windows 11, check out this simple app that makes the Copilot key less annoying and a modernized Task Scheduler that replaces the ancient-looking stock one.

Parallels, the maker of a popular virtualization tool for macOS, announced that Parallels Desktop is now fully supported on the MacBook Neo. Moreover, the company claims that this $599 laptop runs certain Windows 11 apps better than Windows laptops do natively.

On the browser side, we have Opera 129, which is now available in the Stable channel. It brought stability improvements and UI enhancements, plus Gemini integration. Opera GX, the gaming-flavored variant of the browser, is also now available on Linux.

Firefox is getting new features. This week, Mozilla announced that the upcoming version 149 would bring a built-in free VPN, new Smart Window mode for article summarization and product comparison, and a native Split View mode.

A fresh update also arrived for Vivaldi, a feature-packed browser that focuses on personalization and productivity without shoveling useless AI features down your throat. Version 7.9 brought customizable full-screen mode, improved Split View, and new features for the built-in Mail client.

Here are other updates and releases you may find interesting:

• Microsoft is threatening to sue OpenAI over its $50 billion Amazon deal

• Microsoft releases Visual Studio Code 1.112 with integrated browser debugging

• Microsoft is blocking a Windows 11 & Server 2025 automatic installation feature

• Defender for Endpoint gets new Secure Score recommendations to boost security

• Microsoft delays rollout of unified contacts and enriched profiles for Outlook Mobile

• Microsoft is retiring an Office utility this year

• Microsoft reshuffles Copilot leadership as it doubles down on its superintelligence mission

   

Here are the latest drivers and firmware updates released this week:

• AMD Radeon Software 26.3.1 with FSR 4.1 support and optimizations for Crimson Desert and Death Stranding 2.
• Surface Pro 11 for Business received a new firmware update with fixes for various touchscreen issues.

On the gaming side

Learn about upcoming game releases, Xbox rumors, new hardware, software updates, freebies, deals, discounts, and more.

If you have an Xbox Series X or S and you wish you could disable the Quick Resume feature, Microsoft has good news. As part of the latest feature drop for Xbox Insiders, Microsoft announced the ability to specify which games can use Quick Resume. As for PC users, Microsoft is testing the ability to add any game or app to the Xbox app to make it easier to launch from a controller or a handheld console.

Mojang held this year's first Minecraft LIVE, where the studio announced new content for the game and a sequel to the original Minecraft Dungeons. The second part is now in development, and it is coming this year. Unfortunately, details remain scarce, but developers promise that you will get to "visit never-before-seen locations, battle new foes, and do your best to save a world in crisis, alone or with up to three friends."

Also, Minecraft is coming to the real world. In 2027, Mojang plans to open a theme park in the UK where everything from the rides and attractions to the theming will be "unmistakably Minecraft."

Microsoft Flight Simulator received a new City Update. Update 14 features visual improvements and new content in the Netherlands and Belgium. The update is now available for free in the in-game marketplace (supported versions include 2020 and 2024).

NVIDIA announced new improvements for its GeForce NOW cloud streaming service. It now supports 90 FPS for VR mode and four new games. The bad news is that certain games are no longer available in the free tier, and you need to purchase a premium membership to play them.

New games are also available for Game Pass members, with the latest additions including South of Midnight, The Alters, Disco Elysium, Nova Roma, The Long Dark, and more.

Finally, here is this week's Weekend PC Game Deals article, full of specials and discounts in the middle of Steam's annual Spring 2026 Sale.

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Posted Monday 23 March 2026 at 6:55 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of February) 854

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AI was everywhere at the GDC Festival of Gaming this year. Vendors at the event pitched generative AI tools for things like making AI-driven NPCs and even entire games from a chat box. On the show floor, I spent 10 minutes playing a demo of a pixel-art fantasy world generated by Tencent’s AI tools. In a briefing with Razer, I watched an AI assistant for QA automatically log issues in a shooter game. And there were many talks about AI, including a standing-room only presentation by Google DeepMind researchers about playable AI-generated spaces.

But there was one key place where AI was missing: the games themselves. Of the many developers I spoke to at the conference, nearly every one was against the idea of using AI in their projects. “I feel like the human mind is so beautiful,” The Melty Way developer Gabriel Paquette told me. “Why not use it?”

Photo by the GDC Festival of Gaming

 

It was a common refrain. Those I spoke to, most of whom were indie developers, disavowed AI, and many said they would never use the technology as it detracted from the human element of development. That’s perhaps not surprising, given that a recent GDC survey found that 52 percent of respondents think “generative AI is having a negative impact on the game industry,” which is up from 30 percent in 2025 and 18 percent in 2024. Some indie developers already go out of their way to show that their games are “AI free.” The largely negative reaction to Nvidia’s DLSS 5, which, in the publicly shown examples, added AI slop-like faces to recognizable game characters, almost certainly won’t make smaller developers more interested in the technology.

The general pitch for generative AI in gaming is that it might benefit both developers and players. In the most optimistic view of the technology, developers could use AI to help with tasks like debugging, QA, and idea generation, while players could use AI to help tailor games for themselves. Google Cloud executive Jack Buser, who helped launch Google Stadia and worked on PlayStation Now and PlayStation Home at Sony, says that generative AI is “the largest transformation in the games industry I have ever witnessed in my nearly 30-year career.”

But for many of those actually making games, the conversation is different. For instance, Adam Saltsman and Rebekah Saltsman, cofounders of the “collaborative” studio and publisher Finji, known for indie hits like Tunic and Chicory: A Colorful Tale, note that their works are defined in part by “a specific person or persons’ fingerprints.” In other words, a handmade, human quality, one that can include an element of surprise. ”You can show people what it is, but you are going to break all of their expectations when they go and play it,” Rebekah adds. That philosophy runs counter to the idea of utilizing generative AI in development. When I asked the Saltsmans if they would consider using generative AI for any of Finji’s games, it was a hard no. “Absolutely not,” Adam says.

Many developers told me that, in their view, AI-made games don’t look or feel like human-made games, at least right now. Audiences “don’t connect” with generative AI, according to Abby Howard, from Slay the Princess developer Black Tabby Games, adding that “I think it’s generic, I think it makes it feel cheap.” Rebekah is more blunt, saying that generative AI “just looks like crap.” For Matthew Jackson, who is working on the comedy game My Arms Are Longer Now, there’s another practical issue: “AI is so not funny.”

My Arms Are Longer Now.

Image: Jackbox Games

 

There are also legal problems that would complicate actually selling a game made with generative AI. Putting aside issues like the environmental impact of AI or concerns about the data AI is trained on, the Saltsmans tell The Verge they don’t think there is a legal framework to actually selling generative AI output. (This issue is also exacerbated by the fact that AI-generated art can’t be copyrighted.)

Finji isn’t the only publisher that isn’t accepting games made with generative AI. Panic, the publisher of Untitled Goose Game and creator of the Playdate, does not “have any interest in generative AI-created products,” cofounder Cabel Sasser tells The Verge. BigMode, the publishing company started by Jason Gastrow, aka videogamedunkey, requires developers to check a box with their application that says “I confirm that my game is human-made and does not include any use of generative AI.” Even Hasbro, which is now developing its own video games, isn’t using AI in its development pipelines, CEO Chris Cocks recently said on Decoder.

But perhaps what came up most often in my conversations at GDC is that using generative AI removes the craft from making video games. “The only way to get better at things is through the intense concentration of a career of applied craft,” Black Tabby Games’ Tony Howard-Arias says. Adam talked about how writing code can be “one of those things, like visual art, that pushes on your game design.” He points out that good programming is also good for players: “Things that are really hard to program are often really hard for a player to understand, too.” Alex Schleifer, cofounder of Ballgame developer Human Computer, says that the process of making games is just fun — and from that process, ”you’re also going to come to better ideas.”

There are concerns that AI tools might take away jobs from humans, which would both lower the pool of available positions in an industry already riddled with layoffs and provide new developers fewer ways to get their foot in the door. But despite the promised cost and efficiency savings — and that’s assuming an AI tool can even compare to what a human can do — this too would have problems. If you replace humans with AI, “where do you get new talent in the future?” Tony says.

Right now, the developers I spoke with believe crafting games by hand creates a more human connection. “We tell human stories,” Rebekah says. When you launch a game, there is a person that “you’ll never meet in your whole life that is playing a thing that you’ve spent thousands upon thousands of hours considering and working on.” Caring about their experience and that connection is “why we do this.”

Some indie developers I spoke with are open to the potential that generative AI in games could be useful for development or widely adopted down the line. The film and TV industry, for example, is seeing the rise of companies that build bespoke AI models to help with production, which could be a possible future for AI tools for game development. Maybe, at some point, AI will be more accepted, Paquette says. But for now, he prefers to do “100 percent” handcrafted work. “That’s something dear to me.”

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Posted Monday 23 March 2026 at 5:53 am AEST (my time).

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The Government of Mexico City has launched Xoli, a chatbot that will provide information on services, tourism, and cultural offerings. It's available now via WhatsApp in both English and Spanish.

The platform was designed to meet the demand of the millions of visitors expected to arrive during the 2026 FIFA World Cup. However, the authorities assure that the tool will remain active once the sporting event is over, with the aim of promoting economic activities and facilitating access to public services in the capital.

In a press conference, Clara Brugada, head of the Mexico City government, stated that Xoli “will be the technological instrument that will allow us to link culture, tourism, recreation, and entertainment with the population.”

Chat With Xoli

The tool was developed entirely by the capital's government, as a result of the collaboration between the Digital Agency for Public Innovation and the local Ministries of Tourism and Culture.

The chatbot is already available on mobile devices and will operate continuously, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. To use it, just open WhatsApp, start a chat with the number 55 6565 9395, and send the word “Hola.”

Xoli (pronounced sho-lee) will immediately ask if you want to continue in English or Spanish. After selecting the preferred language, users will be able to access a menu with various categories of information, including culture, tourism, gastronomy, and mobility, or just ask a question about anything in the city.

In the context of the 2026 World Cup, there will be a specific section with information about the competition, including special events, match details, broadcasts of games in public places, and ticket purchase options.

Screenshot of Xoli, Mexico City's tourist chatbot for the 2026 World Cup. Cortesía Xoli

The capital's government highlighted that this technology contributes to the city's consolidation as “a more innovative and accessible city,” by speeding up access to official information, offering timely responses and strengthening tourism promotion strategies.

Alejandra Frausto, head of Mexico City's Ministry of Tourism, pointed out that close to 3,000 tourist, recreational, and cultural activities are carried out daily in the capital. In seasons of high demand, this figure can increase to 5,000 events a day. “Translating this data into reliable and accessible information involves a great effort, but it is now possible thanks to this chatbot,” he says.

A Good Sport

The launch of Xoli adds to the technological efforts driven by the federal government to turn the upcoming World Cup into an engine of development for commerce, sports, tourism, and culture throughout the country.

Late last year, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum presented the Mexico 2026 Social World Cup plan, which calls for more than 177 festivities and 5,000 activities linked to the tournament, as well as 74 tournaments and soccer cups aimed at students, workers, and the general public. The program also includes around 1,500 actions within the Vive Saludable (Live Healthy) initiative, aimed at promoting healthy lifestyles, as well as the rehabilitation of 4,200 public sports fields and spaces.

Among the actions announced is the creation of the Conoce México app developed jointly by the Agency for Digital Transformation and Telecommunications (ATDT) and the Ministry of Tourism. This app will allow fans, both national and foreign, to get updated information on matches, venues, routes, services, and cultural activities.

Also, the Federal Consumer Protection Agency reached an agreement with FIFA to enable a ticket sales platform that will operate in Spanish and will display prices in Mexican pesos, in accordance with national legislation. The platform will include an official resale system that will allow those who cannot attend a match to sell their tickets safely and at regulated prices.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup will be unprecedented in scope. For the first time in more than 90 years, the tournament will be hosted by three countries, will bring together 48 national teams and will include 104 matches, an increase of approximately 10 match days and 40 additional matches compared to previous editions.

In this context, the event represents a significant opportunity to boost tourism and trade in Mexico. However, several studies warn that the championship could have a considerable environmental impact, in addition to increasing the pressure on essential services such as water and electricity, aspects that, until now, have not been fully incorporated into Mexican government strategies.

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Paul's Hardware (1.54m subscribers)

March 22, 2026

Video length: 11m 35s

0:00 Welcome to Paul’s Tech News - March 22, 2026

1:43 Nvidia Trolls Gamers with DLSS 5 Announcement at GTC

5:57 Nvidia’s Actual GTC Hardware Announcement - new Vera CPU

7:06 RAM prices down, Intel LGA 1954 Socket Longevity

TECH BRIEFS

8:56 Super Micro co-founder, 2 more indicted for smuggling $2.5B of AI chips to China

10:01 Facebook/Meta cancels, un-cancels the Metaverse

10:39 “Paul’s Brick Vids” LEGO Channel Finally Kicking Off

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Posted Sunday 22 March 2026 at 5:41 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of February) 854

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Gamers Nexus (2.6m subscribers)

March 22, 2026

Video length: 34m 30s

Crimson Desert just launched. We tested the day 1 patch and launch version of Crimson Desert across 25 GPUs, 3 resolutions, all graphics presets, and also tested for simulation time error (alongside frametime spike issues and framerate). During the testing, we encountered numerous bugs across 3 test computers and 2 GPU vendors; Intel was immune to these bugs, which is because Intel Arc simply doesn't work at all for Crimson Desert. When GN emailed Intel, the company put together a statement and distributed it to all of the media to state that Pearl Abyss refused to grant the company early access. Crimson Desert bugs include crashing to desktop, hard system resets, all objects turning pink or yellow at times, game freezes without a crash, and silent settings reductions spread across both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. This does not appear to be a driver or computer issue, but rather a game issue. In these benchmarks, we look at the best GPUs for Crimson Desert and some of the preset settings optimizations and performance of the game. We used the latest public drivers for testing, which would be the game-ready drivers for both AMD and NVIDIA.

00:00 - Crimson Desert Technical Analysis

03:04 - Test Setup and Plan

04:30 - Intel Arc Blocked by Pearl Abyss

06:37 - A Buggy Mess, Loading Time, and Pop-In

09:10 - Test Methodology and Researching Test Areas

09:45 - Game Performance Analysis on 5060 Ti

12:00 - Frametime Plot of Massive Stutter

13:22 - Game Performance Analysis on 9070 XT

14:24 - Crimson Desert Preset Settings Scaling on 5060 Ti

16:50 - Crimson Desert Preset Settings Scaling on 9070 XT

17:23 - Simulation Time Error Explainer

18:20 - Good Simulation Time Error on 5060 Ti in Abyss

19:40 - Simulation Time Error on 5060 Ti in City

20:50 - Bad Simulation Time Error on GTX 1070

21:49 - All GPUs Simulation Time Error Per Frame

23:00 - All GPUs Percent Time with Simulation Errors

23:30 - Crimson Desert 1080p GPU Benchmarks ft. GTX 1080 Ti

26:04 - Crimson Desert 1440p Best GPUs

27:08 - Crimson Desert 4K GPU Comparison NVIDIA vs AMD

27:52 - Crimson Desert 4K Cinematic Benchmark

28:31 - Crimson Desert 1440p Cinematic Best Video Cards

28:47 - RT on vs Off on 7900 XTX

29:38 - Conclusion

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Posted Sunday 22 March 2026 at 5:36 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of February) 854

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Major updates continue to drop for the original Microsoft Flight Simulator and the 2024 release. Today, Microsoft unveiled another city update to the simulation, this time upgrading the visuals and accuracy of the Netherlands and Belgium. City Update 14 is live for all owners to install right now. The update is aimed at improving ten areas of interest in the two regions mentioned, all using the development team's usual use of advanced TIN (triangulated irregular network) surface texturing.

In the Netherlands, Microsoft has made updates to eight areas in total. These are the capital city Amsterdam (three areas of interest here), Breukelen, Brielle, Eindhoven, Rotterdam, and Utrecht.

Next, Belgium has received two areas of interest of its own for players to fly over and explore. These are for Antwerp and Bruges.

"The release coincides with one of the world’s largest flight simulation conferences, FlightSimWeekend (FSWeekend), taking place in Lelystad in the Netherlands from 20 to 22 March, 2026," adds the development team.

At the same time, Microsoft is bringing the Dutch twin‑turboprop regional airliner Fokker F27 Friendship into the game as a part of its Local Legend 23 release. This premium plane can be purchased from the in-game marketplace for $19.99.

Microsoft Flight Simulator City Update 14: The Netherlands and Belgium are now available in Microsoft Flight Simulator, as well as the newer Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, as an optional download.

The update is live across Steam and the Microsoft Store for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5, as well as Xbox and PC Game Pass subscriptions. Xbox One, mobile, and PC players can also jump into the new content using Xbox Cloud Gaming if they have a Game Pass Ultimate membership. The game must be updated to the latest version to download this free update from the in-game marketplace.

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Posted Sunday 22 March 2026 at 5:44 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of February) 854

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Crimson Desert, the popular and long-awaited new open-world action-adventure game from Pearl Abyss, is big. Like, really big. In fact, its colossal map is bigger than that of Skyrim's and Red Dead Redemption 2's combined, and based on what reviews say, you'll be trekking through the vast regions and biomes of Pywel for upwards of 200 hours if you want to see all that it has in store for you.

For some, that's an exciting prospect — an opportunity to truly get lost in a world that's prepared to reward you with exciting discoveries around every forest, hill, and mountain. For others, though, it's pretty daunting, especially if you have a limited amount of time to play or struggle to pick a direction when you're faced with the chance to pick any one you'd like.

For the latter folks — or anyone that's simply struggling to find a specific place or thing — interactive maps are a great resource, as they show you where everything in open-world titles like Crimson Desert is and makes it easy to figure out where you'll find certain points of interest, items to loot, and more. That saves time and gives you some guidance, even if it also robs you of the joy of discovery. Tradeoffs!

Just a single day after Crimson Desert's release, a comprehensive interactive map has already been created, and is available to use now.

Crimson Desert: Interactive map of Pywel

Over five years after its announcement, the open-world adventure game Crimson Desert landed earlier this week from Pearl Abyss, the Korean studio known for creating the Black Desert Online MMORPG. The highly ambitious title received mostly positive reception from critics and players. However, one group of players on PC isn't having a good time, as they can't seem to even run the game.

It has come to light that Crimson Desert does not run on Intel ARC graphics. Both integrated and discrete GPUs are affected. This isn't a crashing issue either, with the game simply throwing an error and blocking players when attempting to run on Intel graphics-powered machines. The error message says, "The graphics device is currently not supported." The wording does give some hope about the support coming later.

Like many other games releasing nowadays, Pearl Abyss did not mention Intel ARC graphics cards when detailing Crimson Desert's minimum and recommended specifications. Those only showed AMD and Nvidia GPUs like the RX 5500 and RTX 2080.

Usually, despite being missing from requirements, games usually run on ARC GPUs just fine, unlike here. There wasn't any announcement or disclaimer regarding the game not supporting ARC cards, either.

As reports of the launch error circulated, a Frequently Asked Questions section Pearl Abyss has published on its website has come into attention, which asks affected players to refund the game:

Does Crimson Desert support Intel Arc?

 

No, Crimson Desert currently does not support Intel Arc graphics cards. If you purchased the game expecting Intel Arc support, please refer to the refund policy of the platform where the game was purchased for available options. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Users on Reddit who discovered the statement also say that this note regarding the support issue wasn't displayed until the game's launch.

Pearl Abyss asking players to refund the game doesn't give much confidence in a quick resolution for Intel ARC owners.

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Posted Saturday 21 March 2026 at 12:04 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of February) 854

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If you're even somewhat keeping up with what's new in the gaming world, than I'm sure you've seen NVIDIA's new DLSS 5 tech — and how its getting absolutely roasted online. Indeed, the latest iteration of the firm's Super Resolution software hasn't been received well at all, with the way it uses generative AI to transform scenes with simulated photorealistic lighting being called uncanny "AI slop" all over social media.

I think DLSS 5's effects actually look good in environment shots, though in some of the comparisons we've been able to see, I do believe it goes too far and starts to infringe on the intended look of a scene. In shots with characters, though, it straight up makes them look like they got hit with a "yassification" filter you'd find in a smartphone app. The before and afters shocked the community, and even shocked the developers that agreed to let NVIDIA present DLSS 5 using their games.

In general, DLSS 5 has proven extremely controversial with developers as well as fans. Notably, one veteran dev, senior animator Mike York — known for his work on GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War Ragnarök, and others — has now reacted to it in a stream of him watching Digital Foundry's analysis of it that's been posted to his York Street Gaming YouTube channel. He's not a fan.

"Whoa, hold on. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no," he began, his deep concern apparent the moment he saw Grace in Resident Evil Requiem with DLSS 5 on. "No. This isn't just some lighting, dude. What the f... I'm telling you, this is like a complete AI re-render. That's what this is doing. This is actually re-rendering this."

NVIDIA asserts that DLSS 5 strictly changes the lighting of a scene, and isn't touching things like model geometry or texture detail whatsoever. As CEO Jensen Huang puts it, it "introduces a real-time neural rendering model that infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials." However, many — York included — believe there's more going on with the software.

"Who even is that? It's a different girl, like, she looks different," he continued, dumbfounded. "You know why I can tell? Look, her eyes are no longer looking, like, correctly. That one eye is looking over here, and one eye is looking there."

"It has, somehow, put wrinkles into her lips that weren't there before. See that? It's added all kinds of details that weren't there before," he added. York then went on to point out several apparent differences with things like the shape of Grace's ear and her nose. "You're no longer looking at the game anymore, does that make sense? This is scary."

While I hesitate to say anything definitive without DLSS 5 actually being in anyone's hands other than NVIDIA's, I have to admit that I'm very suspicious of the claim that the software is only affecting lighting. Lighting can have a huge impact on the way an image looks, true, but I still can't help but feel doubt after seeing how much fuller and sharper Grace's lips are with DLSS 5 on, or the way where she's looking seems to subtly change.

NVIDIA's Jensen Huang can say "They're completely wrong" all he wants, but the fact of the matter is that regardless of the nitty-gritty specifics of what's going on with DLSS 5 under the hood, it just looks off when applied to in-game characters, and has triggered feelings of uncanny valley in countless players.

The silver lining in all of this is that DLSS 5 isn't scheduled to come to NVIDIA's RTX 50-series GPUs until fall later this year, so the company can still improve it ahead of its release. NVIDIA also says developers will be able to fine tune how DLSS 5 looks with their games if they choose to support it, which hopefully means we'll never have to deal with characters that look like Grace does here.

How do you feel about DLSS 5?

Gamers and developers alike have been reacting to DLSS 5 all week long, and it's pretty interesting to hear what a senior animator that's worked on some of the biggest games in the industry has to say.

His negative comments echo most sentiments, but I'm curious: how do you feel about DLSS 5? Share your thoughts below.

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Posted Friday 20 March 2026 at 12:59 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of February) 854

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Earlier this month, Apple introduced the long-anticipated entry-level MacBook, the MacBook Neo. This $599 laptop offers quite a lot for the money, but its weakest point is without question the puny amount of RAM. Some consider 8GB not enough even for daily use, not to mention stuff like virtual machines, but Parallels claims that the Neo can run Windows apps perfectly fine.

Parallels Desktop, one of the most popular apps for virtualization on macOS, now fully supports the new MacBook Neo and the M5-powered MacBook Air. In the announcement post, the company says customers can use Parallels Desktop for running legacy and essential Windows apps on their Macs, particularly the Neo, for "cross-platform flexibility."

As for performance, Parallels says that the Neo delivers better single-core CPU performance when compared to the Dell Pro 14 with the Intel Core Ultra 5 235U processor running Windows 11 natively. However, the Dell Pro 14 outperformed the Neo in multi-core tasks. To be precise, Neo runs Windows apps in Parallels Desktop 20% faster than the Dell Pro 14 natively, while multi-core performance is worse by about 40%. Graphical performance is worse as well, with the Dell Pro 14 outperforming the MacBook Neo by 50%.

This means the MacBook Neo is very fast at handling individual tasks, so common Windows apps will feel quick and responsive. Users can run Windows-based applications, and home or light-office users can access essential business tools, all without switching devices.

 

The Windows laptop performs better for heavy workloads that rely on multiple processor cores, but for many everyday applications, strong single-core performance often matters more.

As for RAM, the biggest weakness of the MacBook Neo, Parallels does not mention specific numbers. Instead, the company claims that 8 GB is "the minimum practical configuration," which leaves "limited headroom."

Those considering the MacBook Neo should be aware of its hardware limitations, but in case you need to expand the scope of its capabilities and push hardware to the limits, you can still run Windows 11 apps on it. Do not expect this inexpensive laptop to be good at running CAD software, but for casual use of apps that are not available on macOS, the Neo should still get the job done. Just maybe do not run anything else side-by-side.

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Posted Friday 20 March 2026 at 12:59 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of February) 854

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One of 2026's biggest games, Pearl Abyss' Crimson Desert, will soon be out for everyone, bringing one of the most colossal and ambitious fantasy adventures ever created in gaming into the hands of Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, Mac, and PS5 players. In fact, its release date and launch time is now less than 24 hours away.

Ahead of the game's highly anticipated launch, its review embargo has officially passed, prompting countless authors and creators to post their reviews of the game to share their thoughts on it with consumers curious if they should buy Crimson Desert at launch or not.

As I write this shortly after the embargo lifted, Crimson Desert has an average score of 78/100 on Metacritic, earning it a "Generally Favorable" rating. That score is based on 91 reviews, notable scores and quotes from several of which you'll find below. Here's a look at what critics are saying about Crimson Desert:

• Vice (100/100): "If you are someone who wants a more linear or cinematic, story-driven campaign, Crimson Desert might not be for you. However, if you loved the sense of freedom and discovery that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild had, then Crimson Desert is the next big game in that genre. Pearl Abyss has truly created something special here, that I suspect we’ll be talking about for years to come."
• DualShockers (95/100): "Crimson Desert combines all the phenomenal aspects of some of the most notable titles of the past decades. It has the sense of discovery like Elden Ring, a deeply engaging and dense world like Skyrim, unpredictable moment-to-moment gameplay like Red Dead Redemption 2, and the exciting exploration and overall feel of the latest Zelda games."
• TechRadar Gaming (80/100): "Crimson Desert manages to capture the essence of pure open-world exploration and delivers incredible combat that is unlike anything you've played previously, while offering an engaging story that keeps you engaged as you progress through its massive map. It's not perfect due to some of its quality of life issues and unfair boss encounters, but this is a game that deserves very high praise."
• GamesRadar+ (80/100): "Crimson Desert is messy, but as you untangle its mechanics and compensate for its flaws, elements of genius and wonder make the experience worthwhile. Take time to leave the beaten path and find out which of its many facets appeals to you, and you'll discover a game that's far better as a sandbox than as a story."
• Screen Rant (70/100): "But Crimson Desert may be the victim of its own ambition. Everything that's been promised is there, but, with a few welcome exceptions, most of these mechanics are woefully underbaked. The final product feels disjointed and rarely coalesces into the comprehensive sandbox RPG I hoped it would be."
• TheGamer (70/100): "I’ve played Crimson Desert for 150 hours now and have only just finished the main storyline. This game is massive, and not designed for the casual player. It’s an MMO that you play by yourself. The grind is enormous yet insatiable. I woke up every day and needed to play more, and even though at times it frustrated me to the point of walking away, I can’t help but admire what Pearl Abyss has created here. I’ve never played anything like it, and chances are, neither have you."

Crimson Desert falls short of expectations

Now, to be clear here: I'm not saying the conclusion to draw from Crimson Desert's overall score is that it's a bad game. On the contrary, it actually sounds like a good one overall, and one that you should definitely check out if you're hungry for an action-packed adventure through a stunning fantasy world.

With that said, the presence of quite a few mixed reviews and an average score that's only a few points above Metacritic's own "Mixed" rating signals that Crimson Desert isn't exactly the genre-defining masterpiece that lots of players were hoping it would be. The game may be good, but it's not likely to be seen as the next Elden Ring.

Most reviews highly praise Crimson Desert's combat, world design, and the secrets the lands of Pywel hold for players to stumble across. Indeed, the best things about the game sound like the memorable adventures and discoveries you'll find yourself going on and making as you explore, supported by the title's biome variety, stunning visuals, and incredible soundtrack.

But many find the main story confusing and hard to get invested in despite quality voice acting and writing in major scenes, and a lot of criticism has been levied against Crimson Desert's side quests, with many reviewers comparing them to the kind of bland busywork you often find in MMOs; it's worth noting that before Crimson Desert, Pearl Abyss did make the 2017 MMORPG Black Desert Online.

Ultimately, Pywel has been described as a world that's a blast to traverse, explore, battle foes, and simply get lost in, though you may be disappointed if you were hoping to engage with its inhabitants and quests on a deeper level.

In terms of performance, most reviews note that it's quite solid overall, though bugs with certain quests and encounters have been reported. I'm worried about something, though: only PC reviews of Crimson Desert have been posted, which means nobody's been able to play it extensively on Xbox Series X|S, PS5, or PS5 Pro yet. We haven't seen console footage yet, either, and overall, console performance is a big concern with this game. If you're on Xbox or PS5, I recommend waiting for performance tests before picking it up.

My colleague Michael Hoglund wrote Windows Central's review of Crimson Desert, giving it a four-and-a-half-star score out of five and calling it "the kind of game that usually only comes along once in a generation, so singular in its ambition that it will define the gaming conversation for weeks, if not months, to come."

Crimson Desert releases on March 19 (tomorrow) for $69.99 across Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, Mac, and PS5. Notably, the Steam version is available for $60.99 at Loaded, with the fancier $79.99 Deluxe Edition also going for $69.99 at Loaded.

Are you getting Crimson Desert?

Even if reviews are indicating that Crimson Desert was perhaps overly ambitious, it's nevertheless one of the biggest action-adventure titles ever made, and considered by most to still be a pretty good game overall.

Do you plan on getting it at launch? Will you wait for a sale, or to see performance tests? Or does it not interest you at all? I'm curious, so let me know in the comments.

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Posted Thursday 19 March 2026 at 12:28 pm AEST (my time).

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Crimson Desert is one of those games I was genuinely afraid to review. Not because I thought it was going to be some terrible creation, but because I could tell that even after spending almost 100 hours, I’d still be left having not touched half the game.

What I didn’t expect was being able to walk away with that lack of seeing it all and still knowing how great the rest was yet to be. Crimson Desert surpassed my exceedingly high expectations in ways I never thought it would, while simultaneously leaving me wanting more from certain facets.

What Pearl Abyss has created is wonderful and should be celebrated in every way. Here’s my tale as to why.

Crimson Desert Review: The most ambitious single-player open world

One of the main concerns with Crimson Desert hasn’t been its size, but the potential lack of meaningful content to fill the space created. From the perspective of someone who’s poured over 70 hours into the game and feels like they’ve barely scratched the surface, there’s something for everyone.

In my time, which has been relegated to what I’ll refer to as the bottom left of the map, I’ve come across the following activities: Competitive Archery, thievery, outlaw tracking, investment banking, goods hauling, brawling, arm wrestling, hidden caves, ancient ruins with puzzles, multiple Abyss Sanctums, nearly 100 different creatures, 34 crafting manuals, 28 different factions, four mounts, and so much more.

I could turn this review into a boring list of all that I’ve found so far, but part of the majesty and mystique is not knowing; it’s the discovery of the event itself.There will be so many opportunities for you to look up all the various activities that I implore you not to. If what you assume is already known, that crucial step of mystery is washed away.I think the only way to really put this all into perspective is with a screenshot of the “knowledge base”.

NVIDIA's new DLSS 5 tech isn’t quite winning the public over, with many comparing the image-altering technology to some kinds of "AI slop" filters seen in generative AI tools like ChatGPT and other Snapchat.

The CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, had responded to that criticism, telling users they are “completely wrong.” However, despite claims that developers have “direct control,” Insider Gaming reports that may not have been the case.

Developers at Ubisoft and Capcom who agreed to showcase their games at the DLSS 5 reveal say they were not informed in advance. “We found out at the same time as the public,” said one Ubisoft developer.

Developers at Capcom also told Insider Gaming they were shocked by the publisher’s involvement. According to the report, the company has historically been “anti-AI,” and some developers fear DLSS 5 could shift its stance on generative AI and its use in future games.

Back in January 2025, IGN reported that Capcom was experimenting with generative AI tools to help create ideas for in-game environments, so its stance on AI might not be as “anti-AI” as some may believe.

However, AI use cases like this in development are nothing new, and not quite the type of AI people typically take issue with. That criticism is usually aimed at AI-generated art, which can directly negatively impact the artists behind it.

How do you feel about DLSS 5?

Is DLSS 5 a huge leap in graphical technology and something you’ve always dreamed of, or is it more akin to AI-generated slop that many, myself included, have come to disdain?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments, and make sure you take part in our poll below:

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Posted Thursday 19 March 2026 at 4:53 am AEST (my time).

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Sony and Kojima Productions' Death Stranding 2: On the Beach was first announced for PC earlier this year, revealing that the game will be shedding its PlayStation 5 exclusivity less than a year after launch. Now, the launch is almost here, but it looks like a preloading blunder on Steam has let pirates jump into the experience earlier than paying customers.

Spotted by DSO Gaming, a leaked build of Death Stranding 2 has appeared on torrent and piracy-focused portals. It looks like the full game too, without any of the encryptions you normally see in pre-loaded packages. The story going around piracy forums is that the developer had uploaded an unencrypted version of the game for pre-loading on Steam accidentally, and before it was fixed, the files, which weigh over 100GB, were already downloaded and being shared.

The leaked files seemingly did have Steam's own protections applied to them, but pirates have already bypassed or removed them. Keep in mind that Sony-published games usually do not use high-profile anti-piracy measures like Denuvo. Of course, there is no guarantee that the leaked files being shared by pirates are untampered.

As expected, the game's online portion won't work in this pirated version. Just like the original, Death Stranding 2 touts a Social Strand asynchronous multiplayer system. While not exactly multiplayer, it lets players band together in their own games to populate the land with structures and rebuild it together, adding bridges, ziplines, roads, vehicles, and more.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is officially releasing on PC on March 19, 2026 at 7:30 am PT across Steam and the Epic Games Store. The PC port is being handled by the Sony-owned Nixxes studio. Find the system requirements over here.

Neowin does not recommend or promote using unofficial and pirated ways of game activation.

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Posted Thursday 19 March 2026 at 4:50 am AEST (my time).

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As large language models and rack-scale supercomputers grow exponentially, the good old method of pairing off-the-shelf processors with separate memory banks is no longer an option. AI workloads today need tightly integrated solutions where compute and memory are co-engineered from the ground up. However, with the exponential rise in AI usage across the globe, there's also a huge supply bottleneck as well as bandwidth limitations that have left AI companies yearning for more suitable hardware for such inference-heavy AI jobs. This is why AMD and Samsung are coming together and have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to help make the next generation of hardware needed for supporting AI infrastructure.

The MOU was signed at Samsung’s state-of-the-art chip manufacturing complex in Pyeongtaek, Korea, by AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su, alongside Samsung Vice Chairman and CEO Young Hyun Jun. According to the agreement, Samsung would be the primary supplier of next-generation HBM4 memory for AMD’s forthcoming Instinct MI455X AI accelerators.

The partnership also includes the CPU market, where Samsung will provide highly optimized DDR5 memory for AMD’s 6th Gen EPYC processors, internally codenamed "Venice." Both of these components will serve as the backbone of AMD’s ambitious Helios rack-scale architecture.

The partnership comes at a time when AI has already triggered a massive pivot toward high-bandwidth memory, driving up costs across the broader consumer storage and DRAM markets. For Samsung, this is a great opportunity to double down on its most profitable sector and become a gatekeeper in the AI sector.

For AMD, this partnership ensures that its hardware will have the memory headroom required to power increasingly complex software. Team Red has been betting big on AI, rolling out a robust suite of local inference tools and AI-focused hardware earlier this year to rival cloud-based models. A steady supply of HBM4 will ensure that their software stack keeps evolving as enterprise clients demand larger parameter models.

Not only this, but Samsung and AMD are also actively discussing opportunities for a deeper foundry partnership, which would see Samsung fabricating next-generation AMD products.

While it is still unclear what the scope of this foundry would include, the two companies have already collaborated on everything from mobile smartphone processors utilizing the RDNA 2-based Xclipse GPU to their present-day arrangement, where Samsung provides HBM3E memory for the Instinct MI350X and MI355X accelerators.

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Posted Thursday 19 March 2026 at 4:49 am AEST (my time).

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For many years, OpenAI and Microsoft were close friends, jumping on the AI bandwagon together and riding the boom. Microsoft initially provided the compute power and funding while OpenAI provided state-of-the-art foundation models. However, it now looks like the AI industry's most formidable alliance is beginning to fracture.

According to a report by the Financial Times (paywall), Microsoft is planning to pursue legal action against its own golden goose, OpenAI, as well as cloud rival Amazon. The dispute is due to a whopping $50 billion partnership that was signed between Amazon and OpenAI last month, which is something that Microsoft alleges blatantly violates its exclusive cloud computing agreements with the ChatGPT maker.

In late 2025, when Microsoft restructured its historic partnership with OpenAI, it gave up some of its total cloud exclusivity to allow OpenAI to diversify its product hosting. However, Microsoft retained one ironclad clause: all basic, "stateless" application programming interface (API) calls to OpenAI’s models must be routed exclusively through Microsoft Azure.

This was a safety net for Microsoft to ensure that no matter how big OpenAI grew, Azure would be the major platform for its core AI traffic.

However, last month, OpenAI and Amazon signed a massive strategic partnership where Amazon committed $50 billion for AWS to become the exclusive third-party cloud distributor for OpenAI's new enterprise platform "Frontier". OpenAI and Amazon co-created a "Stateful Runtime Environment" (SRE) hosted on Amazon Bedrock to smartly circumvent Microsoft's exclusivity clause.

In software terms, a "stateless" model processes each request independently, retaining no memory of past interactions, which is the exact type of API call Microsoft has a monopoly on. A "stateful" environment, however, maintains memory and context over time, allowing AI agents to perform complex, multi-step tasks autonomously. OpenAI and Amazon argue that their new SRE is fundamentally a stateful architecture, and therefore does not violate Microsoft’s monopoly on stateless API calls.

According to the report, the Redmond giant argues that regardless of how Amazon and OpenAI creatively categorize their technical architecture, building a functional enterprise system of this scale without relying on underlying stateless API calls is practically unfeasible.

The dispute also comes at a time when competition between the two cloud providers is already at an all-time high. In fact, AWS currently generates more revenue than Microsoft's Cloud and Server business combined.

If Amazon successfully courts OpenAI’s enterprise clients through "stateful" loopholes, Microsoft risks losing the very competitive moat it spent tens of billions of dollars trying to build over all these years.

Source: Financial Times (paywall)

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Posted Thursday 19 March 2026 at 4:48 am AEST (my time).

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Humanoid robots are rapidly gaining hype, from battlefields to the factory floor.

But there are clear growing pains when it comes to sharing spaces with our new automaton friends. Just this month, a video circulated online showing a robot being escorted away by cops after startling an old lady.

Now, a different robot appears to have gotten carried away while performing a dance routine at a hot pot restaurant in San Jose, California.

A video on social media shows the dancing robot knocking over tableware, smashing plates, and sending chopsticks flying. An orange apron the robot is wearing reads “I’m good” in big letters across the front, perfectly adding to the chaotic scene.

Staffers at the restaurant were forced to intervene. One employee can be seen holding the robot by the scruff of its neck while navigating her phone, presumably searching the bot’s app for controls.

In the end, it took three workers to restrain the robot, who were all forced to duck periodically to avoid being smacked by its waving and sauce-covered hands.

Besides being the “funniest thing I’ve seen all day,” many netizens pointed out what appeared to be the glaring omission of an emergency off button.

“More importantly, why isn’t there a big red power off button on its back, you shouldn’t have to reach for an app to do that…” one user argued.

The incident appears to have been part of a promotional event for Disney’s “Zootopia 2” at a Haidilao franchise in Southern California.

As Chinese business and financial news website Jiemian Global reports, Haidilao is run by an international holding company that is known to invest in automated kitchens featuring robot chefs and robot food deliveries.

Futurism has reached out to the company for comment.

While it must’ve been a hilarious sight to behold, other netizens struck a more ominous tone.

“This is how the ‘Terminator’ timeline actually begins,” one user tweeted. “Not with a bang, but with a boogie.”

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Given that The Elder Scrolls and Fallout developer Bethesda first announced The Elder Scrolls 6 eight years ago now and the fact it still doesn't have a release date, I'd forgive you for thinking that the game has been through a lot of tumultuous development at the studio.

However, according to Bethesda's game director and executive producer Todd Howard, the process of creating the next big Tamriel-based fantasy adventure has actually gone quite a bit smoother than development of the studio's latest title, 2023's Xbox and PC space exploration RPG Starfield (also on Xbox Game Pass, and coming soon to PS5 as well).

Specifically, while speaking with IGN in a new interview, Howard explained that Bethesda's move from Creation Engine 2 — Starfield's engine, and an upgraded version of the one used for Skyrim and Fallout 4 in its own right — to Creation Engine 3, the latest iteration of its proprietary tech, has proven to be a major boon for the company's workflow.

"But the one thing I'd say is really in the tech as we're going to Creation Engine 3. Again, the team has done a really incredible job at not just pushing what it is, but how it's integrated into our development cycle," said Howard, when asked about lessons learned from Starfield that Bethesda is applying to The Elder Scrolls 6. "So, you don't feel [issues in] what we're doing on a day-to-day basis, like when the game goes down. So, we're in a fortunate position where the builds of the game are really consistently working every day. Well, not every day, but we've had more days than we've ever had where the build is good, there's new stuff in it, and we can play it."

"And when you're making those kinds of technical changes as we talked about, often you're pulling the rug out from under the team who's making content. [You don't want] to be like, ‘Okay, that doesn't work for this period of time, you're going to have to wait until we get that working again.’ And we've done a really good job of managing that on this game," he added. "And with Starfield, we struggled there for a number of years in terms of when we went through the engine change."

After plenty of teasing and building hype, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave a keynote at GTC 2026 yesterday, where he announced a range of AI-focused tech. However, most of the internet's attention went towards the DLSS 5 reveal, which was touted as being the company's "most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing in 2018."

The reveal included footage of DLSS 5 in action, where it was attempting to "upgrade" the visuals of characters and environments using real-time AI. Unfortunately for Nvidia, the reaction to the unveiling wasn't the most positive. Since its reveal, a massive backlash hit the technology from both game industry professionals and gamers for the altered 'AI slop' looks of the characters. Now, the Nvidia CEO has responded to these widespread criticisms while speaking to press at a Q&A event at GTC 2026.

"Well, first of all, they're completely wrong," Huang had said in response when Tom's Hardware's Paul Alcorn asked about the widespread criticism. "The reason for that is because, as I have explained very carefully, DLSS 5 fuses controllability of the geometry and textures and everything about the game with generative AI."

Huang went on to reiterate what the company said in its DLSS 5 announcement yesterday, saying that the tech's generative capability "doesn't change the artistic control." It is seemingly possible for the developer to fine-tune how the generative AI performs to match the game's style.

"All of that is in the control — direct control — of the game developer," he had added. "This is very different than generative AI; it’s content-control generative AI. That’s why we call it neural rendering."

So far, Nvidia has confirmed that Bethesda, CAPCOM, Hotta Studio, NetEase, NCSOFT, S-GAME, Tencent, Ubisoft, and Warner Bros. Games are partnering with it for using DLSS 5.

Nvidia has confirmed that the DLSS 5 demos it showed had needed two RTX 5090s to function, with one required for rendering the game and the second running solely focused on the DLSS 5 model. It said the release version will only require a single GPU, however. Real-world performance numbers and supported hardware are yet to be announced for the tech.

Nvidia is slated to launch DLSS 5 sometime this fall.

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Posted Wednesday 18 March 2026 at 12:14 pm AEST (my time).

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After a long break, Bethesda is finally back with more Starfield information, and it's a big announcement. Today, the sci-fi RPG was confirmed to receive a brand-new expansion, as well as a massive free gameplay overhaul with "countless improvements" that will land in less than a month.

The story expansion is dubbed Terran Armada, and as the name suggests, it involves old Earth. There is a new companion included as well, who is a reprogrammed Terran robot named Delta. He is described as "not evil" but also "definitely not good."

"A new threat has entered the Settled Systems," says Bethesda, describing the new storyline. "Believing themselves to be the “true” children of Earth, the Terran Armada is made up of members of the United Colonies and Freestar Collective who vanished during the Colony War. The Terrans are an advanced military force, largely comprised of robotic soldiers."

Also included in the expansion are Terran-flavored ship parts, military gear, a mini-bot crew member, pre-built outposts, and various skirmishes with the Armada in outer space that give big rewards.

Moving onto the massive Free Lanes update, this is where Bethesda is revamping the whole experience.

Cruise mode is coming to all players, which will let explorers travel between planets freely using their own ship's engines without fast traveling. During the longer travel time, players can go about their ship, speak with the crew, craft items, decorate the ship, or do any activity until the autopilot slows the ship down at its destination.

"There are also tons of new space POIs to discover as you travel in Cruise Mode," adds the studio. "You’ll see them dynamically pop up and you can change your destination on the fly to automatically head to one of these POIs, or you can just keep on moving toward your original destination."

Players will be able to jump into New Game+ with their gear going forward too, all thanks to using the new Quantum Entanglement Device they can construct. Starborn abilities have also been changed to allow upgrading without New Game+.

Space encounters have been upgraded too, with brand-new variants and increased frequency being confirmed. Also here are a weapon re-roll system for their legendary effects, two new quality tiers above Advanced, shared containers in Outposts to send resources between them, a database system to track outposts better, alien outpost pets, and much more:

• Anchorpoint Station: Anchorpoint is a new starstation with vendors and quests.
• New Ship Modules: New ship modules have been added to upgrade different ship specs and even add some unique new abilities to your ship, like a new stealth module that cloaks your ship while boosting. These modules will drop in ship combat as schematics and can be installed at any ship services technician.
• Upgrade Module Slot: You’ll notice as you’re customizing your gear that there’s a new Upgrade Module slot. This slot lets you upgrade a specific stat like range, rate of fire, etc. on your gear.
• Colony War Action Heroes: There are 27 Colony War Action Hero collectibles for you to track down. Each one gives a stat buff (with different buffs for opened and unopened versions) and will look great decorating your outpost in the new outpost display cases.
• Many more planetary POIs: You’ll notice an increased variety in the types of planetary POIs as you explore.
• New Elite Crew: Fan-favorite NPC Muria Siarkiewicz can now be added as an Elite Crewmember. Find her at her normal spot near Galbank in New Atlantis.
• New side quests: There’s a number of people on Anchorpoint that could use your help. Talk to everyone.
• New land vehicle: Bounce your way across the surface in style with the new Moon Jumper land vehicle. With its impressive boost capabilities, the Moon Jumper is built for verticality, allowing you to reach high up places much easier while in a vehicle.
• Asteroid base home: For those with a lot of credits to burn, you can now purchase a very ritzy asteroid base to call home. Explore Anchorpoint to learn how to purchase it.
• New enemy modifiers: Add some extra challenge to combat with new enemy modifiers like Tank (3x more health), Tricky (chance to avoid damage), Martyr (dying puts nearby allies into a rage), and more. These modifiers can be tuned in the Gameplay Options menu. All new modifiers will be identified with new icons near enemy health bars and full descriptions can be found in scanner mode.
• New weapon skins: New Constellation and Neon skins for select weapons
• Photomode poses with the REV-8
• New camera features: A toggle to always play a landing camera has been added to Accessibility settings. Additionally, a more distant ship POV level has also been added to camera options.

Check out the video below for a deep dive of the new Free Lanes update and the Terran Armada expansion featuring Lead Creative Producer Tim Lamb, Art Director Istvan Pely, and Design Director Emil Pagliarulo.

The Starfield Terran Armada story expansion and the Free Lanes update are releasing on April 7. On the same day, Starfield will also be released on PlayStation 5, continuing the Xbox porting initative over to the rival platform.

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Posted Wednesday 18 March 2026 at 6:40 am AEST (my time).

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Intel has just announced the launch of the new Intel Core Ultra 200HX Plus series of mobile processors, targeting gamers and professionals. The company said that these entries are high-performance options in the Core Ultra 200 series family that have been optimized for advanced gaming, streaming, content creation, and workstation use.

Making up the Intel Core Ultra 200HX Plus series are the Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus and the Intel Core Ultra 7 270HX Plus. Both bring new features and architectural refinements such as the new Intel Binary Optimization Tool which can improve native performance in select games.

In the case of the 290HX Plus, Intel delivers up to 8% faster gaming performance and up to 7% single thread performance compared to the previous generation Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX. It also delivers a boost of up to 900MHz to the die-to-die frequency. This increases the speed of the CPU and memory controller link by nearly one gigahertz, leading to a reduction in system latency and improved gaming performance.

These new processors also have support for discrete Intel Wi-Fi 7 (5 Gig), Intel Wireless Bluetooth 5.4, and Intel Thunderbolt 5 which supports up to 80 Gbps bidirectional bandwidth to transfer large files quickly.

Intel said the new processors will be available from its OEM partners throughout the year, starting today. Devices that will use these chips include:

Acer

• Predator Helios Neo 16S AI
• Predator Helios Neo 16 AI
• Predator Helios Neo 18 AI

ASUS

• ROG Strix SCAR 18

Colorful

• iGame M16 Origo

Dell Technologies

• Alienware 16 Area-51 Gaming Laptop
• Alienware 18 Area-51 Gaming Laptop
• Alienware 16X Aurora Gaming Laptop

HP Inc.

• HyperX OMEN 15
• HyperX OMEN 16
• HyperX OMEN MAX 16

Lenovo

• Lenovo Legion 7i (16”, 10)
• Lenovo Legion 5i (15”, 11)
• Lenovo Legion Pro 7i (16”, 10)
• Lenovo Legion Pro 5i (16”, 10)

MAINGEAR

• MAINGEAR Ultima 18

Mechrevo

• Mechrevo Yaoshi 18 Pro
• Mechrevo Yaoshi 16 Ultra

MSI

• Raider 16 Max HX

Origin

• Origin PC Gaming Notebook EON18X
• Origin PC Gaming Notebook EON16X

Puget

• Puget Mobile C162-G

Razer

• Razer Blade 18

You can learn more in Intel’s blog post announcement.

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Posted Wednesday 18 March 2026 at 6:38 am AEST (my time).

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Microsoft has announced a new leadership shakeup for its Copilot assistant. The changes come with a combination of its commercial and consumer teams into a single, unified organization.

Jacob Andreou has been promoted to Executive Vice President, Copilot, reporting directly to Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella. Andreou will lead the entire Copilot experience, from design and product to engineering. Before joining Redmond, Andreou was the Senior Vice President of Product and Growth at Snap, where he spent eight years helping to scale the social media platform during its most formative period.

The M365 apps and the Copilot platform will be co-led by a trio of executives: Ryan Roslansky, Perry Clarke, and Charles Lamanna. Roslansky is currently the CEO of LinkedIn (appointed in 2020) and Executive Vice President of Microsoft Office.

Clarke has spent nearly a decade working on Microsoft 365 and also served as General Manager for Microsoft Exchange, where he was responsible for core infrastructure. The last member of the trio, Lamanna, has been with Microsoft on and off since 2009 and previously led engineering teams that built the foundational infrastructure for Microsoft Azure.

Mustafa Suleyman is retaining his title as Executive Vice President and CEO of Microsoft AI but his responsibilities are shifting. He will now "focus all [his] energy on our Superintelligence efforts and be able to deliver world class models for Microsoft over the next 5 years."

As you will have just heard from Satya, the next phase of this plan is to restructure our organization to enable me to focus all my energy on our Superintelligence efforts and be able to deliver world class models for Microsoft over the next 5 years.

 

These models will enable us to build enterprise tuned lineages that help improve all our products across the company. They'll also enable us to deliver the COGS efficiencies necessary to be able to serve AI workloads at the immense scale required in the coming years. Achieving all this will be a huge challenge, and I'm committing everything we have – and I have personally – to make it happen.

Microsoft has been reorganizing its AI and Copilot leadership over the last two years. Before this recent restructuring, its CEO Satya Nadella, in March 2024, hired DeepMind and Inflection AI co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to lead a newly formed division called "Microsoft AI".

At the time, Mikhail Parakhin was the head of Microsoft's Advertising and Web Services, with his team handling products like Bing, Edge, and even the consumer version of Copilot. Nadella announced that Parakhin's group would report to the newly hired Suleyman. Parakhin was reportedly not happy with this arrangement and stepped down shortly after. He's now the CTO at Shopify.

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Posted Wednesday 18 March 2026 at 6:37 am AEST (my time).

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In January, Doug Fulop was riding home from a night out in San Francisco when a man crossed the street in front of his car, doubled back and began screaming at him. The man punched the car’s windows and tried lifting up the vehicle. He then yelled that he wanted to kill Mr. Fulop and the other two passengers for giving money to a robot.

A taxi driver would have simply driven away. But Mr. Fulop’s vehicle had no driver — it was a self-driving Waymo.

“We felt helpless,” said Mr. Fulop, 37, who works in the tech industry.

Since autonomous cars started roaming San Francisco streets almost four years ago, they have elicited an array of unexpected behaviors from humans, including angry protests against the vehicles. That has created an unexpected hazard for passengers of self-driving cars all around the city: being stuck inside the vehicle during an anti-robot rant.

Self-driving cars are designed to stop moving if a person is nearby. People can take advantage of that function to harass and threaten their passengers. In 2024, a San Francisco man tried covering the sensors of a self-driving car that had stopped, effectively disabling it, while passengers were inside. Another video from that year showed three women screaming as a group of vandals tagged their autonomous taxi with spray paint.

It was unsettling to be trapped inside a Waymo during an attack, Mr. Fulop said. “If he had kept hammering on one window instead of alternating, I’m sure he would have eventually broken through,” he said.

The attacker did not appear to be on drugs or otherwise impaired, but seemed to be overtaken by extreme anger at the self-driving car, Mr. Fulop said. It did not seem safe to get out and run, he added, since the man was trying to open the locked doors and said he wanted to kill the passengers.

They called 911 and Waymo’s support line, Mr. Fulop said. Waymo told them that it would not manually direct the car away if someone was standing nearby, and that the passengers would be OK with the doors locked. The car’s software does not allow riders to jump into the driver’s seat and take over during an incident.

The attack lasted around six minutes. By then, bystanders had begun cheering on the man, Mr. Fulop said. That distracted the man, who moved far enough away from the car that it could finally drive away.

San Francisco police officers showed up shortly after. A police report reviewed by The New York Times supported Mr. Fulop’s account.

The San Francisco Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Katherine Barna, a Waymo spokeswoman, said the company’s support team had remained on the phone with the riders during the incident, which she noted was very unfortunate but a “rare occurrence.”

“We believe our technology can fundamentally improve road safety, provide a safer ride and empower people by providing a more accessible transportation option,” she said.

Handing the keys to a robot has added bizarre and, at times, worrisome new quirks to car travel. Passengers have shared videos of their autonomous cars getting stuck driving in circles or becoming lost in a parking garage. Last week, a video showed a Waymo in Austin, Texas, that had stopped under a railroad crossing gate just short of the tracks before a train sped past. It’s unclear whether someone was in the vehicle.

For some, riding in a taxi with no driver feels safer than being alone with a driver. In 2024, Amina Green, a San Francisco technologist and writer, filmed two men standing in front of her Waymo and harassing her while the car idled, waiting for them to move.

“I felt like a sitting duck,” she later said in Business Insider. But Ms. Green concluded that Waymo still felt safer than a ride-hailing service, where she has had drivers who watched YouTube videos while driving or otherwise made her uncomfortable.

Anders Sorman-Nilsson, a technology author and speaker, had a similar experience in Los Angeles in May when, he said, five men on e-bikes surrounded his Waymo, forcing it to stop. The vehicle sat frozen as the men banged on the windows and demanded he open up.

Mr. Sorman-Nilsson said he had felt safe inside the vehicle. A  driver could have panicked and escalated the situation or made him hand over his wallet to the thieves, he said. He felt reassured knowing that Waymo’s many exterior cameras were recording the men. After around five minutes, he said, they gave up and rode away.

Waymo frequently emphasizes its safety compared with human drivers. Its data has shown a 90 percent decrease in “serious injury or worse crashes” for its cars compared with the average human driver over the same distance in cities where it operates. (A different 2023 study showed that self-driving cars were twice as likely as human drivers to be involved in rear-end collisions.)

Waymo has expanded from a sci-fi novelty for San Francisco tourists to a sizable and thriving business. Last year, it tripled its annual trips taken to 15 million. The company plans to launch in 20 cities this year.

Continued growth will require maintaining the public’s trust. Mr. Fulop said he had stopped using Waymo for a time after the January attack and would avoid the service at night unless the company changed its policy of not intervening when a hostile person threatened riders.

“As passengers, we deserve more safety than that if someone is trying to attack us,” he said. “This can’t be the policy to be trapped there.”

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On Monday afternoon, GPU manufacturer and leading graphics innovator NVIDIA officially announced DLSS 5 at the ongoing Game Developers Conference (GDC), and boy oh boy has it proven to be quite controversial. The latest version of the company's Super Resolution tech — exclusive to NVIDIA's RTX 50-series GPUs — uses AI to render photorealistic lighting and enhancements and then adds them to a scene, and is intended to make the games you play look more natural and high-fidelity.

The problem? In nearly all of the screenshots and footage we've seen from NVIDIA of DLSS 5 running in existing titles like Resident Evil Requiem and Hogwarts Legacy, the technology makes some aggressive changes to character skin and facial appearance in particular, to the point where comment sections across social media are flooded with comparisons to the generative AI beautification filters you'll find in smartphone apps.

DLSS 5 seems to effectively homogenize the way individual characters across games look, eliminating nuance from art direction and applying some universal standards (more pronounced laugh lines and fuller lips for young female characters, more and deeper wrinkles for older characters, etc.).

As a result, the overall reception to the technology thus far has been extremely negative, and many believe most developers won't even want to support it in their games. One big-name dev, though, was excited to see DLSS 5 running in their game: Todd Howard, game director and executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios.

Howard had this to say about how DLSS 5 looks in Bethesda's latest game, Xbox's Starfield: "When they showed us DLSS 5 and we got it running in Starfield, it was amazing how it brought [it] to life. We've played it; we can't wait for all of you to do so as well."

Now, while DLSS 5's character faces immediately trigger the feeling of uncanny valley in me, I will admit that the way it improves the quality of lighting and textures in the environment is pretty impressive. Starfield in particular — a game that's a bit notorious for having flat visuals in scenes without dramatic lighting effects — pops quite a bit more with DLSS 5. Check out Digital Foundry's comparisons in the above video for examples.

I imagine this is largely what Howard was impressed by, because the way DLSS 5 changes NPC faces is pretty jarring, and makes everyone look a little too perfect. Again, it's that same uncanny look you'd expect from an AI filter...and ultimately, that's kind of what DLSS 5 is.

In the year 2026, Nvidia and its AI department have taken over the world of AI computing. Powering corporations and the masses, Nvidia now looks to bring DLSS 5 into the homes of gamers everywhere.“Twenty-five years after NVIDIA invented the programmable shader, we are reinventing computer graphics once again,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “DLSS 5 is the GPT moment for graphics — blending handcrafted rendering with generative AI to deliver a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression.”

According to Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, “Twenty-five years after NVIDIA invented the programmable shader, we are reinventing computer graphics once again. DLSS 5 is the GPT moment for graphics — blending handcrafted rendering with generative AI to deliver a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression.”

After revealing the above trailer, Jen-Hsun took center stage at GDC:

"Computer graphics comes to life, now what did we do? We fused controllable 3D graphics, the ground truth of virtual worlds, the structured data of virtual worlds, and the generated worlds. We combined 3D graphics with generative AI and probabilistic computing.

"One of them is completely predictive, the other one, probabilistic yet highly realistic. The content is beautiful as well as controllable. This concept of fusing structured information and generative AI will repeat itself in one industry after another. Structured data is the foundation of trustworthy AI."

I am speechless, for all the wrong reasons

(Image credit: Nvidia)

 

This looks like AI fan art made by someone getting ready to subscribe to ChatGPT.

 

(Image credit: Nvidia)

 

Ah, that's better.

 

During the entirety of the trailer, all I kept thinking was “That looks exactly like the first AI image I made.” In some instances, it did make the current-looking image more realistic and pleasant to look at. Again, sometimes.

 

In terms of environments, the difference was night and day, especially during the Starfield shots during the game’s opening tutorial. The lighting effects presented were uncanny in terms of their realism, but that’s where the uncanny stopped to benefit, and instead, began to haunt me.

 

I mean, I think Resident Evil: Requiem speaks for itself when you look at Grace Ashcroft. They turned her into some anime waifu AI garbage that you see when people “fix” the character models to look sexier. The image is completely and utterly changed from the original presentation into something unrecognizable by comparison.

 

(Image credit: Nvidia)

 

The lighting in this looks far better than the next image, but the faces remind me more of Deadspace than Starfield.

 

(Image credit: Nvidia)

 

Off it is.

 

In the shot of the older woman in Hogwarts Legacy, the initial rendering showcases a soft blend of wrinkles that creates a better illusion of movement in the face. When DLSS 5.0 is turned on, it recreates the wrinkles under the new lighting system, but in turn, makes it seem as though a piece of bark with lips is speaking to the character, ruining that initial facial movement.

 

Which, perhaps, is the leading issue? I don’t know, and I’m obviously not an Nvidia AI engineer working on the latest neural networks, but according to Digital Foundry, none of the original assets are touched by DLSS 5. The only thing changed is the lighting presentation, meaning every geometry point in use comes from the original render; nothing new is being created in terms of surfaces.

 

Given that the face of the woman in Hogwarts Legacy isn’t changed, all it does is highlight the shortcomings of the original 3D image to create somewhat of a horror show. So, maybe it comes down to developers using it to their advantage?

 

 

In the Digital Foundry video, they also mention that Todd Howard signed off on this implementation in Starfield. Saying this preserved the original artistic integrity of the game. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m just washed when it comes to what artistry is supposed to look like if the director says otherwise, but I can factually say it looks completely different than anything I’ve ever played.

 

I can argue that this is the best example of this technology, as the original textures are rough by comparison to anything else in the trailer. Starfield was never a game where character models looked good, so the fidelity increase is actually preferred, for me, in this game.

 

In fact, I’d argue the AI neural rendering of DLSS 5 feels more like facial replacements you’d find on Nexus mods for Starfield, Skyrim, and other Bethesda titles. This doesn’t look or feel anything like the game, but rather, some fan creation.

 

Even the main character from Hogwarts Legacy, arguably the second-best result in the trailer, falls apart the longer you look because he’s supposed to be 15. Instead, he ends up looking like some 22-year-old dude playing a 15-year-old student.

 

"DLSS 5 will come to games including AION 2, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Black State, CINDER CITY, Delta Force, Hogwarts Legacy, Justice, NARAKA: BLADEPOINT, NTE: Neverness to Everness, Phantom Blade Zero, Resident Evil Requiem, Sea of Remnants, Starfield, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, Where Winds Meet, and more."

 

At the end of the day, DLSS 5 is clearly pushing NVIDIA’s tech in a bold new direction, but the reaction shows just how sensitive players are to anything that changes the “feel” of a game. If the YouTube comments are any indication, NVIDIA has some convincing to do before these AI‑driven filters win people over. The conversation isn’t slowing down, and neither is the scrutiny: DLSS 5 is going to be one to watch.

What do you think about DLSS 5's new AI filters?

NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 reveal has sparked one of the harshest community reactions we’ve seen in a while, with YouTube comments going almost entirely negative. Some players say the AI filters look uncanny, others think it’s just early footage, and a few believe NVIDIA is pushing too far into “AI‑beautified” visuals.

 

Where do you land on this? Are the new filters a step forward, a step too far, or something that just needs more time in the oven? Drop your take below.

 

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Posted Tuesday 17 March 2026 at 12:04 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of February) 854

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