Okay, so the biggest game of 2026 is all-but-guaranteed to be GTA 6, given that Rockstar's upcoming open-world game is one of the most highly anticipated titles of all time. But the runner-up game threatening to rival it is Crimson Desert — a colossal new single player open-world action-adventure experience from Pearl Abyss, the creators of the popular MMORPG Black Desert Online, that's coming to Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, macOS, and PS5.

This grand fantasy adventure set in the same universe promises rich and nuanced combat systems, a vast and immersive world filled with different biomes and settlements, countless quests to complete and puzzles to solve, spectacle-driven boss fights, a memorable story, and more.

Essentially, Pearl Abyss wants to deliver the game of every adventure-lover's dreams. And while there are concerns about performance for a project this vast and ambitious, fans are nevertheless extremely excited for Crimson Desert. Aside from the aforementioned GTA 6, I haven't seen this much buzz for a game since Elden Ring.

The wait for it has been a long one, but thankfully, it's finally almost over. In fact, the game's global launch is now only days away — and ahead of it, the devs have confirmed its exact release date and launch time in every region across the globe, along with details about preloading the title.

Crimson Desert release date and launch times

During the Nvidia GTC 2026 Keynote, company CEO Jensen Huang announced the next major iteration of its DLSS technology stack. The AI-based image enhancing and upscaling tool seen in games is at version 4.5, but Huang unveiled DLSS 5 on stage today while calling it the "GPT moment for graphics."

"Twenty-five years after NVIDIA invented the programmable shader, we are reinventing computer graphics once again,” said Huang. "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 the company, the newest version of its technology will introduce a neural rendering model capable of adding "photoreal lighting and materials" to pixels, all in real-time using color and motion vectors taken from each frame as input. While the frame rates that can be achieved while doing all this weren't revealed, the company says that gameplay up to 4K will be supported in DLSS 5. It also touted that such fidelity was only available to Hollywood visual effects teams previously.

The newest upgrade is being backed by a number of major game publishers too, who will be adopting the tech into their games. This includes Bethesda, CAPCOM, Hotta Studio, NetEase, NCSOFT, S-GAME, Tencent, Ubisoft, Warner Bros. Games, and more.

"The AI model is trained end to end to understand complex scene semantics such as characters, hair, fabric and translucent skin, along with environmental lighting conditions like front-lit, back-lit or overcast — all by analyzing a single frame," adds the company. "DLSS 5 then uses its deep understanding to generate visually precise images that handle complex elements such as subsurface scattering on skin, the delicate sheen of fabric and light-material interactions on hair, all while retaining the structure and semantics of the original scene."

Games like Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Hogwarts Legacy, Delta Force, Resident Evil Requiem, Starfield, and more games are already confirmed as games that will support the upgrade.

Nvidia didn't give a specific day for DLSS 5's launch or say which of its product lines will support it, but the technology is slated to launch sometime this fall.

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Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 17 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

RIP Matrix

If you have a Surface Pro 11, particularly its Business-focused flavor, Microsoft has a firmware for you to install. The March 2026 update for the 11th-generation Surface Pro brings important fixes for its touchscreens, particularly bugs with hovering with the Surface Slim Pen 2, inking delay, inaccurate finger touches, and slow touch response when using the device with certain screen protectors.

Here is the changelog:

• Reliability:
  • Write and draw smoothly with your pen. We’ve fixed issues where the Surface Slim Pen 2 inks while hovering, loses tracking at lower pen pressure settings, delays inking after you set the pressure, or uses inaccurate pressure levels.
  • Get seamless touchscreen functionality. We’ve resolved an issue where finger touches on the screen aren’t accurate, and we’ve addressed issues with the touchscreen not responding after the device is idle or wakes from sleep.
• Performance and usability:
  • Complete your work efficiently. We’ve resolved an issue where the touch response is slow when the device is used on a flat surface with a UAG Workflow Series Industrial-Grade Screen Protector for Surface Pro.

Here is the list of new drivers:

Here is extra information about the release:

The 11th-generation Surface Pro for Business has a six-year support lifecycle. According to the official documentation, Microsoft will continue releasing firmware updates until at least February 18, 2031. Before installing any updates, make sure to back up important data, as firmware updates are non-uninstallable.

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Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 17 March 2026 at 5:40 am AEST (my time).

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

RIP Matrix

Watch the video:  < https://media.wired.com/clips/69a9612f01c4f78c739f396b/1080p/pass/WRD_COBOL.mp4 >

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the governor of New Jersey made an unusual admission: He’d run out of COBOL developers. The state’s unemployment insurance systems were written in the 60-year-old programming language and needed to be updated to handle the hundreds of thousands of claims. Trouble was, few of the state’s employees knew how to do that. And the crisis went beyond New Jersey, just one of many states that depended on these unwieldy systems. By one rough calculation, COBOL’s inefficiencies cost the US GDP $105 billion in 2020.

You might think New Jersey would have replaced its system after this—and that Covid was COBOL’s last gasp. Not quite. The state’s new unemployment system came with a number of quality-of-life improvements, but on the backend, it was still made possible by a mainframe running the ancient language.

COBOL, short for Common Business-Oriented Language, is the most widely adopted computer language in history. Of the 300 billion lines of code that had been written by the year 2000, 80 percent of them were in COBOL. It’s still in widespread use and supports a large number of government systems, such as motor vehicle records and unemployment insurance; on any given day, it can handle something on the order of 3 trillion dollars’ worth of financial transactions. I think of COBOL as a kind of digital asbestos, almost ubiquitous once upon a time and now incredibly, dangerously difficult to remove.

COBOL was first proposed in 1959 by a committee comprising most of the US computer industry (including Grace Hopper). It called for “specifications for a common business language for automatic digital computers” to solve a growing problem: the expense of programming. Programs were custom-written for specific machines, and if you wanted to run them on something else, that meant a near-total rewrite. The committee approached the Department of Defense, which happily embraced the project.

COBOL’s design set it apart from other languages both then and now. It was meant to be written in plain English so that anybody, even nonprogrammers, would be able to use it; symbolic mathematical notation was added only after considerable debate. Most versions of COBOL allow for the use of hundreds of words (Java permits just 68), including “is, “then,” and “to,” to make it easier to write in. Some have even said COBOL was intended to replace computer programmers, who in the 1960s occupied a rarified place at many companies. They were masters of a technology that most people could barely comprehend. COBOL’s designers also hoped that it would generate its own documentation, saving developers time and making it easy to maintain in the long run.

But what did it even mean to be readable? Programs aren’t books or articles; they’re conditional sets of instructions. While COBOL could distill the complexity of a single line of code into something anybody could understand, that distinction fell apart in programs that ran to thousands of lines. (It’s like an Ikea assembly manual: Any given step is easy, but somehow the thing still doesn’t come together.) Moreover, COBOL was implemented with a piece of logic that grew to be despised: the GO TO statement, an unconditional branching mechanism that sent you rocketing from one section of a program to another. The result was “spaghetti code,” as developers like to say, that made self-documenting beside the point.

Plenty of computer scientists had issues with COBOL from the outset. Edsger Dijkstra famously loathed it, saying, “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.” Dijkstra likewise hated the GO TO statement, arguing that it made programs nearly impossible to understand. There was a degree of real snobbishness: COBOL was often looked down on as a purely utilitarian language that was intended to solve boring problems.

Jean Sammet, one of the original designers, saw it differently—the language simply had the complicated task of representing complicated things, like social security. Or as another defender wrote, “Regrettably, there are too many such business application programs written by programmers that have never had the benefit of structured COBOL taught well.” Good COBOL was indeed self-documenting, but so much depended on the specific programmer. Fred Gruenberger, a mathematician with the Rand Corporation, put it this way: “COBOL, in the hands of a master, is a beautiful tool—a very powerful tool. COBOL, as it’s going to be handled by a low-grade clerk somewhere, will be a miserable mess.”

None of this stopped COBOL’s widespread adoption, of course. That the Department of Defense put its finger on the scale and required COBOL compilers in most of the machines it ordered certainly helped. No computer manufacturer at the height of the Cold War wanted to miss out on those federal contracting dollars. In the end, COBOL succeeded at two of its most important goals: It was truly machine-independent and could proliferate rapidly. Its reliance on fixed-point and not floating-point arithmetic (if you know, you know) made COBOL ideal for financial applications, which is why it’s everywhere in the financial sector.

But as New Jersey learned in 2020, updating COBOL for the modern age presents real challenges. Sammet admitted a key mistake in the early design: no “parameterization.” Different parts of a program were broken into modules, but they couldn’t pass data to each other, so they had to share everything, which meant that changes in one place could affect the whole program. Or cause millions of dollars to disappear in a flash. Or shut down people’s Social Security payments.

Today, companies like IBM are trying to sell COBOL conversion tools that are powered by generative AI. (At one point, DOGE was promising to use one such tool to completely rewrite the Social Security Administration’s codebase in a matter of months. The effort seems to have stalled.) But we may be caught in a bind. Simply converting COBOL to, say, Java results in “JOBOL,” a confusing mishmash that mimics the structure of COBOL but with none of its readability. I’m not convinced by many of these AI tools. As with COBOL, they promise a streamlined, anyone-can-do-it efficiency. Look what happened there.

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The anonymity of accounts on social media will be more difficult to maintain in the age of artificial intelligence. A group of researchers gathered thousands of posts from anonymous forums such as Hacker News and Reddit, asking several AIs to identify their authors. To no one’s surprise, language models like Gemini and ChatGPT did in minutes what would take a human several hours, if they could even manage to crack it at all. The models identified 68% of anonymous users with 90% precision “compared to near 0% for the best non-LLM method,” according to the scientific article. “Our results show that the practical obscurity protecting pseudonymous users online no longer holds and that threat models for online privacy need to be reconsidered.”

This may seem like merely one more task that AI does more quickly, but it has implications for the way the internet as we know it works. “People sometimes express their opinions through pseudonymous accounts, assuming that those opinions will remain private,” says Daniel Paleka, a researcher from ETH Zurich and one of the study’s co-authors. “The existence of a mechanism to investigate or monitor with large language models that allows us to simply ask about a person’s beliefs, political opinions, insecurities, or anything else that can be extracted from their anonymous Reddit account, for example, could disempower many people today,” he adds.

It’s not even necessary to dox a person to affect their behavior: AI can already reveal a lot of personal information of pseudonymous accounts on message boards and social media platforms. The company Anthropic and the Pentagon are in a legal dispute that has to do, among other factors, with the Trump administration’s planned use of AI for de-anonymization. In its statement to the Department of Defense issued prior to filing its lawsuit, Anthropic revealed that one of its motives for not collaborating was precisely this ability of AI: “Under current law, the government can purchase detailed records of Americans’ movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant, a practice the Intelligence Community has acknowledged raises privacy concerns and that has generated bipartisan opposition in Congress. Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale,” stated the business.

It’s easy to do, though these researchers have not explored this road, says Paleka. “Although we do not consider this particular threat, models can provide a timeline of a person’s life if there is sufficient information about them on the internet.”

The researchers worked on a limited database out of ethical concerns, and because they had to know who the real person was behind the message board comments. In one example, they chose Hacker News user profiles that were connected to LinkedIn profiles. They anonymized them and fed them to the AI, asking it to search for biographical and personal details with requests like: “Which candidate is the same person as the query? Consider overlapping traits like location, profession, hobbies, demographics, and values. A match should share multiple distinctive traits, not just one or two common ones.”

The digital footprint that the majority of humans have is difficult for a person to navigate, but not an AI. “Our methods, if are applied to real de-anonymization, take advantage of how people reveal personal details that would also allow a human investigator to identify them. The difference is that large language models can do this much more cheaply and quickly,” says Paleka. Internet users, even those who are anonymous, haven’t tended to consider this while online, until now. “Keep in mind that everything you post stays on the internet and can become the target of future models,” that will be even more effective, says Paleka.

Mother and fan, but hold the cilantro

AI doesn’t only search for personal details that are explicitly stated by users themselves. The researchers shared fictitious facts as examples of what can be found by AI in years of comments. “She lives in Nelson (British Columbia, Canada), pediatric nurse, woman, married, has two daughters, owns a Prius, obsessed with sourdough, plays Stardew Valley, fan of Critical Role [a web series], supports nuclear energy, celiac, plays the mandolin, walked the Pacific Crest Trail end to end, does not like cilantro.”

According to Paleka, we’re not aware of other details that we leave online, like less obvious facts that are harder to detect. “She visits the Berlin subreddit and ‘uses British spelling’ and ‘accidentally wrote a “¿” in an English text,” says Paleka. “Stylometry would be useful for linking two online accounts belonging to the same person, but personally, I tend to think that simply exploiting real-world facts is where the greatest privacy dangers lie for most people.”

Since the years 2023 and 2024, many have know that this would wind up happening. What is new about this study is the quantification and methods it employed. “It is not surprising that, when language models gained search abilities, they were able to de-anonymize some users, particularly the ones who had revealed searchable information about themselves. It is a bit surprising how easy it is to get some models involved in this type of malicious use,” Paleka says.

The great shadowy characters of the internet are still safe, but it’s hard to know for how long. “I don’t believe that today, the models can reliably de-anonymize someone who is truly difficult to identify,” says the researcher. “Satoshi Nakamoto [the supposed creator of Bitcoin] is safe. In the future, they could become better than people at this type of research, and then, the balance could shift.” 

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5G came with many promises. Remote surgery, where surgeons operate thousands of miles away from patients; driverless cars talking to each other and autonomously navigating highways; new killer apps that would change the world as Uber did.

But the cellular technology that succeeded 4G LTE didn't live up to the hype. At least Netflix loads a bit faster.

The networking tech brought real benefits to the world, from improved latency—reducing the time it takes for data to travel from one point to another—to broader and faster coverage in dense urban areas. But most people likely won't point to 5G delivering a meaningful change in their lives like many carriers suggested as they tried to justify mass spending on their infrastructure build-outs.

Well, get ready to hear that aspirational, forward-looking, and sometimes maybe deluded language again—this time in the lead-up to 6G, which is being paired with “AI” to create a marketing bingo bonanza. Even if the tech won't deliver a night-and-day difference to average folks like us, the industry is moving the goalposts.

Last week at Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona, key players like Qualcomm, Ericsson, and Nokia kicked off the hype about the next G of mobile networks. It's still early days, but here's what to expect.

Four Years to Go

Mobile networking technology evolves every 10 or so years, says David Witkowski, a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He says we can expect 6G to be deployed globally by 2030, though some carriers could launch it in specific regions a year or two earlier.

Technical discussions are already underway by industry leaders, including the mobile broadband standards body, the 3GPP. As blueprints take shape, the official requirements for 6G performance will be set by the United Nations International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R), which will be called International Mobile Telecommunications-2030, or IMT-2030. (Following the decade-long upgrade cycle, 5G was IMT-2020, 4G was IMT-2010, and 3G was IMT-2000.)

The rollout will start with new radios on cell towers and buildings and the build-out of the computer core that orchestrates interactions between the network and the public internet. Naturally, devices will need to support 6G—so you'll eventually have to upgrade to a 6G phone the same way you needed a 5G phone.

“Every generation of cellular attempts to do two things at a very broad level,” Witkowski says. “It attempts to overcome the limitations of the previous generation, and it attempts to add new functionality that's considered to be important.” Did 5G succeed with these premises? Witkowski says it depends. “If your goal was simply to have your phone perform better and get faster speeds, then 5G is a success because your phone now is typically getting in the range of 100 to 200 megabits of downlink.”

That's why it's pretty easy to load up a YouTube video when you're out and about today. But where 5G had to cut corners was the uplink, and this will be a big focus of improvement with 6G. The goal is to make upload speeds symmetrical with download speeds. Even so, you can expect the usual improvements in download speed as 6G may tap into the Terahertz (THz) spectrum—higher than millimeter wave used in 5G, though with even shorter range—and, like with every new generation, the number of devices served by a cell tower will also go up.

Up and Up

Uplink is the data you send to the network. Demand for faster upload speeds has been growing for a few years, especially after remote work became the norm during the pandemic and we all came to rely on videoconferencing. Today, increasingly large files are being sent to cloud servers for AI processing, from security camera footage to generative AI photo and video editing. The demand for faster uploads will continue to grow as companies trot out new kinds of mobile devices, like smart glasses, smartwatches, AI wearables, and earbuds, that plug into the cloud.

“We are uploading a lot more to the network now because of AI,” Witkowski says. “We're shoving unparsed, unanalyzed raw data to a cloud and hoping that AI will figure it out. If you think about it in a mobile context, then you have a problem of how much is being uploaded to the network—was the network architected to account for or handle that level of performance on the uplink?”

5G also expanded Fixed Wireless Access around the country, with carriers providing 5G home internet instead of fiber optic or cable connections. That will expand with 6G; it's another reason why upload speeds will become a main focus.

Outside of uploads, you'll likely hear a lot more about AI being “integrated into the network.” It's not the same as AI managing the 6G network itself—though that's a separate talking point. Take streaming a movie as an example. You're typically not receiving that stream from your streaming provider's servers, like Netflix. Instead, it comes from a content distribution node, hosted by your internet service provider. ISPs have public distribution nodes all over the network, so if someone in New York City wants to watch an episode of Mindhunter, it'll come from a nearby node without much delay rather than traversing to a distant server Netflix owns somewhere else.

Now take that paradigm and map it to AI. When you're talking to your AI chatbot, usually your request is sent through your provider to your chatbot company's data centers far away, then it comes back to you, likely with a bit of a delay. With 6G, Witkowski says, we may see “AI nodes” in the cellular network, which serve specific regions, distributing the load so that there's not one data center handling millions of requests, a process called edge compute.

“If we ever get to the point where we have, say, self-driving 18-wheelers, the smart thing to do would be to put the 6G network along the major highways so that at any given time, the self-driving truck is only talking to an edge device that is along the highway,” Witkowski says. “They don't have to clock out into the network; it cuts down on load, and the network can speed up response time.”

Making Sense

Another big feature you'll hear around 6G is “sensing,” also called joint communications and sensing, or JCAS. Think of a network functioning as a radar system, where it can infer the presence of objects and people as high-frequency radio signals bounce back to towers. This could allow operators to know precise locations of objects, their shape and size, how fast they're moving, and what kind of materials they may be made of.

“There's a lot of discussion around using the 6G infrastructure when it's deployed to detect the presence of drones flying through the air, vehicles on the ground,” says Richard Burbidge, principal technologist at the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions. “I wouldn't say everyone is convinced of the business at the end of the day, but some operators see there's going to be business in offering that kind of sensing information to third parties for whatever applications it could be used for.”

Naturally, there are significant privacy implications for a network that can precisely detect people, objects, and movement without the need for a camera—a similar parallel we've seen with Google's Soli technology, which can detect human movements using radar alone.
 

There's plenty more on the horizon for 6G, whether that's improving power efficiency so that the cell network doesn't consume a large chunk of the global electrical grid or more deliberate integrations with satellites to plug the coverage gaps in terrestrial networks. Over the next few years, we'll see these goals ironed out.

4G LTE is still in use today in conjunction with 5G, so don't expect 5G to disappear once 6G starts rolling out. That said, Jaydee Griffith, managing director at the Next G Alliance, says carriers have made it clear that they want 6G to stand on its own two legs, without the kind of previous-gen dependence that we saw with 5G. “It does get more expensive to operate when you stack G’s,” Griffith says.

Hype and Health

With 6G already an early focus at events like Mobile World Congress, we're seeing companies hyping it up just like they did 5G. Qualcomm's 6G blog says 6G “represents new paradigms” and suggests new use cases, such as “hologram telepresence, collaborative robots, human augmentation, and deeper immersion to the digital and virtual worlds.”

But Griffith says there are a lot of lessons learned from the marketing hype of 5G and that a big part of 6G will be a focus on the practical, not the fabulous. “We see that with every generation,” he says. “Especially the earlier in the process, the more hype there is, because the world is our oyster. We'll build a network that can do everything: flying cars, remote tele-surgery.”

Witkowski dejectedly points out that we're also likely to see yet another wave of unfounded health fears surrounding 6G. Every decade, when carriers apply for permits to build towers, there are objections to the process from communities that believe that cellular technology is dangerous, even if there's plenty of evidence that it's safe.

“I've been down this road before, where every 10 years we have to go back, and we have to re-fight the fight,” Witkowski says. “It keeps me employed, but I prefer that we not be living in this sort of anti-science mindset all the time. It would be great if people would accept that this stuff is safe within the limit that is set by the IEEE standard and adopted by regulatory agencies like the FCC.”

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The gaming community freaked out last week when Seamus Blackley, the original creator of Xbox, claimed the console was sunsetting in an interview with Gamesbeat.

However, if you read the interview or his comments on Bluesky, you'll realize he meant that something at the core of Xbox feels off: The console he built is in “distress.” Blackley speculated that the February shuffle of Asha Sharma from AI executive to executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft Gaming means the product is in “palliative care.”

Xbox is not shutting down, but many were quick to believe the headlines, as there’s a dark cloud over the industry right now. What happened?

While gaming experienced an unprecedented high during the pandemic, artificial intelligence crept up behind it. AI's proliferation in the gaming industry is already accelerating job loss and cheapening the work of developers at studios now scrutinized by anti-AI gamers.

Data centers have siphoned RAM from the industry, resulting in a global memory shortage. This has driven up the costs of hardware required for consoles, stalling releases and rendering at-home PC building—once a rite of passage for entry-level gamers—a luxury.

In December, Valve announced it was discontinuing its Steam Deck LCD 256GB model, released in 2022, and the 2023 upgrade has all but disappeared. This is the first discontinuation of a major console before the launch of a worthy upgrade; Valve’s Steam Machine, a box six times more powerful than the Steam Deck, is meant to be released this year, but its exact timing and cost remain unknown.

Meanwhile, prices have gone up on Xbox and PS5. Per Bloomberg, Sony has yet to confirm or deny that the successor to the PS5, originally slated for release in late 2027, is delayed another year. And Nintendo, having narrowly avoided new tariffs to the Switch 2 launch in 2025, which they are now suing the US government over, is not ruling out price hikes.

Six years ago, while the world was in lockdown, the gaming industry was thriving.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold 13.4 million units within just six weeks of its launch date in March 2020, the most digital units of a console game ever sold in a single month. That same year, global gaming revenue increased by 23 percent, and millions who would not have previously labeled themselves gamers picked up controllers and booted up PCs.

When the Playstation 5 launched in November 2020, seven years after its predecessor, it felt like a promise that the gaming industry would be fine, even while other industries struggled to adjust to the pandemic. In July of 2021, Valve revealed the Steam Deck, a handheld console that would make it possible to play Steam games anywhere. Preorders sold out within hours.

Meanwhile, YouTubers and Twitch streamers rose in popularity with millions at home watching gamers stream in place of other on-screen entertainment. The power centers of the game industry began to bulge. Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard and ZeniMax Media. Sony responded by acquiring Bungie in 2022 while making a $1.45 billion investment in Epic Games. Job postings in the gaming space rose by 40 percent during the pandemic.

But the rise of AI has prompted a random-access memory shortage now being referred to as RAMaggedon—and it’s bringing all of this progress to a grinding halt.

The rapid rise of artificial intelligence has upended every corner of the tech industry. Nearly a third of adults and most teens in the US use AI on a daily basis, according to Pew Research. Data centers have doubled in the US since 2022, raising electricity costs up to 267 percent more than they were five years ago for households near those warehouses, according to Bloomberg. Reports show the US accounts for more than half of “hyperscale facilities,” centers built specifically for AI, many of which are multibillion-dollar investments.

Those massive computing stacks require gobs of RAM, the short-term memory of any device. RAM is the green, black, and gold brain of electronics. Data centers, both AI-specific and not, are expected to consume around 70 percent of global RAM production in 2026, according to The Wall Street Journal. The shortage in available chips has caused mass delays and price hikes of electronics worldwide, rendering the gaming industry one of its biggest casualties so far.

Gaming is “the only mass media entertainment where the creative ceiling is limited by consumer hardware,” Washington Post game critic Gene Park tells me. “So, if consumers can't afford or access higher grade tech like sufficient RAM, the innovation will slow down.”

This happens because RAM is what dictates how minute or vast world-building within a game can be.

Park argues that developers could be forced to compromise stories, art, non-player characters, battles, worlds—all of which are already at risk of being automated by new AI tools. Park says those tools still have substantial limitations. “None of it is even close to replacing handcrafted video games.”

Close or not, the impact that these tools are having on games—and the push within game studios to use them to speed up development through automation—is turning up noses.

None of the developers I spoke with want to use AI, and most gamers won’t have it, even in limited quantities. Alec Robbins, narrative director at Squanch Games, was told to use generative AI in a project, a decision he "fought against and lost.” For gamers, it “didn’t matter” that the AI became “localized to a very specific and small part of the game,” though. Its mere presence diluted the entire experience and caused the company “reputational damage,” Robbins says. (Squanch chose to honor gamers' concerns and not use AI again.)

There was similar backlash against Divinity last year when Larian Studios’ CEO admitted the game used generative AI. Gamers didn’t care that it was used for workflow; just the mention of AI forced the company to walk it back. Larian Studios declined a request for comment.

There’s a fear among the staff of major studios that make AAA games (like Playstation, Xbox, and Rockstar) that CEOs will continue to fall for the potential of AI rather than the reality, and thus gut workplaces. About 45,000 gaming employees lost their jobs from 2022 to the end of 2025, with up to 10,000 layoffs predicted for 2026.

I spoke with several longtime AAA employees, all of whom requested anonymity over fear of retribution in an already volatile industry. A veteran game developer at Xbox says layoffs and fewer job postings have disproportionately impacted junior staffers, and now “everyone is just having seniors do the work.” That work is often supplemented with AI. “There was this myth” the developer tells me, that AI is “going to allow devs to focus on, you know, the good stuff, the hard stuff. But the problem is, OK, then who does the basic stuff? And the answer is … no one.”

A senior sound designer for one AAA studio says employees go along with AI because they’re doing “whatever they can to stay hirable.” If they’re not “keeping up with the times,” or are outwardly anti-AI, they risk their jobs. “Many of my peers are already looking for work in other sectors just to more reliably provide for themselves and their families.” Studios have already begun implementing generative AI to speedrun or even bypass character speech, avoiding hiring voice actors.

The only industry workers who could benefit from AI are streamers. Spencer Agnew, director of programming for Smosh Games, thinks cost increases driven by the RAM shortage could mean that gamers unable to play might tune into streams more. “Some streamers could see it as advantageous for their audience to not have access to these games … so they become dependent on the streamer to provide that experience.”

In the aftermath of the sunsetting rumors, Xbox announced its next-gen console under the name Project Helix. The company has been running behind in console sales since the release of the Xbox Series X in 2020, selling less than even the original Nintendo Switch in 2025. Project Helix, due within a couple of years, will be an open-platform hybrid PC-console, reportedly with no exclusive titles.

If RAMaggedon continues at its current pace, experts are predicting the cost for this next console will land somewhere between $900 and $1,200, double the price of the last Series X.

A source familiar with Xbox’s new strategy assured me the brand is “definitely not in distress” and that, while the latest project may look and feel different, the company is still committed to innovation. As far as AI use, the source claims Xbox will continue “using AI responsibly and transparently” to “both player and dev benefit.”

A longtime AAA video game company executive tells me he believes the CEOs insisting AI be integrated into the gaming industry will eventually fail when gaming fans ultimately reject the results. “Because we will not buy their shit. And we will not give them explosive growth. We will not, you know, do cosplay. We will not go to cons. We will not generate merch. We will not make fan fiction. We will not make fan games. Like, we will do none of the things they want, because it sucks.”

While employees at major studios feel buckled under AI, consumers can still help dictate where the next 10 years of gaming go.

Gamers, rise up.

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Paul's Hardware (1.54m subscribers)

March 15, 2026

Video length: 13m 58s

0:00 Welcome to Paul’s Tech News - March 15, 2026

1:43 Intel Announces 'Arrow Lake Refresh': Core Ultra 270K/250K Plus Desktop CPUs

5:17 GDC - Nvidia’s Lackluster GeForce / Gaming announcements

7:49 GDC - Microsoft Project Helix, “Xbox Mode” for PCs

9:10 GDC - AMD “FSR Diamond”

TECH BRIEFS

10:26 A Steam Machine Update At Last (not good though)

11:47 MacBook Neo - $600 Apple Laptop Launches

12:38 This Week: Steam Spring Sale Incoming, Nvidia GTC

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Posted Sunday 15 March 2026 at 5:57 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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A big Windows 11 bug is hitting Samsung users hard, details about the next-generation Xbox, fresh Windows 11 builds with new features, reviews, gaming news, and more in the latest episode of our Microsoft Weekly news recap.

Quick links:

1. Windows 10 and 11
2. Windows Insider Program
3. Updates are available
4. Reviews are in
5. 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.

This week, Microsoft released the March 2026 Patch Tuesday update roundup for Windows 11 and Windows 10. Those on Windows 11 version 25H2 and 24H2 got KB5079473, which packs security updates and new features, including Emoji 16.0, new camera controls, File Explorer improvements, RSAT support for Windows on ARM, and more. For Windows 10 users, Microsoft released KB5078885. No new features in there, since Microsoft ended mainstream Windows 10 support five months ago.

Speaking of new Windows 11 features, a highly-requested taskbar update is delayed. In 2025, Microsoft promised to bring back agenda view in the calendar flyout, but the initial implementation was received to a universal hate. As such, Microsoft removed it, and it is now delayed because the company wants to make it right. The good news about the taskbar is that Microsoft is bringing back the ability to remove tiles in quick action tiles so that you can have only the ones that you need the most.

Those with Samsung laptops running Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2 are not having a good time right now. Microsoft acknowledged a new issue where users get locked out of the system drive after the February 2026 Patch Tuesday updates. Windows 11 does not allow opening the drive, plus affected PCs exhibit other serious issues, including app launch failures, problems with executing common tasks, failures to elevate privileges, and more. Microsoft is investigating the situation, but there are currently no workarounds. There are reports of other issues as well.

While Microsoft investigates problems with drive C on Samsung laptops, the company pushed an emergency update for a critical network flaw on Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2. Also, Microsoft released new Defender updates and a fresh version of official Windows 11 ISO files, now available through the Media Creation Tool app.

If you want a one-click solution for tweaking and customizing Windows 11, you should try Sophia Script. This powerful open-source script lets you apply over 150 Windows tweaks on any system, including what some consider debloating. Unlike people who try to debloat Windows 11 with AI, this script uses officially documented methods, not AI slop.

Did you know that Windows 11 now has a built-in network speed test? The bad news is that it's just a dumb link to Bing.com.

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.

Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for the web are getting a new way to share files. This week, Microsoft announced a new "Publish to web" feature that allows sharing a file in read-only mode using a link, with all version history, notes, comments, and other internal information removed. Microsoft says "Publish to web" also eliminates accidental data leaks where confidential or sensitive information leaves the company unnoticed in a note, comment, or a previous version that the sender forgot to clean. When using the new feature, the receiving side gets only the finalized, polished, read-only document.

Speaking of Office apps for the web, Microsoft is fixing their UI with a new search bar in the header, making it much more useful than the previous version, which only contained a dummy image. The updated UI is currently rolling out for commercial customers of Microsoft 365.

Outlook for Windows, another app from Microsoft's Office suite, is getting a feature that improves offline use. Soon, users will be able to attach files in offline mode and send emails as soon as internet connectivity is restored. The feature was supposed to arrive in February, but Microsoft delayed it to April-May 2026.

Finally, check out Usama Jawad's editorial about why AI features in Microsoft 365 are pointless cost-wise and why no one should bother signing up for them.

On the browser side, we have Firefox 148.0.2, a new minor update for the browser that addresses several bugs with Firefox Home, rich text editors, YouTube autoplay, video quality regression on PCs with NVIDIA GPUs, and more. By the way, as it turned out, Mozilla is not done with Firefox on Windows 7. The company decided to give Firefox 115 ESR six additional months of support. Now its end of support is scheduled for August 2026.

Also, Microsoft released Edge 146 with changes to the browser's password manager, important fixes on Windows 11, UI improvements, and more.

Here are other updates and releases you may find interesting:

• Microsoft released Visual Studio Code 1.111 and switched to a weekly release schedule

• Microsoft is enabling some Windows updates by default for several PCs

• Live transcriptions with translations are coming to Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android

• PowerToys is getting a major update for PowerToys Runner

• Microsoft introduces Copilot Health to analyze your health data from wearable devices

• Microsoft is bringing more AI features to SharePoint and Teams

• Copilot Notebooks get a big redesign in the latest update

• Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 3 announced: New agentic features for Word, Excel, and Outlook

• Microsoft debuts $99/month "E7" tier for Microsoft 365 Enterprise

   

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

• NVIDIA 595.79 WHQL Game Ready driver with optimizations for Crimson Desert and Death Stranding 2. The driver also includes fixes for several other games and a bug breaking GPU overclocking (it was recently fixed with a hotfix update).
• AMD 8.02.18.557 Chipset Driver. The update only includes bug fixes.

Reviews are in

Here is the hardware and software we reviewed this week

Neowin had plenty of reviews published this week. Steven Parker reviewed the GEEKOM A5 Pro 2026 Edition mini PC, highlighting its tiny footprint, good all-metal case, and solid display output. His second review features the GMKtec NucBox K15, a power-efficient mini PC with good cooling, DDR5 memory, and HDMI 2.1 ports. It was followed by the GMKtec AD-GP1, an external GPU dock with OCUlink and USB4.

Moving from mini PCs, we have a review of the Cuktech 15 Air, a compact power bank with silicon-carbon battery and GaN components, a hands-on review of the GameSir G7 PRO ZZZ, and a review of Monster Hunter Stories 3.

On the gaming side

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

At GDC, Microsoft announced new details about Project Helix, its next-generation Xbox that will be able to play not just console games, but PC games as well. Microsoft said that the console will be powered by an SoC from AMD, and it will feature massive improvements in ray tracing performance, plus tech like AMD FSR, Neural Rendering, ML upscaling, and more. Unfortunately, we are still pretty far away from consumer-ready products, as Microsoft only plans to reveal "alpha versions of the hardware" for developers somewhere in 2027.

Big gaming news does not end there. Next month, Microsoft will release the new Xbox mode for all Windows 11 PC form factors. Microsoft's take on Steam Big Picture aims to give users "a clean, distraction-free interface, while still giving them the flexibility to seamlessly switch back to the Windows desktop at any time." In addition to that, Microsoft is expanding Advanced Shader Delivery to all game developers to improve performance in games.

Minecraft fans should mark March 21 in their calendars, as Mojang announced the next Minecraft Live, its regular event where the studio plans to detail the upcoming "Tiny Takeover" content update. Additionally, Mojang promised to unveil some "Secret Stuff" outside the upcoming game drop, so tune in for the event on March 21 at 10 AM PT.

NVIDIA GeForce NOW is getting some big updates for VR gaming. Also, NVIDIA is adding GOG support, new games, and more.

Finally, check out this week's Weekend PC Deals article with a fresh giveaway from the Epic Games Store, new bundles from Humble Bundle, and a lot of discounts on various games across other storefronts.

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Posted Sunday 15 March 2026 at 12:02 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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A team of researchers from the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), the University of Tokyo, Kyoto Institute of Technology, and Tohoku University has shown that thin films of ruthenium dioxide (RuO₂) display altermagnetism. This is a newly recognized type of magnetism, different from the familiar ferromagnetism and anti-ferromagnetism.

Magnetic materials are essential in memory devices. Ferromagnets make it easy to write data but are sensitive to stray magnetic fields, which can cause errors as devices get smaller and more crowded. Antiferromagnets are more stable against interference, but their spin structure cancels out, making it hard to read stored information electrically. Altermagnets offer a middle ground. They have no net magnetization, like antiferromagnets, but still allow electrical readout of spin-related properties. As the researchers put it, “altermagnetism presents intriguing possibilities for spintronic devices due to its unique combination of strong spin-splitting and zero net magnetization.”

Spintronic devices harness the spin of electrons, alongside their charge, to process and store information in ways that surpass conventional electronics. By exploiting spin states, they enable faster switching speeds, lower energy consumption, and non-volatile memory that retains data without continuous power. This makes them highly efficient, durable, and scalable for modern applications. Their resistance to radiation and temperature variations further enhances reliability, while technologies like magnetic random access memory (MRAM) demonstrate their potential to revolutionize computing and data storage, like memory, HDDs, and SSDs.

The new tech can become the go-to for corporations that crave top-notch AI performance, thus potentially reducing the current crisis among existing products.

One of the main challenges has been making high-quality samples. In this study, the team succeeded in fabricating single-variant RuO₂(101) thin films with fully epitaxial growth on Al₂O₃(1̅02) r-plane substrates. This means the atomic lattice of the film was aligned in a single direction, rather than randomly. The match between how oxygen atoms sit on the surfaces of RuO₂(101)[010] and Al₂O₃(1̅02)[11̅0] was crucial for this alignment. The result was confirmed through detailed structural checks using X-ray diffraction, atomic-resolution transmission electron microscopy, and X-ray magnetic linear dichroism.

This careful alignment made the magnetic behavior clear. The team directly observed that the magnetic poles cancel each other out, and they measured spin-split magnetoresistance, where electrical resistance changes depending on spin orientation. They also tested RuO₂(101)/CoFeB bilayers and found that single-variant growth had a strong effect on spin transport.

To explain the importance of orientation, the researchers compared it to laying tiles on a floor. If tiles are placed at random angles, patterns are hard to see. If they are aligned in one direction, the structure becomes obvious. In the same way, aligning the crystal axes of RuO₂ revealed its underlying magnetic properties.

"These results show that controlling crystallographic orientation is key to revealing and utilizing altermagnetism in RuO₂ thin films," said a member of the research team. "This approach allows us to connect theoretical predictions with experimental observations."

The findings matched first-principles density functional theory calculations, giving confidence in the interpretation. By demonstrating single-variant RuO₂(101) films, the team has taken a significant step forward in the study of altermagnetism.

Looking ahead, they plan to explore memory devices that use RuO₂ thin films for faster and more efficient information processing. The synchrotron-based magnetic analysis methods developed here can also be applied to other candidate altermagnetic materials, opening the door to broader progress in spintronics.

Source: Tohoku University, Nature

This article was generated with some help from AI and reviewed by an editor. Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, this material is used for the purpose of news reporting. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.

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Posted Sunday 15 March 2026 at 11:57 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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A new scientific review raises concerns about how chatbots powered by artificial intelligence may encourage delusional thinking, especially in vulnerable people.

A summary of existing evidence on artificial intelligence-induced psychosis was published last week in the Lancet Psychiatry, highlighting how chatbots can encourage delusional thinking – though possibly only in people who are already vulnerable to psychotic symptoms. The authors advocate for clinical testing of AI chatbots in conjunction with trained mental health professionals.

For his paper, Dr Hamilton Morrin, a psychiatrist and researcher at King’s College in London, analyzed 20 media reports on so-called “AI psychosis”, which describes current theories as to how chatbots might induce or exacerbate delusions.

“Emerging evidence indicates that agential AI might validate or amplify delusional or grandiose content, particularly in users already vulnerable to psychosis, although it is not clear whether these interactions can result in the emergence of de novo psychosis in the absence of pre-existing vulnerability,” he wrote.

There are three main categories of psychotic delusions, Morrin says, identifying them as grandiose, romantic and paranoid. While chatbots can exacerbate any of these, their sycophantic responses means they especially latch on to the grandiose kind. In many of the cases in the essay, chatbots responded to users with mystical language to suggest that users have heightened spiritual importance. The bots also implied that users were speaking with a cosmic being who was using the chatbot as a medium. This type of mystical, sycophantic response was especially common in OpenAI’s GPT 4 model, which the company has now retired.

Media reports would become essential in Morrin’s work, he said, as he and a colleague had already noticed patients “using large language model AI chatbots and having them validate their delusional beliefs”.

“Initially, we weren’t sure if this was something being seen more widely,” he said, adding that “in April last year, we began to see media reports of individuals having delusions affirmed and arguably even amplified through their interactions with these AI chatbots.”

When Morrin first began working on his paper, there were no published case reports yet.

While some scientists who research psychosis said that media reports tend to overstate the idea that AI causes psychosis, Morrin expressed gratitude for those reports drawing attention to the phenomenon much faster than the scientific process can.

“The pace of development in this space is so rapid that it’s perhaps not surprising that academia hasn’t necessarily been able to keep up,” said Morrin.

Morrin also suggests more cautious phrasing than “AI psychosis” or “AI-induced psychosis”– phrases which are appearing frequently in outlets like NPR, the New York Times and the Guardian. Researchers are seeing people tipping into delusional thinking with AI use, but so far there’s no evidence that chatbots are associated with other psychotic symptoms like hallucinations or “thought disorder”, which consists of disorganized thinking and speech.

Many researchers also think it’s unlikely that AI could induce delusions in people who weren’t already vulnerable to them. For this reason, Morrin said “AI-assocciated delusions” is “perhaps a more agnostic term”.

Dr Kwame McKenzie, chief scientist at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, says “it may be that those in early stages of the development of psychosis will be more at risk”.

Psychotic thinking is something that develops over time and is not linear, and many people with “pre-psychotic thinking do not progress into psychotic thinking”, McKenzie explained.

Echoing the concern that chatbots could worsen psychotic thinking is Dr Ragy Girgis, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University. Before someone develops a full on delusion, they will often have “attenuated delusional beliefs”, he says, which means they are not 100% sure their delusion is true. Girgis said the “worst case scenario” is when an attenuated delusion becomes a full on conviction, “which is when someone would be diagnosed with a psychotic disorder – it’s irreversible”.

Notably, people who are vulnerable to psychotic disorders have used media to reinforce delusional beliefs long before AI technology existed.

“People have been having delusions about technology since before the Industrial Revolution,” Morrin said. While in the past, people may have had to comb through YouTube videos or the contents of their local library to reinforce their delusions, chatbots can provide that reinforcement in a much faster, more concentrated dose. Their interactive nature can also “speed up the process”, of exacerbating psychotic symptoms, said Dr Dominic Oliver, a researcher at the University of Oxford.

“You have something talking back to you and engaging with you and trying to build a relationship with you,” Oliver said.

Girgis’s research found “the paid versions and newer versions [of chatbots] perform better than the older versions”, when they respond to clearly delusional prompts, “although they all perform badly”. Still, that these models perform differently suggests: “AI companies could potentially know how to program their chatbots to be safer and identify delusional versus non delusional content, because they’re doing it.”

In a statement, OpenAI said that ChatGPT should not replace professional mental healthcare, and that the company worked with 170 mental health experts to make GPT 5 safer. GPT 5 has still given problematic responses to prompts indicating mental health crises. OpenAI said it continues to improve its models with the help of experts.

Anthropic did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.

Creating effective safeguards for delusional thinking could be tricky, Morrin said, because “when you work with people with beliefs of delusional intensity, if you directly challenge someone and tell them immediately that they’re completely wrong, actually what’s most likely is they’ll withdraw from you and become more socially isolated”. Instead, it’s important to create a fine balance where you try to understand the source of the delusional belief without encouraging it – that could be more than a chatbot can master.

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According to Reuters, Meta is looking to offset spending on AI and data centers with a massive round of layoffs. Sources familiar with the matter say the company could lay off as much as 20 percent of its staff, eliminating roughly 15,800 positions. That would be the largest series of layoffs at the company since it terminated 22,000 workers over just a few months between November 2022 and early 2023.

Word of the potential downsizing comes after Meta signaled that it was all but giving up on VR and the Metaverse, slashing budgets and closing studios. Instead, the company has been spending big to attract AI talent, build data centers, and acquire companies like Moltbook.

Amid all this, the company has also repeatedly found itself in hot water over its smart glasses, chatbots, and its impact on teens.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Posted Sunday 15 March 2026 at 5:16 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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Modern gamers are used to loading up a new game for the first time and being forced to wait multiple minutes while a “compiling shaders” step whirs away, optimizing advanced 3D effects for their specific hardware. This week at the Game Developers Conference, Microsoft provided some updates about its Advanced Shader Delivery for Windows efforts, which are designed to fix the problem by generating collections of precompiled shaders that can be downloaded ahead of time.

In a console environment, developers can optimize and precompile their graphics shaders to work well with a set driver and GPU environment. On PC, though, developers tend to leave their shaders as uncompiled code that can then be compiled and cached at runtime based on the specific hardware and drivers on the player’s machine.

Microsoft’s Advanced Shader Delivery infrastructure aims to fix this problem by automating the process of precompiling shaders that work across “a large matrix of drivers and GPUs in the Windows ecosystem,” as the company puts it. To enable that, developers use Microsoft’s Direct3D API to create a State Object Database (SODB) that represents in-game assets at the game engine level. That asset database is then fed into multiple shader compilers to create a Precompiled Shader Database (PSDB) that supports multiple display adapters from different hardware vendors.

An Nvidia graphic outlines the process of going from shader code to compiled shader.

Credit: Nvidia

That PSDB can then be downloaded alongside the game, providing what Microsoft calls “console-like load times across the hardware ecosystem” on PC. That PSDB can also be automatically updated when hardware vendors register a driver update, letting players download a new precompiled shader as a patch rather than recompiling locally every time their hardware drivers change.

Getting everyone on board

Microsoft first rolled out Advanced Shader Delivery in its SDK last September and added support to the ROG Xbox Ally as a proof of concept by October. Microsoft said that the addition reduced launch times in games like Avowed by “as much as 85 percent,” which is a big deal on battery-limited handhelds.

Getting Advanced Shader Delivery adopted across the wider PC gaming ecosystem has been a slower process. Nvidia says it is “working closely with Microsoft” to add Advanced Shader Delivery support to its GeForce RTX line “later this year,” and Intel says it’s “looking forward to releasing a driver supporting ASD in the near future.” Qualcomm also said it plans to “debut this feature soon on Qualcomm Adreno X2 GPUs,” for what it’s worth.

Even with hardware support, game engine makers will have to integrate Microsoft’s SODB APIs to streamline the setup process for game developers. Epic Games says it is “doing early testing and explorations on SODB and PSDB generation and will have more details coming soon,” which is probably not the full-throated commitment Microsoft would like at this point.

For now, Microsoft has updated its APIs to let developers more easily create and test PSDBs and more easily compile shaders in larger games. The company is also urging developers to “integrate SODB collection into your game engine” now so they’ll be ready to upload those precompiled shaders through the Xbox Partner Center starting in May.

At that point, some PC games downloaded through the Xbox app will finally be able to skip that annoying “compiling shaders” loading step. But this isn’t a feature Microsoft wants to keep for its own PC game platform; the company says that “in the future, any storefront can compile the SODBs to… PSDBs and distribute them.”

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Posted Saturday 14 March 2026 at 4:54 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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The city-building games space expanded back in 2021 with Timberborn. The Steam Early Access release landed with the promise of being a unique beaver-powered experience, all set in a post-apocalyptic world. Now, following almost five years of updates, the game is out in full form. Alongside the long-awaited 1.0 release, a massive update has landed too, which adds everything from automation features to Steam achievements.

"It was a long, sometimes bumpy road, but today, we are proud to give you the full version of our beaver city builder," said developer Mechanistry about its journey. "With seven major updates and the 1.0 mega-update, Timberborn is a better, bigger, deeper, and prettier game."

Adding to the game's sandbox mechanics, 3D water physics, two playable beaver civilizations, and resource management aspects, automation is landing as a major new wing to explore.

Over 20 new buildings have been added by the developer for players to automate various tasks of their cities that previously needed manual tweaking. This includes Sensors, Relays, Timers, and more options. "From automating when Floodgates open to creating fully autonomic utopias, it is now possible," says the studio.

At the same time, Interactive Objects can now be found (or built in the map editor) across maps. This can include unstable cores that explode after some time, seeping water sources to survive droughts, and even human-built structures from eons ago.

Other additions of the update include maps that offer more puzzle-like structures to survive, new buildings like spiral stairs and gates, better tools for mod makers, graphics enhancements, and much more.

"We thank our amazing players for every hour they've spent in Timberborn, for all the feedback they've sent us over the years, and for all the great creations they've shared with the rest of the community," the developer adds. "It’s thanks to them that we could spend as much time in Early Access as we did, working our way towards Timberborn 1.0. The full version of our game is a dream come true for us, and it exceeds anything we hoped for when we started working on it eight years ago."

Timberborn 1.0 is now available across Windows and macOS on Steam. It usually costs $34.99 to purchase, but a 20% launch discount has lowered that to $27.99 until March 26. Find the complete patch notes for the massive 1.0 release update here.

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Posted Friday 13 March 2026 at 1:46 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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Members of the International Imaging Technology Council (Int’l ITC) are calling out HP for issuing firmware updates that brick third-party ink and toner functionality in its printers. HP calls this Dynamic Security and has been doing it for years; however, the Int’l ITC is taking new issue with the practice, considering that it is explicitly prohibited for devices registered under the General Electronics Council’s (GEC’s) Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) 2.0 registry.

The Int’l ITC is a nonprofit trade group that says it represents North American “toner and inkjet cartridge re-manufacturers, component suppliers, and cartridge collectors.”

It’s important to note that the Int’l ITC may be considered biased because its members could greatly profit when printer manufacturers commit to supporting aftermarket cartridges in devices.

Still, customers and security experts have long criticized Dynamic Security, making the Int’l ITC’s complaints worth examining.

EPEAT 2.0 registry bans firmware updates that brick third-party ink

Following the launch of the original EPEAT registry in 2006, GEC launched EPEAT 2.0 in December 2025. Per a GEC website, “EPEAT 2.0 criteria are designed to identify more sustainable products, built by sustainability-conscious companies with responsibly managed supply chains.” The updated criteria address “climate change mitigation, sustainable use of resources (circularity), chemicals of concern, and responsible supply chains” across the lifecycle of products from five product categories: imaging equipment (such as printers), computers and displays, phones, servers, and TVs.

The GEC’s criteria for EPEAT 2.0 registration [PDF] includes a more user and environmentally friendly approach to third-party ink and toner. It states: “Manufacturer shall ensure registered products do not prevent the use of remanufactured cartridges, either manufacturer or non-manufacturer branded, by implementing one or more” of three options.

The first option requires manufacturers to refrain “from issuing firmware updates that intentionally disable remanufactured cartridges that, at the time of the firmware update, use aftermarket electronic circuitry to operate with the registered product’s then-current manufacturer firmware.”

The second option requires printer companies to make “available a manufacturer approved solution using unmodified original manufacturer electronic circuitry that ensures registered products permit the uninterrupted use of remanufactured cartridges” and don’t prevent key functionality.

The third option is for manufacturers to make available, such as via the manufacturer’s website, “to purchasers remanufactured cartridges, either manufacturer or nonmanufacturer branded, for, at minimum, registered products.”

As of this writing, 38,291 devices are under the EPEAT 1.0 registry. There are 163 products registered under EPEAT 2.0, but none are printers. This all underscores how new the EPEAT 2.0 registry is and the likelihood that the GEC is still working to register more devices, like printers.

Still, the Int’l ITC is skeptical about HP ever following EPEAT 2.0’s criteria, especially considering that “HP released firmware 2602A/B on January 29, 2026 across eleven printer models,” the trade group said in a press release last week. (At least some of the firmware updates, including for the nearly 9-year-old OfficeJet Pro 7720, appear to have come out in February.)

“HP’s recent behavior is emblematic of a larger pattern,” the Int’l ITC’s release said. “HP positions itself as a leader in sustainability, circular business models, and responsible product design, but instead of proactively aligning its products and practices with the highest environmental standards, such as EPEAT 2.0, HP puts profits first and waits until external scrutiny or the threat of non-compliance forces change.”

In an email discussion with Ars Technica, Tricia Judge, the Int’l ITC’s executive director and general counsel, pointed out that HP’s firmware update succeeded the launch of the EPEAT 2.0 registry. She explained why the Int’l ITC’s press release called out HP but no other printer manufacturers:

HP is the only one with lockout chips that are triggered using firmware “upgrades” that claim “security” as a justification for their existence. HP is the only one that misleads and frustrates its own customers when locking out the environmentally superior competition. The others have made some interesting attempts in the past to create a competitive advantage.

In 2023, the Int’l ITC wrote a letter to the GEC requesting that the GEC revoke at least 101 of HP’s printers from the (original) EPEAT registry, largely due to Dynamic Security. GEC denied the Int’l ITC’s request.

“EPEAT 1.0 was very basic (no interference with the use of remanufactured cartridges), and HP claimed that its statements (buried in its marketing materials and/or on its website) that it didn’t interfere with the use of remanufactured cartridges was a loophole that the GEC decided was acceptable,” Judge said. “We were trying to close that loophole with EPEAT 2.0. We didn’t get it as airtight as we hoped, but it is better.

HP didn’t respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment for this story.

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Posted Friday 13 March 2026 at 8:52 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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Not many companies have had the chance to reach the milestone Apple is about to hit. The Cupertino giant will celebrate its 50th birthday next month, on April 1, 2026, and its current CEO has already started the celebrations.

Cook shared a letter on Apple.com titled "50 Years of Thinking Different," taking inspiration from Apple's famous "Think Different" marketing campaign from 1997 to 2002. The CEO thanked millions of customers, teams across the globe, and the developer community, whose collective contributions turned Apple into a wealthy tech giant.

"Fifty years ago in a small garage, a big idea was born. Apple was founded on the simple notion that technology should be personal, and that belief — radical at the time — changed everything," Cook wrote in the letter.

The letter recalls how Apple was started five decades ago in a small garage by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who had to sell their valuable possessions to secure the "Celebration" Board #0 from the Apple-1 era. Apple's journey has been a roller coaster ride. While the company has tasted so much success, there was a time when it was on the verge of bankruptcy and was saved by its rival, Microsoft.

Cook ended the letter with the famous lines from the Think Different campaign:

So here’s to the crazy ones.

 

The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.

Apple also published an official post to mark its 50th anniversary, and said it will do more as part of the celebrations over the coming weeks. One thing Apple has been doing differently lately is to increase its social media presence.

Apple already has an official Instagram account, but it decided to set up a new one with the handle @helloapple. As of writing this, the new account currently has over 17,500 followers, a handful of posts, and its bio says, "Our stories, and yours."

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Posted Friday 13 March 2026 at 6:34 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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A few weeks ago, we learned that Microsoft and Xbox veteran Phil Spencer is retiring, alongside his second-in-command, Sarah Bond. Spencer had been at Microsoft for almost 38 years, and has been succeeded by Asha Sharma, a former Meta executive who is also the President of Microsoft's CoreAI product. Now, yet another veteran has departed the company, as the organizational chart continues to change.

The latest notable executive to leave Redmond is Rajesh Jha, the Executive Vice President of the Experiences + Devices division. Jha will be retiring on July 1, 2026, after 35 years at the firm. Those reporting to him will begin reporting directly to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The executives who will begin reporting to Nadella rather than Jha from July include Perry Clarke, Charles Lamanna, Pavan Davuluri, and Ryan Roslansky.

For those unaware, Clarke is the President of Microsoft 365 Core, Lamanna is the President of Business & Industry Copilot, Davuluri leads the Windows and Surface teams, while Roslansky is the CEO of Microsoft-owned LinkedIn. As a part of this restructuring, Jeff Teper has also been promoted to EVP, and Sumit Chauhan and Kirk Koenigsbauer are now Presidents, too.

From now till the end of June, Jha will be forcused on transition plans, ownership of products, and "details on the future org structure". The goal is to hit the ground running with the start of the next fiscal year. Jha has also clarified that priorities around Microsoft's Secure Future Initiative (SFI), Quality Engineering Initiative (QEI), and Copilot remain unchanged.

Nadella had a lot of positive things to say about Jha too, noting that:

Rajesh has been a constant throughout my entire life at Microsoft. From our earliest days working together, I have admired his unwavering commitment to his team, to our customers, to the products we build, and to the company. I have always been struck by his operational rigor, his ability to make the hard strategic calls, lead through the grind, and emerge stronger on the other side. That, to me, is what true leadership looks like.

Here at Neowin, we have been covering Rajesh Jha's endeavors since at least 2006, when he was leading the Office Live initiative. He took over the newly formed Experiences + Devices group after Terry Myerson stepped down in 2018, which fragmented a bit in 2020 to have Panos Panay lead Windows initiatives. The division went through further restructuring after Panay abruptly gave in his resignation in 2023. Pavan Davuluri eventually took over the Windows and Surface hardware business in 2024, which is still how things stand right now, but with Jha's exit in July, Davuluri will begin reporting directly to Nadella.

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Posted Friday 13 March 2026 at 6:33 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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The creator of Steam, Valve, may be facing a $900 million lawsuit in the UK as it's accused of "rigging" the PC gaming market, but that's not the only legal trouble the publisher is dealing with right now. Recently, New York Attorney General Letitia James also began the process of suing Valve "for illegally promoting gambling through video games popular with teenagers." Hagens Berman initiated a similar lawsuit just two days ago.

The case against Valve argues that loot boxes — in-game containers players can pay money to open in hopes for a valuable cosmetic item, such as skins for in-game weapons — in its games (Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, Team Fortress 2) "enable gambling by enticing users to pay for the chance to win a rare virtual item of significant monetary value."

Now, Valve has publicly responded, posting a letter to its New York community on Steam on Wednesday afternoon and addressing the situation by explaining why it feels its loot boxes don't violate New York gambling laws. "We don't believe that they do, and were disappointed to see the NYAG make that claim after working to educate them about our virtual items and mystery boxes since they first reached out to us in early 2023. We rarely talk about litigation, but we felt we should explain the situation to you," it wrote.

The crux of Valve's argument against these lawsuits is that in-game loot boxes are ultimately no different than products like baseball card packs or blind boxes — things that also give people a chance of finding a high-value collectible, and then trading or selling it to others for profit. Valve also points out that loot boxes exist elsewhere in gaming, and in its case, have no impact on gameplay and don't give players an advantage.

The company also says it explained "our efforts over many years to shut down accounts found to be using Valve game items on gambling sites in violation of the Steam Subscriber Agreement," and asserts that "Valve does not cooperate with gambling sites." Valve has aggressively ordered Counter-Strike skin gambling sites to cease and desist before.

Gamers Nexus (2.6m subscribers)

March 11, 2026

Video length: 37m 43s

In this hardware news recap for the week, we talk about the Valve Steam Machine double-update, Nintendo's lawsuit against... America, Microslop talking Project Helix, CXMT and YMTC getting more deployment in the hardware market, Quake III RTX, and more, including a note about a YouTuber who seems to be abusing the copyright strike system on YouTube videos critical of him.

00:00 - Recap for the Week

01:43 - More Documentaries, Mouse Mat Launch

06:59 - Schroedinger's Steam Machine

11:14 - Nintendo Sues America

14:43 - Microslop Talks New Project Helix Xbox

16:14 - Chinese Memory and SSD Adoption Rising

17:25 - StarCraft Tabletop Game

19:22 - Quake III Remix Mod with Particle Update

22:40 - Responding to Threat Interactive

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Posted Thursday 12 March 2026 at 7:04 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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Intel has had an eventful 2026 so far. Back in January at CES 2026, new Core Ultra 300 series CPUs were unveiled for laptops and notebooks.

On the opposite end of the consumer spectrum, new Xeon workstation processors were also added to the mix in early Feb with the new Xeon 600 series parts. These come with up to 86 performance cores (P-cores).

Following that, the company, earlier this month in March, launched the new Core 200 series for edge computing. These are also P-core only, with the flagship Core 9 273PQE packing 12 P-cores. Along with it, the Ultra 300 series was also delivered.

Now, Team Blue is all set to release its mainstream desktop CPUs in the form of Intel Core Ultra 200S Plus Series. For now at least, the company is launching two new SKUs, the Ultra 7 270K Plus and the Ultra 5 250K Plus. There will also be an F- variant of the latter where the integrated graphics will be disabled.

You might be wondering why Intel is using the same "200" series moniker like the previous Arrow Lake-S series but with a "Plus" at the end. That is because this is essentially a refresh of the 200 series, which was flagshipped by the Ultra 9 285K, and the Plus at the end is meant to signify that these SKUs have been pushed to their limits as they are meant for enthusiasts.

If you are wondering how far Intel pushed them, the company has said that both the 270K Plus and the 250K Plus have up to a 900 MHz die-to-die (D2D) frequency boost compared to the 265K and the 245K. Plus the 270K Plus has four more E-cores than the 265K, and likewise, the 250K Plus has four extra E-cores compared to the 245K.

Thanks to these extra cores and clock, Intel says it helps the new Ultra 200 Plus achieve up to a 15% faster gaming performance compared to the current 200 series. The more impressive part is that Intel says this makes it about twice as good as competing AMD Ryzen processors. On Windows 11 25H2, Intel says the 250K Plus is up to 103% better than the Ryzen 9600X, and the 270K Plus is up to 92% better than the Ryzen 9700X.

Perhaps the biggest improvement with the new 200 Plus chips is the memory controller. Intel says that the new processors are stable at DDR5-7200 MT/s, which is significantly up from the previous 6400 MT/s speed.

The more impressive announcement is the early support for 4-rank CUDIMM which means that the Intel 200 Plus series supports 128 GB of memory per module. If you install two of these modules, your system can have a total of 256 GB of DDR5-7200 RAM, ensuring high memory capacity and performance.

Intel is also launching a new Binary Optimization Tool with Arrow Lake-S refresh. Details on the new utility are low at this moment. Intel says that it is the "first-of-its-kind binary translation layer optimization capability that can improve native performance in select games."

Intel also adds that this new optimization tech helps in "workload optimization to increase processor instructions per cycle (IPC) and user performance, even if the workload has been optimized for another x86 processor, a game console, or an earlier architecture."

Finally, in terms of pricing, Intel has pegged the 270K Plus at $299 and the 250K Plus at $199 starting March 26. On paper, this looks like a good value product. We will see in our review how the new chips stack up against the AMD competition.

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Posted Thursday 12 March 2026 at 7:01 am AEST (my time).

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Intel’s Core Ultra 200S desktop chips, codenamed “Arrow Lake,” first launched in late 2024, and they were the most significant updates to Intel’s desktop CPU lineup in years. But that didn’t mean they were always improvements over what came before: while they’re power-efficient and run cooler than older 13th- and 14th-generation Core CPUs, they sometimes struggled to match those older chips’ gaming performance. And for gaming systems in particular, they’ve always had to live in the shadow of AMD’s Ryzen 7000 and 9000-series X3D processors, chips with extra L3 cache that disproportionately benefits games.

Intel doesn’t have a next-generation upgrade available for desktops yet, but it is shoring up its desktop lineup with a pair of upgraded chips. The Core Ultra 200S Plus processors (also referred to as Arrow Lake Refresh, in some circles) add more processor cores, boost clock speeds, add support for faster memory, and speed up the internal communication between different parts of the processor. Collectively, Intel says these improvements will boost gaming performance by an average of 15 percent.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and 270KF Plus (a real mouthful, all of these names are getting to be) add four more efficiency cores compared to the Core Ultra 7 265K, bringing the total number of cores to 24 (8 P-cores and 16 E-cores). If you wanted that many CPU cores previously, you would have had to spring for a Core Ultra 9 chip. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and 250KF Plus also get four more E-cores than the 245K, bringing its total to 6 P-cores and 12 E-cores.

Aside from the 900 MHz increase to the internal communication bus between chiplets and official support for DDR5-7200, these are the same Arrow Lake chips Intel has been selling for a while. They still use the LGA 1851 CPU socket and motherboards with 800-series chipsets, and should work in current boards after a BIOS update. The K-series chips still come with a basic integrated GPU with four of Intel’s Xe Cores, plus a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of 13 trillion operations per second—well short of the 40 TOPS needed to qualify for Microsoft’s Copilot+ label.

The new CPUs will be available starting on March 26, and their new suggested pricing is right around the current street price for their predecessors. The 270K will cost $299, compared to a $399 launch MSRP and $280-ish street price for the 265K. The 250K will cost $199, compared to a $309 launch MSRP and $210-ish street price for the 245K.

Intel is also pushing a partial software solution to its lesser gaming performance: According to the company, the Intel Binary Optimization Tool is “a first-of-its-kind binary translation layer optimization capability that can improve native performance in select games.” Intel didn’t provide many details here, but the translation layer seems to be intended to improve performance for titles that were originally optimized for other x86 CPUs—this mostly means AMD chips, but could apply to older Intel architectures as well. Since AMD’s processors have been used in PlayStation and Xbox consoles for more than a decade, the translation layer could be particularly useful for improving the performance of console ports running on an Intel-based PC. The translation layer is an extension of Intel’s existing Application Optimization tool.

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Posted Thursday 12 March 2026 at 7:01 am AEST (my time).

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Nvidia’s DLSS 4.5 with 6x Multi Frame Generation will be available starting March 31st for users with RTX 50-series GPUs, the company announced on Tuesday. With 6x Multi Frame Generation, Nvidia claims that DLSS 4.5 can generate “five additional frames for every single natively rendered one, for a maximum 6X multiplier.” It’s an increase from the maximum of three additional frames possible with DLSS 4.

On March 31st, Nvidia will also release Dynamic Frame Generation for 50-series GPUs, which can automatically switch between Multi Frame Generation multipliers to hit your target frame rate for a game or your display’s refresh rate.

Nvidia announced both Dynamic Frame Generation and 6x Multi Frame Generation alongside DLSS 4.5, but at the time, Nvidia only provided a spring launch window for the two features.

Nvidia is also announcing some upgrades to GeForce Now. You’ll be able to link your GeForce Now account with your GOG account in the “coming months.” If you’re using GeForce Now in a VR headset, the service will also support frame rates of up to 90fps, an increase from the previous maximum of 60fps, starting March 19th (though you have to have an Ultimate subscription). And “select” Xbox games will be joining GeForce Now’s Install-to-Play library, including Brutal Legend and Contrast.

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Posted Wednesday 11 March 2026 at 5:17 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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Resident Evil Requiem was released less than two weeks ago, and Capcom already announced that the survival horror entry has sold over five million copies. Now, the company is looking towards the future of the title, with it today revealing what it has planned for this ninth mainline Resident Evil game, which includes a story expansion.

The news came from a video message by Resident Evil Requiem director Koshi Nakanishi. He first thanked players for the hugely positive reception before saying that the studio will continue to support the game with updates containing bug fixes and performance improvements.

"We released an update the other day to fix a variety of issues, and we will continue to address any other bugs and performance issues," said Nakanishi. "But that’s not all. We are also planning to add more content."

The first of this content will be an official photo mode. Then, "around May" will land another piece, which is said to be a mini-game of some sort. Exact details around these additions or release dates were not announced.

At the end of the message comes the biggest reveal. After teasing fans with a few images that show a Match-Three puzzle game and Leon's mystery partner, the director pulled out a printout showing that a story expansion is now in development. Once again, no release date information has been revealed. It's also unclear where the expansion will take players and if the protagonist duo will return for this adventure too.

"We are planning to make extra story content," added Nakanishin. "In this story, we will delve deeper into the world of Requiem. We’re hard at work on it now. It will take some time, so we ask for your patience and hope you’ll look forward to it."

Resident Evil Requiem is now available across PC, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch 2.

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Posted Wednesday 11 March 2026 at 5:15 am AEST (my time).

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Apple’s M5 Pro and M5 Max make deceptively large changes to how Apple’s high-end laptop and desktop chips are built.

We’ve already covered those changes in some depth, but in essence: The M5 Pro and M5 Max are no longer monolithic chips with all the CPU and GPU cores and everything else packed into a single silicon die. Using an “all-new Fusion Architecture” like the one used to combine two Max chips into a single Ultra chip, Apple now splits the CPU cores (and other things) into one piece of silicon, and the GPU cores (and other things) into another piece of silicon. These two dies are then packaged together into one chip.

M5 Pro and M5 Max both use the same 18-core CPU die, but Pro uses a 20-core GPU die, and Max gets a 40-core GPU die. (Because the memory controller is also part of the GPU die, the Max chip still offers more memory bandwidth and supports higher memory configurations than the Pro one does.)

The other big change is that neither of these chips uses Apple’s “efficiency” CPU cores anymore. All of the M5 family’s large high-performance cores are now called “super” cores as of macOS 26.3.1, including the ones that originally launched as “performance” cores in the regular M5 last fall. The standard M5 still has smaller, slower efficiency cores, but M5 Pro and M5 Max use a third kind of CPU core instead, confusingly also called “performance” cores.

Users will experience the M5 Pro and M5 Max mostly as the expected iterative upgrades over last-generation chips, the same thing delivered by most new Apple Silicon processor generations. But for the technically inclined, it’s worth digging a little deeper into the M5 Max, both to learn why it performs the way it does and to dispel confusion about what’s being rebranded (the new “super” cores), and what’s actually different (the new “performance” cores in M5 Pro and M5 Max, which definitely aren’t just rebranded efficiency cores).

If you’re interested in a slightly wider-ranging review of the new MacBook Pros, I’ll point you toward reviews of the M1, M3, and M4 generation models, as well as the one for the low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro with the standard M5 (now $100 more expensive than it was before, but with 1TB of base storage instead of 512GB).

Apple is using the same external design for these laptops that it has been using since 2021—it’s aging pretty well, and we still mostly like it, especially compared to late-Intel-era MacBook Pros. There’s just not much else to say about the design that hasn’t been said.

M5 Max benchmarks

In our testing, the fully enabled M5 Max’s single-core performance is about 10 percent higher than the fully enabled version of the M4 Max in last year’s 16-inch MacBook Pro. The multi-core performance improvements are more variable (Cinebench R23, which shows a 30 percent improvement, seems to be an outlier), but most tests also show a modest 10 or 12 percent improvement.

Graphics performance improvements are slightly more robust, measuring between 20 and 35 percent depending on the test. Apple suggests you may see more uplift on GPU compute workloads that can leverage the neural accelerator Apple has built into each M5-family GPU core.

The jump from the M4 Max to the M5 Max isn’t quite as large, expressed as a percentage, as it has been for the last couple generations; both M3 Max and M4 Max were big leaps from what had come before. But assuming you’re upgrading from an M1 or M2-based Pro, you’ll still be taking a big leap. Fears that stepping down from 12 of Apple’s best-performing CPU cores (in M4 Max) to just six of the best-performing cores are also a bit overblown, based on these results.

Compared to the basic M5 in the 14-inch MacBook Pro, the M5 Max’s single-core performance is roughly the same, which is in keeping with how Apple usually does things—stepping up to higher-end chips gets you better multi-core and graphics performance, but Apple doesn’t push the clock speeds upward on the individual cores the way that Intel or AMD do with their higher-end processors.

Multi-core performance increases between 66 percent (Geekbench) and 120 percent (Cinebench R23)—for sustained heavy workloads, an 18-core M5 Pro or M5 Max ought to be just about twice as fast as the M5, give or take. And jumping from the M5’s 10 GPU cores to the M5 Max’s 40 cores typically gets you between three and four times the graphics performance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Measuring the M5 Max’s CPU power consumption with the powermetrics command-line tool, average power consumption during our Handbrake video encoding test is about 23 percent higher than M4 Max, and because of that increase, the chip uses just a bit more energy overall to do the same work. We observed a similar increase when comparing the M4 to the M5. But overall, power efficiency is roughly in line with past Apple Silicon generations.

While Apple only sent us an M5 Max-equipped MacBook Pro to test, for most CPU-based tasks, the M5 Pro should perform similarly. That’s because both chips are using the exact same silicon die for the CPU cores, Neural Engine, Thunderbolt and display controllers, and SSD controller. It’s the GPU die that separates the Pro from the Max; the Pro has up to 20 GPU cores and 307 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and the Max has up to 40 GPU cores and up to 614 GB/s of memory bandwidth (these are two totally different GPUs—the Max GPU isn’t just two Pro GPUs joined together with the Fusion Architecture).

M5 Max under the hood: Definitely not efficiency cores

The whole “performance cores are now super cores in all M5 chips” thing has created a lot of confusion around the non-Super cores. The M5 Pro and M5 Max come with six super cores and 12 of what Apple is now calling “performance” cores, but are those just efficiency cores that have been rebranded to create the impression of higher speeds?

Apple has said publicly that these new performance cores are “all-new” and “optimized for power-efficient, multithreaded workloads,” and we’re told that the performance cores are new designs that are derived from the super core. There’s precedent for this; AMD ships functionally identical but physically smaller, lower-clocked Zen 4c and Zen 5c cores in many of its laptop CPUs, rather than using different core designs for the big and little cores (as Intel still does, and as Apple has likely been doing up till now).

I can’t speak to the actual low-level architecture of each type of CPU core, but using both powermetrics and the sysctl command, we can confirm that these aren’t just rebranded efficiency cores. The new performance cores have more L2 cache than the M5’s efficiency cores and run at much higher peak clock speeds.

The new non-super performance cores have the same L1 cache sizes as Apple’s E-cores, but slightly more L2 cache per 6-core cluster and much higher minimum and maximum clock speeds. At about 4.3 GHz, the M5 Max’s performance cores come in only 300 MHz lower than the super cores’ 4.6 GHz peak.

We can also report that the powermetrics tool uses new under-the-hood nomenclature for reporting data about these performance cores. Powermetrics still refers to the cluster of super cores as the “P-cluster,” and the M5’s E-cores are still referred to as the “E-cluster.” But the new performance core clusters are labeled “M0 cluster” and “M1 cluster.” (M for Middle, maybe? Medium? It’s very likely that Apple started working on these core designs before it decided what their public-facing name should be.)

What I can’t say is whether macOS treats these new performance cores any differently than it would treat the E-cores. From the operating system’s perspective, you still have one group of CPU cores that runs at high speeds and one group that runs at lower speeds, and my guess would be that anything that would be directed at an E-core in the M5 or an older Mac will simply be directed to the performance cores in an M5 Pro or M5 Max system. But it’s totally possible that M5 Pro or M5 Max systems could assign tasks to different CPU cores slightly differently, since the performance gap between the “big” and “little” cores isn’t as large.

Finally, let’s look at how the M5 Max’s CPU cores perform under the sustained heavy load of our Handbrake video encoding test.

Clock speed measurements for the “super” clusters on M5 and M5 Max during our CPU-based Handbrake

video encoding test, which uses all CPU cores in a system at once.

 

Clock speed measurements for efficiency core clusters on M5 and one of the performance core clusters on

M5 Max during the same Handbrake video encoding test.

 

Power consumption measurements over the length of the same Handbrake video encoding test run.

 

Observe the standard Apple M5 in the 14-inch MacBook Pro. The M5’s four super cores maintain a peak multi-core clock speed of 4.24 GHz for a bit less than a minute, then fall slightly to a clock speed closer to 4.1 GHz, and ramp down further to about 4.0 GHz for the last stretch of the test. (Note that the fanless version of the M5 in the MacBook Air starts lower, drops off faster, and settles down to a sustained clock speed somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 GHz.)

The standard M5’s E-cores also run at fairly consistent speeds of around 3 GHz throughout the test, with some peaks and valleys but little sign of any performance throttling.

Now look at the lines for the M5 Max in the 16-inch MacBook Pro. The 6-core supercluster maintains its maximum clock speed for just a few seconds, quickly dropping down to a sustained clock speed of around 3.9 GHz (with periodic dips as low as 3.4 GHz). There are two extra cores in the M5 Max’s super cluster, so slightly lower sustained clock speeds are to be expected.

But those performance cores are where a lot of M5 Max’s multi-core speed is coming from. In terms of clock speed, the two performance core clusters behave more like efficiency cores, insofar as they maintain a fairly stable clock speed without significant performance throttling. But these cores are running between 4.3 and 4.2 GHz rather than 3 GHz; even without other architectural changes, that means that these performance cores are going to run things quite a bit faster than the efficiency cores do.

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Posted Tuesday 10 March 2026 at 1:38 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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7 Days is a weekly roundup of picks of what's been happening in the world of technology - written with a dash of humor, a hint of exasperation, and an endless supply of (black) coffee.

This week's highlights include Apple's brand-new low-cost MacBook, Mozilla's plan to redesign Firefox, a wild phishing plot, and a Florida woman being jailed for a massive Windows activation fraud. Let's get started.

Major Firefox redesign

Mozilla wants you to keep your hopes high for a major Firefox redesign on the cards, codenamed "Nova." For starters, it will feature strong curves that aggressively round off the tabs and the address bar, pastel colors, a revamped new tab page, floating UI elements, and more. Before Nova, Firefox Proton was a major update that removed visual clutter and simplified menus back in June 2021.

In more browser news, you should get ready for more Chrome updates, as Google has moved to a tighter release schedule. The search giant used to follow a four-week schedule for Chrome updates, but it will release Chrome updates every two weeks, starting in September.

A wild phishing plot

You might have seen phishing attacks based on compromised security systems, zero-day bugs, and anything else when you hear the word hacking. In the latest attempt, bad actors devised a clever approach to infiltrate enterprise computers using legitimate software.

The attackers use an abused Extended Validation (EV) certificate to digitally sign malicious files, according to security experts. These files were then sent to the target via emails containing fake meeting invites, prompting them to download malware-infected versions of popular apps such as Teams, Meet, Zoom, and Adobe Reader.

Humans are useless

Most of us live with the fear that AI will take away our jobs. In reality, that might just be an abstract concept of what might happen in the future. Enter Lenovo, whose latest AI ads campaign feels like a direct jab at humanity. It appears to portray humans as inferior to AI, outright incapable of doing meaningful work, and clueless about what happens right in front of them.

In other news, Lenovo showcased its refreshed Yoga lineup at the MWC 2026, featuring better screens and more AI features. Its wildest MWC concepts also include a foldable gaming PC (Yoga Book Pro 3D Concept) and an AI desk clock.

Florida woman jailed

It's not surprising when we hear about someone trying to use Windows without a key. However, a Florida woman took things to the next level and got indicted over a massive fraud involving thousands of "Genuine" Windows and Office labels that often contain product activation keys.

The 52-year-old resident of Brandon has been sentenced to 22 months in federal prison and fined $50,000 for being guilty of trafficking in illicit Microsoft certificate of authenticity (COA) labels.

Drone strikes hit data centers

Recent drone strikes on the UAE and Bahrain damaged three Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers, highlighting the physical vulnerability of the cloud. Amazon warned that its cloud operations in the Middle East are now unpredictable. The damage affected critical services, including EC2, S3, and DynamoDB, leaving customers with a choice of moving data to a distant server, which would incur higher latency.

Amazon ran into another problem as people started facing issues on its e-commerce platform, including being unable to check listings or order history and login problems. The company reached out to Neowin to clarify that the issues on the Amazon shopping site are unrelated to the previous AWS issues, adding that it's working to resolve them.

New Apple devices

Apple had a big week this month, refreshing several of its devices and launching the new MacBook Neo at $599. It's now the cheapest MacBook in Apple's lineup, and the cost-cutting the company did is quite evident, as there is no MagSafe charging to say the least. Read our detailed Specs Appeal post to know how the MacBook Neo compares against the MacBook Air.

The Cupertino giant launched refreshed versions of its products, including the iPhone 17e, M4 iPad Air, M5 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro with M5 Pro/Max, Studio Display, and the Studio Display XDR to succeed the Pro Display XDR. These devices, available for pre-order, will go on sale from March 11.

Download the official Apple wallpapers

Just like every time, someone took the pain of extracting and upscaling the official iPhone 17e wallpapers. You can download them in three different colors. If you're looking for more custom stuff, Apple also released the Year of the Horse wallpapers a while ago.

The things you can't see with Meta glasses

Meta isn't the name you remember for having the best privacy practices. It was reported that subcontractors in Africa (who review content after signing confidentiality agreements) were able to see sensitive content being filmed by the company's smart glasses. This prompted the UK's data regulator, the ICO, to write to Meta to express its concerns about the reports, insisting that the company clearly explain its data collection process.

TikTok doesn't want E2EE

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) has become a standard feature across messaging apps. But TikTok is taking a different path, stating that it won't implement E2EE for direct messages. While TikTok still supports standard encryption, it wants to have room for authorized employees and law enforcement to access messages if a user reports harmful behavior or if a valid legal request is made.

Unlock your home with Galaxy

Samsung announced that its Wallet app now supports Digital Home Key, allowing compatible Galaxy smartphones to unlock the front door. The feature is based on the Aliro standard released by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) in 2023 to establish a common language between the readers from different brands and mobile devices, which otherwise exist in a fragmented market.

Motorola x GrapheneOS

Motorola wants to "strengthen smartphone security" by entering a multi-year partnership with GrapheneOS Foundation. The Lenovo-owned company plans to design future devices compatible with GrapheneOS, working together on joint research, software, and security, especially on mobile platforms.

New features in Telegram

Telegram's latest feature update brings a new useful feature to improve privacy in individual chats, group chats, GIFs, voting, and more. If you're a Telegram Premium user, you can restrict sharing in private chats, in addition to groups and channels. Among other changes, you can add custom tags next to your name in a group to showcase a role or some other information.

Audible gets cheaper

You might be having a good time listening to audiobooks on Audible, but the $14.99/mo Premium subscription might pinch on some days. You might only get through one bestseller a month. Amazon realized this and launched a new $8.99/mo Standard plan in select countries, including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, France, and Germany. However, it comes with tighter restrictions.

Can AI play Xbox games?

AI can do a lot of things for you. But Microsoft thinks it should play Xbox games too. A newly discovered patent shows Microsoft is exploring the idea of using a cloud-powered AI helper to step in and finish Xbox games when you get stuck. The patent, titled "State Management for Video Game Help Sessions," describes a feature where players can request a "helper" to temporarily take complete control of their Xbox gaming session.

Speaking of Xbox, we got to see the first official teaser for the next-generation console, "Project Helix," with PC game support. It will be the successor to the current Xbox Series X|S consoles; however, exact details about the unreleased console are yet to be revealed. Microsoft is expected to discuss it further at the Game Developer Conference (GDC).

Shame Shame

If you get annoyed by sloppy, battery-wasting apps, Google has come up with a solution. It has been rolling out wake lock technical quality treatments to improve the battery drain situation for impacted apps. It will shame developers with apps that significantly drain your device's battery through warnings on Google Play and the visibility of such apps might get affected.

Google brings cinematic overviews

NotebookLM got a major add-on in the form of Cinematic Video Overviews, which makes AI-generated overviews sound more immersive. The feature is available to Google AI Ultra subscribers on the web and mobile.

The search giant also announced its Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite model for high volume developer workloads. It's the most cost-efficient and the fastest AI model in the Gemini 3 series, available in preview via Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI for enterprises.

Major changes for Android

Google's long-standing battle with Epic Games finally reached some settlement, pushing the company to open up the Android ecosystem. In other words, Google will allow developers to use their own billing systems in their apps and games and it also reduced the fee charged from developers distributing apps and games via Google Play.

Turn Android into a desktop

If you remember Microsoft Continuum, you might agree that it was essentially the right project at the wrong time. Almost a decade later, Google is continuing its legacy on Android with its "new connected display support feature." With Android 16 QPR3, connecting a supported Android device to a monitor will open a full desktop session with a taskbar and resizable windows.

Microsoft recently announced that it will end all security updates and technical support for Defender on Android 10. Enterprises now have three weeks to upgrade their devices to a newer version before the Redmond giant pulls the plug.

New Silicon

Intel thinks its latest silicon can help major telecom companies adopt the upcoming 6G networks. It previewed the Xeon 6+ server chip, built on Intel 18A process, which promises higher core density, low power consumption, and aggressive workload scaling compared to Xeon 6. Intel cited multiple examples of telecom operators using Xeon CPUs to accelerate their OpenRAN development.

AMD unveiled its Ryzen AI 400 series for desktop configurations and shared details around performance and specifications. The leader of the pack is the Ryzen AI 7 450G with eight cores and 16 threads.

Meanwhile, Qualcomm is targeting the premium wearable market with its new Snapdragon Wear Elite Platform, which will support Wear OS, Android, and Linux. Qualcomm says Snapdragon Wear Elite delivers 30% longer battery life despite the jump in performance.

NVIDIA can't drive

The chipmaker is having a hard time with its drivers. It re-released driver version 595.71 to fix broken fan controls, only to realize it had caused severe performance drops for some users. This resulted in performance drops of up to 16% for some users, due to severe voltage throttling and reduced core clock speeds. NVIDIA then released a new hotfix over the week to address the crippled GPU clocks and other bugs.

Power gains for Linux

Linux is about to get some big performance gains from a native feature. A developer, contributing to .NET, confirmed a performance upgrade for Linux .NET sockets in the runtime as they are being reworked to use the kernel's own 'io_uring' API.

The development of Linux 7.0 is off to a volatile start, and Linus Torvalds noted that the second RC of Linux 7.0 is significantly larger than typical RC2 milestones. Torvalds in not happy about it and attributed the bigger release to "random timing noise." The latest kernel update has shifted focus from drivers to high-risk core filesystem and networking changes.

A fresh paint

Discussing its recent work, the Linux Mint team said it's bringing a new Cinnamon screensaver. Cinnamon now locks the screen on its own using its own toolkit and widgets, rather than relying on a separate program, offering full compatibility with Wayland.

We are better than Microsoft Office

LibreOffice fired back at critics who prefer Microsoft Office for its ribbon interface. It said that its UI is better than Office and that the ribbon can't be regarded as a standard, "nor a good example of ergonomics". There is no evidence that the ribbon offers "superior usability," especially for experienced users, according to LibreOffice.

Less cringy OpenAI model

Amid the ongoing backlash over its Pentagon deal, OpenAI released the new GPT-5.3 Instant model, which is "less cringe" than its predecessors. It's now more natural, provides less dramatic responses, and reduces the unnecessary refusals to users' questions.

It also announced GPT 5.4, its most powerful frontier model, advancing reasoning, coding, and agentic workflows previously seen in the Codex series. It's available in ChatGPT as GPT 5.4 Thinking and GPT 5.4 Pro. That said, here's some more OpenAI news from the week:

• OpenAI is reportedly working on its own GitHub competitor
• OpenAI releases the much-awaited Codex app for Windows
• OpenAI's Prism update adds Codex CLI for end-to-end research automation
• Bing Video Creator is not powered by OpenAI Sora 2

Running AI models on your phone

While cloud-powered AI models continue to flex their muscles, curious minds are exploring on-device models that can even run on your smartphone. One such model is the Qwen 3.5-2B that can easily run on Android and iPhone for free. However, it doesn't mean you should unless you're doing it for fun or as an enthusiast. It's best suited for low-complexity tasks like chat sessions, and setting it up is no cakewalk, not to mention the toll it takes on your phone's battery life.

Anthropic hits back at DoD

As the drama continues over Anthropic getting labeled a "supply chain risk," meaning all federal agencies will stop using Anthropic technology. Interestingly, it has become the first domestic company in US history to get that status.

Its CEO, Dario Amodei, released a new statement confirming the government's move. However, Anthropic believes the decision is not legally sound, and it will take the Department of Defense to court.

What happened at Microsoft this week

For those wondering what happened under the Redmond giant's roof this week, Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2 are still seemingly breaking the internet, Windows 11 is getting useful audio improvements, and a furious user called Microsoft "idiot" for allegedly automatically upgrading their Windows PC.

Some beautiful Windows 11 wallpapers surfaced this week with a touch of nostalgia but those claims of Windows 12 coming this year turned out to be fake. You can check out Taras's freshly baked Microsoft Weekly roundup to catch up on all the interesting stories this week.

Our features

This week, Usama discussed how a small but useful change in Microsoft Teams made a big difference for remote work. Teams now has a three-bar system to display each participant's network strength in a meeting. If someone has low strength, Microsoft will suggest ways to mitigate issues and improve call quality. It also helps people figure out whose network is causing those jittery Teams calls.

Another editorial published over the week highlights how AI features in Microsoft 365 are insanely expensive for consumers. For starters, the Redmond giant sets you back by $129/year for its Family plan, with limited AI credits that only the subscription owner can use, and then it asks you to pay an additional $70 if you want the full set of AI capabilities with higher usage limits.

Sony is shifting gears

It's been six years since Sony began porting its console-exclusive games to PC, starting with Horizon Zero Dawn and eventually major titles such as Spider-Man, God of War, and The Last of Us. However, it's now being reported that Sony is not satisfied with the sales numbers for PC.

There are people at Sony who think the multiplatform business will damage the PlayStation brand. Sony had recently pulled the plug on its plans to bring the most recent first-party developed single-player games to PC, including Ghost of Yotei and Saros. It's expected that this change will trickle down to Insomniac's Wolverine and Naughty Dog's Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.

Clip games hands-free

Microsoft is updating the ROG Xbox Ally handheld devices from 2025 with new features. Highlight Reels is one of them to automatically capture clips from games for sharing without opening any panels or pressing any shortcuts during gameplay. The feature is now entering the public testing phase. It's unclear if it will arrive on more devices, including the standard Xbox Ally, Windows PCs, and laptops.

What else in gaming?

The latest issue of Pulasthi's Weekly PC Game Deals curates a number of multiplayer games on sale this week. You can grab the humorous rogue-lite action game Turnip Boy Robs a Bank as a freebie on the Epic Games Store. Xbox Free Plays is giving you the chance of trying out new titles, including Call of Duty Black Ops 7 and Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds.

GeForce NOW has added support for 15 more games in March, such as Legacy of Kain: Defiance Remastered, Esoteric Ebb, Slay the Spire 2, John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando, Crimson Desert, and more. If you're a racing fan with Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft announced that EA Sports F1 25 is coming to EA Play.

That said, here are some more stories from the gaming world:

• Star Citizen developer suffers data breach impacting user personal data
• After Witcher 3, Microsoft is bringing Cyberpunk 2077 to Xbox Game Pass
• Ubisoft finally confirms Assassin's Creed: Black Flag remake is real
• Prime members get Total War hits, Rebel Galaxy, and 11 more games in March

From the review corner

Steven got his hands on the Intel-powered NucBox K15 from GMTec, which comes with a few surprises to make it a worthy contender in the saturated mini PC market. The device comes with an Intel Core Ultra 5, up to 32GB RAM, a USB 4 port with 100W power delivery, HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4, and an OCulink port to connect a dGPU.

You can get in a barebone configuration with no OS, memory, or SSD. But a possible downside could be the PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD onboard on the pricier variants, just one USB 4 port, being a bit on the pricier side, thanks to AI features.

GameSir G7 Pro Zenless Zone Zero

GameSir sent a review unit of the refreshed G7 Pro Zenless Zone Zero controller to Taras, which comes with a total of five sets of sticks to choose from, and to compensate for the price tag. The controller has impressive specs with a 1000Hz polling rate, motion controls, a 3.5 mm audio jack, Hall Effect sticks and triggers, trigger locks, customizable rear buttons, and more. But it cheaps out on the bundled cable, which is a regular Type-A USB made of hard plastic and inferior to the one with the Wuhang edition.

Planet of Lana II

Pulasthi also published his detailed review of Planet of Lana II, the sequel to the puzzle platformer that moves the story forward and expands on almost everything the original offered. For a $19.99 asking price, it features beautiful environments that almost pop off the screen, carefully controlled puzzles, great sound design, and masterfully animated characters who use gibberish to express emotions. However, the game's length could be a turn-off for some.

So, these were some of the biggest tech news and other updates from this week. There will be more issues of our 7 Days series in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned. You can also support Neowin by registering for a free member account or subscribing to extra member benefits, along with an ad-free tier option.

Have a great weekend!

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Posted Monday 9 March 2026 at 6:07 am AEST (my time).

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