AMDLSS5, a free mod that runs NVIDIA's DLSS 5 Neural Rendering on AMD's Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, has reached version 2.0 with an engine its developer, Wehaveall, built for the project. Earlier builds were based on Daniel Blanco's DLSS-NR-on-AMD, the tool that first got DLSS 5 working on Radeon cards back in September, but version 2.0 no longer needs files from any other mod. In a 60-second Resident Evil Requiem run at 4K with FSR on an RX 9070 XT, the new build averaged 101.2 FPS with 78.5 FPS 1% lows, up from 91.3 and 66.0 FPS on version 1.6.1. That is roughly 11% and 19% better, respectively.

The headline 64% figure comes from a comparison with unnamed "other mods," which managed 61.6 FPS in the same scene. These are the developer's own numbers from one game on one GPU, and there's no mod-off baseline showing what Neural Rendering costs. Game support now includes PRAGMATA, Nioh 3 and GTA 5 Enhanced, the latter only in offline Story Mode with BattlEye disabled. RX 9060 series cards should work but are untested, while RX 7000 support is an alpha that hasn't been tried on real hardware yet.

PC Games Hardware has put a modded GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 22 GB through their test gauntlet, and the extra memory seemingly pays off once games run out of headroom. At 4K with DLSS Performance and FSR 3.1 Frame Generation, the card averaged 52.5 FPS in Flight Simulator 2024 against 30.2 FPS on a regular 11 GB model, roughly 74% faster. Spider-Man 2 jumped from 39.4 to 64.0 FPS, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle crashed to the desktop on the 11 GB card. At 1440p with DLSS Quality, the gap was smaller, though those first two games still ran about 20% slower on 11 GB. Of course, PCGH chose nine memory-hungry games on purpose, and most titles run fine on 11 GB. Keep in mind that these are just one outlet's numbers, and other results may vary.

These cards have shown up everywhere from Alibaba to eBay listings at $499, and this one came from a reader. All eleven memory chips are swapped for 2 GB Samsung parts. No firmware changes are needed, since relocating a single strap resistor tells the GPU about the extra capacity, and NVIDIA's regular drivers pick it up. Its weak blower-style cooler and 250 W limit held it back, so PCGH tuned both cards to identical 1.9 GHz, 15 GT/s, and 280 W settings. At around €500, the 22 GB card costs quite a bit less than a 16 GB RTX 5060 Ti, which goes for €770 in Germany. PCGH still calls it a gamble, citing eight-year-old hardware and soldering work that can fail weeks later, and advises checking the seller's reputation and whether any warranty goes beyond a 30-day return window.

Epic Games recently promised expanded Linux support for Easy Anti-Cheat, outlining a new set of standards and native Linux security features that would need to be adopted by Linux distribution developers who wanted gamers to be able to access EAC Linux v2 games. As is par for the course for the distribution, CachyOS has come out swinging as one of the first, if not the first, Linux distribution to explicitly announce support for EAC Linux v2.

The announcement comes by way of a discussion on CachyOS's GitHub. Although its developers have yet to fully implement the new features, CachyOS's maintainers and developers are quick to note that the linux-cachyos-eac kernel will be a fully optional feature for the desktop environment, and that it will be opt-in. That's an important point, because some of the features required for EAC Linux v2 have been quite controversial in Linux gaming circles.

A new DLSS 5 mod borrows a trick from VR headsets to make Neural Rendering less punishing on ultrawide monitors. FoveatedDLSS5, a ReShade add-on built by maximedgoulet, keeps neural rendering at full resolution in the middle of the screen and steps it down toward the edges, where peripheral vision picks up less detail. In a Reddit post, the modder says The Witcher 3 went from 49 FPS to about 80 FPS on an RTX 4090 at 7680x2160 with 2x multipass, a gain of over 60%.

With default settings on a 7680x2160 panel, Neural Rendering ends up processing about 71% of the original pixels. Smaller screens gain less, however. At 4K, the defaults leave 93% of the pixels, and at 3440x1440 the mod turns itself off, so 16:9 and 21:9 users should shrink the center zone. It's also a pre-release tested in one game, and it only works when neural rendering runs after upscaling, which rules out pairing it with the Neural Upstream trick. Videocardz points out a similar project, CheekyFoveatedDLSS, that has been out since early September and adds eye-tracked foveation for VR headsets.

CD Projekt RED's Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.5 went live yesterday on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Mac, with the Switch 2 and Mac App Store versions due in the coming days. The studio announced the update on October 20 with just two confirmed features, and a YouTuber's early video filled in most of the rest. The leak was mostly right, though a few things changed.

Dual-wielding isn't limited to pistols, since the Double Trouble perk also covers revolvers from the Power category and comes with four extra perks. The mystery Night City tour is called Welcome to Paradise and is narrated by Richard Night, while the Clampdown prequel quest rewards a five-piece gear set based on King. Glamdocs also handle the Monowire and Projectile Launch System, and 12 new Minor Arcana tarot cards are hidden around the city, something the leak didn't seem to mention. Mods come through mod.io as a curated selection, and the official notes list Switch 2 alongside PC, Mac, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, although the leak suggested otherwise. Modded console saves can't earn achievements or trophies.

CD Projekt RED's Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.5 isn't out until October 22, but most of its content has already leaked. YouTuber WesNemo apparently published a video covering the update too early, and while it has since been pulled, players on r/GamingLeaksAndRumours had already summarized it. According to WesNemo, CD Projekt gave him and other creators early access to the update ahead of its official presentation. The studio itself has only confirmed dual-wielding and cyberware customization so far, so treat the rest as unofficial until the patch notes go live.

Apparently, dual-wielding is limited to pistols and comes through a new "Double Trouble" perk in the Cool skill tree. The leak also lists a new Edgerunners 2 gig called "Clampdown," which reportedly acts as a prequel to the anime that premiered on Netflix on October 20, plus a mystery Night City tour sidequest. Glamdoc shops will let players change the look of arm cyberware like Mantis Blades and Gorilla Arms, and there are five new clothing sets, new hairstyles for both male and female V, Quadra skins through Twitch Drops, and a radio station playing Edgerunners music.

When Digital Extremes introduced the powerful Riven mods system, the weapon-specific mods all had dispositions that would be adjusted quarterly as a balance for the resulting high damage output and subsequent popularity of specific weapons due to Riven mods, and the Riven system has seen a number of changes and reworks since it launched, mostly in an attempt to encourage build diversity and experimentation. However, metas have still emerged in the game, many of which came as a direct result of Riven mods. Now, Digital Extremes has decided to rework the Riven system again, doing away with Riven disposition entirely and capping ammo efficiency, resulting in what appears to be a more easily manageable and understandable system that should again encourage build diversity and be more new-player-friendly, to boot.

The high-level overview of the change is that, with a few temporary exceptions, ammo efficiency will be capped at 75%, meaning the best-case scenario is that a weapon will only consume one ammo every four shots, and Riven mods will all be reset to new base values that would represent a disposition of 1.2 in the outgoing system. This means that all new weapons will start out with powerful mods available from the get-go, and existing Rivens may see significant swings in viability in the game. These changes will be introduced in an October 22 update, and Digital Extremes has also said that it will provide all Warframe players with an inbox reward in order to offset whatever impact this may have on builds that relied on those mods for high damage output. Players who used the Riven Splicers and Trait locking that was introduced earlier in 2026 will receive double the rewards as a thanks for testing the new system.

NVIDIA shipped its faster DLSS 5 Neural Rendering model with NBA 2K27 on October 16, and it didn't take modders long to pull it out and test it elsewhere. Renan Maniero on X extracted the new 310.9.16.0 build of the DLL. That lets people inject it into games that don't officially support DLSS 5 through tools like RenoDX and OptiScaler. The new DLL also keeps the older model around as Preset A, with the new one sitting under Preset B, so comparing the two is as simple as switching presets. Gaming Optimized on X did exactly that, and found the new model running up to 90% faster than the old one in The Witcher 3. The channel points out that the gain varies from game to game, so 90% looks like the best case rather than the norm.

That roughly aligns with NVIDIA's own claims. The company says the October update shrinks the model by 24% to roughly 118 million parameters, cuts VRAM use at 4K by 20%, and runs the neural rendering workload up to 2x faster than the September version. NVIDIA also quoted up to 40% higher frame rates in NBA 2K27 specifically. Officially, DLSS 5 is still limited to RTX 50-series GPUs and GeForce NOW. NVIDIA plans to bring it to the RTX 40-series, though there's no date yet, and there's no word on RTX 30 or RTX 20 support. Modders, apparently, aren't waiting, since the OptiScaler README notes a modified runtime that gets it running on RTX 20-series cards as well.

Daniel Blanco's DLSS-NR on AMD project has grown well past its original scope. The mod first got NVIDIA's DLSS 5 Neural Rendering running on Radeon cards back in September, and later pulled off a 74% performance jump in a single day. The new Alpha 0.8.0 release, published on October 17, now brings almost the whole DLSS stack to AMD GPUs. That includes DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution (Models M and L), Ray Reconstruction (Model F), and Frame Generation with up to 4x multi-frame generation (MFG) in games that expose DLSS FG inputs. FSR 4.1.1 is also bundled, so it no longer depends on the driver, and a new NeuralHub mod manager handles game detection and installation.

According to the developer, this is a ground-up reimplementation of the DLSS runtimes using custom HIP kernels rather than a translation layer, and users have to supply their own NVIDIA DLLs. RDNA 4 and RDNA 3 cards get the full feature set, while RDNA 2 support is still experimental and limited to Neural Rendering. The developer says DLSS 5 Neural Rendering now runs at roughly 90 to 100 FPS at 1080p on an RX 9070 XT, and the goal is to match an RTX 5070 Ti. Early results with Ray Reconstruction are mixed, however. One Reddit user reported no performance loss in Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing at 1440p on an RX 9070 XT, while others saw drops of up to 25%. The mod only works in DirectX 12 games on Windows 11, and anti-cheat software blocks it, so readers are advised to stick to single-player titles.

A developer who goes by Panchovix has released three tools that let NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50, RTX 40, and RTX 30-series owners run a modified VBIOS without writing anything to the card's flash chip. The first is a VBIOS editor for Windows and Linux that can change power limits, voltage ceilings, current (OCP) limits, fan channels, and the core and memory offset ranges. Edited images keep NVIDIA's original signature, which no longer matches, so they can't be flashed with nvflash. Patched tools did break NVIDIA's BIOS signature lock for crossflashing back in 2023, but this approach skips flashing altogether. On Windows, the loader stores the edited image in the GPU's driver registry key, where the driver picks it up as an override every time the device starts, and it only needs a quick GPU restart. The Linux loader instead patches NVIDIA's open kernel modules so the GSP firmware starts with the custom image, with Fedora 43 being the only distro tested on real hardware so far.

The screenshots show how this works in practice. On what appears to be an RTX 5090 Founders Edition ROM, the board power ceiling went from 600 W to 700 W and the NVVDD and MSVDD voltage ceilings from 1,110 mV to 1,150 mV. An RTX 4090 ROM had its power ceiling raised from 666 W to 750 W and its core offset range doubled to +2,000 MHz, and nvidia-smi later confirmed that card's power limit going from 550 W to 671 W. Apparently, an RTX 5090 reached 800 W, an RTX 5080 went from 360 W to 500 W, and an RTX 5060 Ti from 185 W to 300 W in the developer's own testing. Laptop RTX 40 GPUs can't be edited yet, and memory timings can't be changed since the card reads them directly from the flash chip.

Reddit user DallasGrave, who recently soldered a dual 8-pin board to an RTX 5090's 16-pin header, is back with a more ambitious take on the same idea. The new "Quad 2x8 Header Conversion" mounts four 8-pin PCIe connectors right on the card, tapping the contact points of the 12V-2x6 header, so the 16-pin connector can either stay in use alongside it or be skipped entirely. Each 8-pin carries three 12 V conductors, which spreads the load over twelve wires instead of six.

According to the modder, current per conductor is "almost perfectly halved" compared to the native connector, landing at roughly 4.1 to 4.4 A per wire at 600 W, with wire temperatures dropping by around 20°C. The sense pins are set for 600 W, and the board has apparently been tested up to 800 W on a shunt-modded card, where the PCB itself reportedly sat at about 45°C. Videos covering installation, live current data, and a 24-hour sustained load test are apparently being shot now, and custom backplates are in the works to make the mod look more factory-made. Versions for nearly every card, Founders Edition included, are also going into production.

NVIDIA's new DLSS Frame Generation Preset C has only been out for a few days, and modders have already brought it to RTX 30 cards. The latest version of dashdogy's Universal MFG Unlocker (v1.5.0, formerly RTX 40 MFG Unlock) adds Preset C support on both RTX 40 and RTX 30 GPUs, including 3x to 6x multi-frame generation (MFG). Officially, Preset C is a beta "performance mode" for RTX 40, RTX 50, and RTX Spark systems, available through the NVIDIA app's experimental features. It swaps one of Frame Generation's two AI models, the one handling optical flow, for a lighter algorithm, and NVIDIA claims up to 35% higher performance in exchange for a small hit to image quality.

According to the release notes, RTX 30 support is now considered stable, with smoother frame pacing at 3x and above, though it only works in DirectX 12 games. However, the newest DLSS Frame Generation build that carries Preset C has only been validated offline on RTX 30, and the preset was confirmed in-game on an RTX 40 card in The Witcher 3. No RTX 30-series performance numbers have been shared yet, so the gains on Ampere are anyone's guess. The update also adds XeSS Multi Frame Generation from 2x to 6x on NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel GPUs through an OptiScaler plugin, and fixes a launch crash in Gears of War: E-Day. This effort follows recent mods that got DLSS Multi Frame Generation running on Ampere and also brought Smooth Motion to the same cards.

Jagex has canceled RuneScape Reignited, a new character type it revealed at RuneFest 2026 alongside RuneScape 4, less than two weeks after the announcement. Reignited characters were set to arrive on December 2 with their own economy, Grand Exchange, and hiscores, plus access to Reignited-only worlds. They would also need a separate membership and couldn't trade or share boss instances with existing "Veteran" characters. Players were quick to point out that this could fracture an already small player base. Jagex apologized on October 6, and three days later floated a list of changes, such as letting players "Reignite" an existing character under their current membership.

Apparently, that wasn't enough. In an update posted on October 15, Mod Ryan said the studio "missed the mark" and won't move forward with Reignited. He also brought up the last time Jagex ignored player feedback on combat, which seems to be a nod to the 2012 Evolution of Combat update that, in his words, took the game over a decade to recover from. The rest of the December 2 update still goes ahead, including the Adventure Guide and the first part of the Remastered Journey. Earlier this month, Jagex said RuneScape still has hundreds of thousands of members but has been on a slight decline for a long time, so it's reasonable to expect another attempt at bringing new players in down the line.

Googlebook laptops arrived only a few weeks ago, and Googlebook OS is already running on hardware Google never built it for. Developer Skylar Taylor-Barrick has published gbos-vm, an open-source project that boots the OS inside a GPU-accelerated virtual machine on Apple Silicon Macs, with Chrome working. Apparently, the install script downloads Google's own recovery image for the Dell XPS Googlebook, an ARM64 build based on Android 17, replaces the hardware-specific vendor partition with virtual device components from Google's Cuttlefish project, and boots it under QEMU.

The Dell is one of the Snapdragon X-powered Googlebooks, so its Arm image runs on the Mac's hypervisor without emulation. That also means Intel Macs are out. Googlebook OS renders through Vulkan while Macs use Metal, so the project passes Vulkan calls through MoltenVK. The README asks for 16 GB of RAM, 60 GB of free storage, Xcode command line tools, and the Android SDK with NDK, plus a hefty 9 GB of downloads. First boot takes about 45 seconds on an M5 MacBook, which is the only machine the developer lists as tested.

A modder going by SupraGSX has released an unofficial Windows XP driver on GitHub that adds support for NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 10-series "Pascal" graphics cards, including the TITAN Xp. Called Forceware 382.69, it is a patched version of NVIDIA's 368.81 driver from July 2016 and only works on 32-bit Windows XP. The timing is a bit funny, since NVIDIA ended regular driver support for Pascal last year and later dropped the cards from its 590 driver branch. However, Forceware's latest release covers the GTX 1060, GTX 1070, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti, TITAN X (Pascal) and TITAN Xp, along with some GTX 900-series and Quadro cards.

It also adds DisplayPort 1.4 HBR3 and HDMI 2.0 handling. SupraGSX notes that these are INF additions, and that not every model was individually validated. The October 4 build fixes OpenGL crashes on Pascal, which was verified on a GTX 1080 Ti. Support for GP107 cards such as the GTX 1050 Ti is experimental and untested on real hardware. X user @TheBobPony, who shared a GPU-Z screenshot of a GTX 1080 running on Windows XP, described the driver as "vibe coded." That claim remains unconfirmed currently, as the project's README and release notes make no mention of AI tools. Readers are cautioned to keep unverified drivers off their primary PCs, AI-coded or otherwise. Still, the effort deserves some credit, if only for keeping the Xp on XP meme alive.

Melting 16-pin connectors keep making headlines, and some RTX 5090 owners have started taking the protection of their expensive cards into their own hands. Reddit user DallasGrave has modified an MSI GeForce RTX 5090 with two extra 8-pin PCIe power inputs that work alongside the card's original 16-pin connector. According to their post on r/pcmasterrace, a small pickup PCB is soldered to the contacts of the 16-pin header, and that board feeds a second PCB carrying the two 8-pin sockets. The card then runs on three cables in total. DallasGrave says each conductor now carries roughly 3 A, and that the wires never crossed 40°C during a 48-hour run at 550 W, even at the joint. More test data is apparently on the way, so for now these are the modder's own numbers.

The 12V-2x6 revision was supposed to fix the melting power connector issues. In early 2025, NVIDIA said the 16-pin melting issues were over, pointing to the updated connector on the RTX 50-series. However, the first melted RTX 5090 Founders Edition was reported shortly after, in that case with a third-party cable. Since then, several RTX 5090 power connectors have reportedly melted, including one with an undervolt and a -100 W power limit. Moreover, last month Hardware Unboxed watched its RTX 5090 power cable reach 175°C with a single wire pulling around 22 A.

Paralympics Productions, the modding group that got GTA 5 running natively on the original Nintendo Switch, is shutting down on October 3. Project lead M0jso announced on X that Take-Two Interactive sent him a cease-and-desist letter, after which he was left with no choice but to shut down his projects. The Android port he was working on after the Switch build is canceled as well, and he says nobody will take over the project or continue it under a new name. M0jso also says the source code won't be released, since that could bring more legal trouble. Apparently, he thinks Take-Two has solid grounds and that he probably wouldn't win in court.

Both ports reportedly relied on GTA 5 source code that leaked in 2023. However, he hasn't publicly detailed the legal claims, so it's not clear exactly what the letter targets. The timing seems to line up with Rockstar's move to tighten its mod guidelines this month. The new rules tell fans not to modify Rockstar games to run on consoles or other platforms where the company hasn't officially released them. Moreover, M0jso also took a jab at Rockstar over those rules about a week before the shutdown. Of course, we can't say for sure that's what triggered the letter, but it probably didn't help. For now, Android users are back to Winlator-style compatibility tools or streaming, and I doubt anyone will try a native port again any time soon.

Modders working on bringing NVIDIA's DLSS 5 Neural Rendering to AMD Radeon GPUs just had their busiest day yet. The developer behind the DLSS-NR-on-AMD tool shipped two new versions within 24 hours, Alpha 0.3.3 and Alpha 0.4.0, together adding roughly 74% performance on Radeon hardware, according to the project's own GitHub release notes. YouTuber Ancient Gameplays tested the update in Cyberpunk 2077 at 3440x1440, and saw framerates climb from around 30 FPS on earlier builds to roughly 50 FPS on Alpha 0.4.0. That's a big jump for a workaround that started out barely playable. The original mod release had poor performance, but it looks like that's being addressed.

The tool works by feeding NVIDIA's own DLSS 5 DLL into Radeon RX 9000 GPUs, and reportedly RX 7000 cards too, intercepting the calls the DLL expects and routing the neural computation onto AMD hardware, since RDNA 4 supports the FP8 math DLSS 5 relies on. Alpha 0.3.3 also added a graphical installer with a built-in settings editor and overlay controls, so getting Neural Rendering running on Radeon apparently no longer means digging through file paths manually. Moreover, just today, the Alpha 0.4.1 update brought another 8% jump in overall performance, and a 9% performance increase under heavy gameplay loads.

A federal court in Washington has ordered Reddit moderator James "Archbox" Williams to pay Nintendo $4.5 million in damages over alleged Nintendo Switch piracy. US District Judge Lauren King granted Nintendo's motion for default judgment in full on September 23, along with a permanent injunction barring Williams from distributing pirated games or circumvention tools. Nintendo filed the lawsuit in June 2024, accusing Williams of running a network of so-called "Pirate Shops" offering libraries of pirated Switch games to the public.

According to the complaint, Williams promoted these shops through the r/SwitchPirates subreddit, where he served as lead moderator, and allegedly solicited eShop gift card donations to fund additional pirated titles. Williams never responded to the lawsuit. The court noted he had hired an attorney at one point to contest a Google subpoena, but he did not answer Nintendo's claims. Since he failed to respond, the court treated the complaint's allegations as true, which is standard for default judgments rather than a ruling on contested evidence.

Modder gebdag has released GTA2 RTX Remix, a mod that brings full path tracing and dynamic time-of-day lighting to Grand Theft Auto 2, the 1999 top-down classic. NVIDIA's Jacob Freeman shared a clip of the mod on X, showing a day-night cycle that looks quite well-done. Apparently, the biggest hurdle in the process was technical, as GTA 2 ran on DirectDraw and an early version of Direct3D, neither of which RTX Remix supports natively. To get around this, the modder built a custom Direct3D 9 wrapper using two DLLs that translate the game's legacy rendering calls into something RTX Remix can actually read. The result reportedly adds real-time path-traced lighting, so explosions, car fires, and neon signs now cast their own glow, and the day-night cycle shifts lighting as it passes.

The mod also unlocks widescreen 16:9 support (the original was locked to 4:3) and adds frame generation for up to 60 FPS, well above what the original release could hit. GTA2 RTX Remix is open source on GitHub and was reportedly tested on version 9.6 of the game, the free release Rockstar distributed in 2004. It needs 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 alongside the RTX Remix runtime. It's certainly a niche release given how old the base game is, but it's another one in the chain of RTX Remix mods breathing new life into titles most people wrote off years ago. Similar projects already exist for Max Payne, Morrowind, and Need for Speed Carbon, and modders keep finding new ways to push the tool's limits.

Counter-Strike 2 just received a rare, sizeable content update that both introduces a brand-new game mode and makes several tweaks and changes to how the game works, looks, and feels. The biggest change to Counter-Strike 2 is the new Rush game mode, which is a "fast-paced 3v3 queued mode," that puts players through a series of 40-second-long matches on randomly selected arenas specifically designed for the shorter games.

Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists will effectively face off against one another in king of the hill-style matches, in which the objective is to control a point until time runs out or eliminate the enemy before time runs out. The team with the most rounds won at the end of the game is the winner, and Valve has added a custom Rush leaderboard to specifically track performance and compare to friends.

Modders have gotten NVIDIA's Smooth Motion frame generation running on GeForce RTX 30 series cards, VideoCardz reports. Smooth Motion is NVIDIA's driver-level frame generation feature, similar in spirit to AMD's AFMF, and NVIDIA only exposes it officially on RTX 40-series and newer through the NVIDIA App. Ampere owners have been left out, at least officially. Two unrelated projects are apparently working to close that gap.

The first comes from developer pipotoufikxyz-lgtm, who expanded the earlier dlssg_for_sm86 project, itself an adaptation of NVIDIA's DLSS-G runtime for the SM86 architecture that RTX 30 GPUs use. The update adds Smooth Motion and Vulkan support, and it reportedly went live on September 19, tested on an RTX 3070. The second, NVSmooth30, comes from a developer going by ItsAdeline and takes a different route: rather than building on the existing DLSS-G package, it's a clean-room compatibility layer aimed directly at NVIDIA's NvPresent64.dll Smooth Motion path. Currently, NVSmooth30 has been tested on an RTX 3050 laptop GPU, and separately on an RTX 3070.

Raspberry Pi has confirmed its boards are firmware-locked to their factory RAM configuration, closing off a popular DIY upgrade path. The disclosure came from PhilE, a Raspberry Pi engineer and forum moderator, responding to a user who couldn't get a newly soldered-in 4 GB chip to register on a Compute Module 5. Apparently, the lock isn't new. According to the forum thread, it has been in place for some time, just not spelled out this plainly before. The lockdown reportedly dates back to late 2024, before this year's RAM price surge, so it's not a reaction to the current memory crunch either. That part obviously doesn't sit well with the repair and modding crowd, a community Raspberry Pi has usually supported.

PhilE explained the reasoning candidly. Apparently, some resellers were buying boards with cheaper RAM, swapping in higher-capacity chips "of dubious origin," and reselling them as factory 8 GB units. Those boards were never tested by Raspberry Pi, so when buyers ended up with unreliable hardware, support headaches landed on the company. Locking devices to their original RAM size removes that incentive, PhilE said. The firmware also reads other device attributes tied to the RAM part, so even a same-capacity swap from another board may not work, thus complicating repairs. It seems the tinkerer culture Raspberry Pi built its reputation on has unfortunately run into a hardware lock.

An MSI GeForce RTX 5080 16G Ventus 3X reportedly stopped working after its owner injected an unofficial version of DLSS 5 into a heavily modded copy of Grand Theft Auto 5. Reddit user "wax469" said the card had been running fine for about a month before the crash. According to the post, the screen began flashing uncontrollably about five minutes into a session, and the system refused to boot afterward. Swapping to his Ryzen 9 9950X3D2's integrated graphics let the PC start normally, and reinstalling the RTX 5080 brought the failure back. A replacement card of the same model has apparently worked without issues since.

It's worth being cautious here. NVIDIA has not released DLSS 5 for GTA 5, so the injection relied on unofficial tools, and the user says the card was running at stock settings with no overclock. There's no photo evidence of physical damage, and it's entirely possible a manufacturing defect was already present and just got exposed under load. Whether DLSS 5 had anything to do with it remains unconfirmed. The user was running a heavily modified version of GTA 5 Legacy, and adding unofficial DLSS 5 seems to be what eventually led to the failure.

Ahead of the official launch of GTA VI, Rockstar has put out a new set of mod guidelines for the upcoming action game, revealing strict rules surrounding the community's contributions to Leonida and the world of GTA as a whole. The modding guide, as spotted by users on the ResetEra forums, was silently launched on September 10, and it dictates what gamers and modders can and can't do with GTA games, imposing rather strict limitations in some places.

The limitations that stand out the most are the rules that disallow expanding or modifying "official storylines, plots, missions, characters, or other elements" of Rockstar's continuity. The studio also forbids mods that "combine maps, locations, characters, storylines, in-game assets, or other IP" between different Rockstar games. This comes after an early 2025 incident in which Liberty City Preservation Project, a mod that recreated GTA IV's map in GTA V, was taken down by Rockstar Games.