When Pearl Abyss first announced Crimson Desert's Charting the Unknown DLC in early September, it said that the DLC would launch on October 15 for PC, Xbox, and PS5. However, the studio has had to push back the game's DLC launch, citing concerns about stability and polish as the primary factor. The delay officially pushes the launch back to October 29, per the official announcement on the game's X account.

Pearl AbyssWe are hard at work on Crimson Desert: Enhanced Charting the Unknown to bring you new adventures to Pywel. However, we have determined that we need additional time to deliver a more polished and stable gameplay experience.
Therefore, we have decided to move the DLC's release by 2 weeks to October 29 GMT/PT.

We know many of you have been looking forward to returning to the game, and we sincerely apologize for the longer wait. We will use the additional time to further refine the content and do our utmost to deliver the best experience we can.

Despite the Valve Steam Machine being right around the corner, there has been a lot of interest from gamers who want to run SteamOS on custom gaming desktops or DIY Steam Machine console builds, while others may be looking to extract as much of the Steam Deck experience out of something like a used Lenovo Legion Go after the recent Steam Deck price increases. Fortunately, the latest SteamOS release, version 3.8, has officially landed in the stable release channel with a host of compatibility, performance, and usability upgrades. First and foremost, SteamOS 3.8 brings initial support for the upcoming Steam Machine and improvements to the desktop mode for those who want to use the Steam Machine as a PC-console hybrid. This is aside from a host of bug fixes for both the OS and certain game bugs and general improvements to the overall level of polish of the OS.

SteamOS 3.8 updates both the Arch Linux base and the KDE Plasma desktop mode to KDE 6.4.3 and switches to the Wayland display protocol by default. The update also improves VRR frame pacing and adds support for HDMI Variable Refresh Rate thanks to AMD's recent efforts to bring HDMI 2.1 support to Linux. The OS now also supports the LAVD CPU scheduler if manually enabled via the command "steamosctl set-cpu-scheduler lavd". SteamOS 3.8 also updates the graphics driver and fixes performance discrepancies between game mode and desktop mode, specifically addressing performance regressions in desktop mode. It also re-enables Bluetooth wake from sleep on Steam Deck LCD models. There are also improvements to game capture in game mode, as well as support for HDR, VRR, and per-display scale factor on external displays in desktop mode. Critically for desktop builds, SteamOS 3.8 also significantly improves video memory management on systems with discrete GPUs and support for recent Intel and AMD platforms.

Valve has been working to improve SteamOS since the launch of the Steam Deck, and the latest SteamOS and Steam Client updates out of Valve combine a whole host of bug fixes that were previously fed into the testing streams. Most notably of the lot are the changes to the accessibility and Steam Input options, but Valve also fixed a few issues that have been part of the SteamOS experience for some time, including flickering UI elements, low-resolution thumbnails on the Recent Games screen of the game library, and issues with button mapping and Switch Pro controller LEDs coming on when they're not supposed to. There are also some additional improvements to features like family sharing and high contrast theme options, but the most interesting addition comes by way of the generic SteamOS 3.7.20 release.

SteamOS 3.7.20 officially merges the NTsync driver from a previous beta release into the mainline OS version, which is a change that could see some games get notably higher performance in some instances. NTsync is a Linux kernel driver that's been in a stable state for a little over a year, but in essence, it aims to increase performance by more closely matching Windows NT synchronization when using the Proton compatibility layer. Other versions of Proton and WINE have had NTsync for a while as a performance booster, but now Valve has added official support for it to the kernel, leaving less development work in the hands of the community and Valve itself. NTsync promises performance uplifts in some games, although not all of them, and it won't always necessarily offer better performance than the existing Fsync, but it gives Linux gamers another option to use when they're tinkering with Proton settings to eke out that last drop of performance.

Earlier in November, we reported on screen-off downloads finally being added to SteamOS and the Steam Deck Beta and Preview channels in order to prevent OLED burn-in. Now, that update has officially made it into the Steam Deck Client Stable channel, meaning it will soon be available to all Steam Deck users after an update. Any Steam Decks with the latest Steam Client update will automatically download game updates with the display off when the device is plugged in, but you will need to manually enable the new feature on battery power. The Steam Deck will turn off the display automatically after an idle period, and you can check on the download without fully waking the Steam Deck by simply tapping a button or moving the device.

Along with the new screen-off downloads, Valve has also added a bunch of fixes to the Steam Client for Steam Deck, including expanding high contrast support, fixing controller and gyro compatibility and sensitivity issues, polishing some UI elements, and fixing some Bluetooth connectivity and compatibility bugs. Valve also added the ability to report harassment in chats directly from the chat window and added support for the 8BitDo 64 Bluetooth controller. Overall, at this point, it seems as though Valve is working on polishing SteamOS and the Steam Client as much as possible, both for the Steam Deck and likely in anticipation of the release of the Steam Machine.

As enterprises race to adopt generative AI and bring new services to market, the demands on data center infrastructure have never been greater. Training large language models is one challenge, but delivering LLM-powered real-time services is another. In the latest round of MLPerf industry benchmarks, Inference v4.1, NVIDIA platforms delivered leading performance across all data center tests. The first-ever submission of the upcoming NVIDIA Blackwell platform revealed up to 4x more performance than the NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU on MLPerf's biggest LLM workload, Llama 2 70B, thanks to its use of a second-generation Transformer Engine and FP4 Tensor Cores.

The NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPU delivered outstanding results on every benchmark in the data center category - including the latest addition to the benchmark, the Mixtral 8x7B mixture of experts (MoE) LLM, which features a total of 46.7 billion parameters, with 12.9 billion parameters active per token. MoE models have gained popularity as a way to bring more versatility to LLM deployments, as they're capable of answering a wide variety of questions and performing more diverse tasks in a single deployment. They're also more efficient since they only activate a few experts per inference - meaning they deliver results much faster than dense models of a similar size.

The latest version of AMD's open-source GPU compute stack, ROCm, is due for launch soon according to a Phoronix article—chief author, Michael Larabel, has been poring over Team Red's public GitHub repositories over the past couple of days. AMD ROCm version 6.0 was released last December—bringing official support for the AMD Instinct MI300A/MI300X, alongside PyTorch improvements, expanded AI libraries, and many other upgrades and optimizations. The v6.0 milestone placed Team Red in a more competitive position next to NVIDIA's very mature CUDA software layer. A mid-February 2024 update added support for Radeon PRO W7800 and RX 7900 GRE GPUs, as well as ONNX Runtime.

Larabel believes that "ROCm 6.1" is in for an imminent release, given his tracking of increased activity on publicly visible developer platforms: "For MIPOpen 3.1 with ROCm 6.1 there's been many additions including new solvers, an AI-based parameter prediction model for the conv_hip_igemm_group_fwd_xdlops solver, numerous fixes, and other updates. AMD MIGraphX will see an important update with ROCm 6.1. For the next ROCm release, MIGraphX 2.9 brings FP8 support, support for more operators, documentation examples for Whisper / Llama-2 / Stable Diffusion 2.1, new ONNX examples, BLAS auto-tuning for GEMMs, and initial code for MIGraphX running on Microsoft Windows." The change-logs/documentation updates also point to several HIPIFY for ROCm 6.1 improvements—including the addition of CUDA 12.3.2 support.

Quantum coherence at room temperature has been achieved, thanks to the efforts of Associate Professor Nobuhiro Yanai and his research team at Kyushu University's Faculty of Engineering. Additional credit goes to Associate Professor Kiyoshi Miyata (also of Kyushu University) and Professor Yasuhiro Kobori of Kobe University, all in Japan. Their scientific experiments have led to an ideal set of conditions where it is "crucial to generate quantum spin coherence in the quintet sublevels by microwave manipulation at room temperature." A quantum system requires operation in a stable state over a certain period of time, free of environmental interference.

Kobori-san has disclosed multi-department research results in a very elaborate document: "This is the first room-temperature quantum coherence of entangled quintets." The certain period of time mentioned above was only measures in nanoseconds, so more experimental work and further refinement will be carried out to prolong harmonious conditions. Head honco, Professor Yanai outlined some goals: "It will be possible to generate quintet multiexciton state qubits more efficiently in the future by searching for guest molecules that can induce more such suppressed motions and by developing suitable MOF structures...This can open doors to room-temperature molecular quantum computing based on multiple quantum gate control and quantum sensing of various target compounds."

After going through a month-long beta stage, Chrome 17 has now been promoted and is available as a Stable release for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Chrome 17 (build 17.0.963.46) features new Extension APIs, updated Omnibox Prerendering, download scanning protection, various tweaks and fixes for about 20 vulnerabilities.

Chrome 17 Stable can be downloaded via this page.

Keeping the Chrome crowd well-stocked on new releases, Google has made available a couple of versions of its browser, the 16.0.912.75 (Stable channel) and 17.0.963.26 (Beta channel).

The new Chrome 16 build is a security update which comes to fix three vulnerabilities rated 'High', while the first Chrome 17 release brings quite a few fresh goodies like New Extensions APIs, Omnibox Prerendering (the browser will load a website in the background while you type in the URL), enhanced download protection, and a few tweaks.

Both Chrome 16.0.912.75 and 17.0.963.26 are available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux and can be downloaded via this page.