Microsoft is putting a hard cap on Xbox Cloud Gaming for the first time, ending years of unlimited streaming for Game Pass subscribers. Starting in November, Game Pass Essential will include 5 hours of cloud streaming a month, Premium gets 10 hours, and Ultimate tops out at 15 hours. Once subscribers burn through their allotment, they'll need to pay for extra hours through the Xbox Store to keep going. Xbox says the change should only affect around 4% of subscribers, so casual streamers likely won't notice much. Heavy users are a different story, particularly anyone leaning on cloud streaming as their main way to play.

Xbox hasn't announced pricing for extra hours yet, saying more details will come before the change goes live. The company did admit outright that "the practical result is a higher cost" for some players. Contrary to how generous this might look on paper, Xbox's own ceiling is notably tighter than NVIDIA GeForce Now's 100-hour monthly cap on its top tier. Microsoft points to rising cloud infrastructure costs as the reason, though it's hard not to read this as part of the division's overall push toward profitability after a rough stretch of layoffs.

Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson has given us the first real number on GTA 6's length. Nelson told The New York Times that his own playthrough, completed back in February, took around 80 hours. That run covered the main story plus some optional objectives that carry actual narrative weight, which is interesting in itself. For context, GTA 4 and GTA 5 each wrap up their main stories in around 30 hours. Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar's previous benchmark, sits at 50 to 60 hours. If someone this familiar with the game needed 80 hours, average players jumping in fresh will probably need a fair bit more.

Part of that comes down to sheer size. GTA 6's map is reportedly about three times bigger than Red Dead Redemption 2's, and Rockstar has packed it with things to do. Gyms are back for the first time since San Andreas, and there's kayaking, skydiving, dirt biking, deep-sea diving, and more scattered across the map. Nelson said the optional goals he mentioned actually affect character relationships and mission outcomes, so they're not just busywork.

Electronic Arts, the gaming giant behind games like The Sims, Apex Legends, and the Battlefield franchise, today announced a new partnership with Stability AI that it claims will help artists more quickly iterate and develop games more efficiently. However, according to a recent report by Business Insider, EA has been pushing its employees across the board to use AI for at least a year. Sources who spoke to Business Insider revealed that, despite what EA says about any AI tools it plans to develop with Stability AI in the future, the current in-house AI tools have caused more hassle than anything else. EA employees familiar with the AI tools say that the AI tools often hallucinate, to the point that developers have to go in and manually fix code that the AI tools generated.

Artists also took issue with the fact that their art was being used to train these AI models, which would theoretically devalue their work and result in reduced demand for artists. There are also reports that around 100 employees were recently terminated from the QA department because the AI could easily review and summarize tester feedback. Despite these complaints, EA is leaning into AI more heavily than ever with the aforementioned Stability AI partnership. News also just broke that Krafton, the publisher behind PUBG and the Subnautica franchise, has announced that it will be pivoting to become an AI-first company. Specifically, Krafton will be spending $70 million on GPU horsepower to power an increased reliance on agentic AI for automation and efficiency. Towards the end of September, it was revealed that EA's new owners—a group of investors—would be leaning on AI in order to "significantly cut operating costs," which has clearly already started to materialize.

The Rainbow Six Siege X Showcase will be taking place in Atlanta, Georgia on March 13th, 2025 at 10am PDT / 1pm EDT / 6pm CET and will be broadcast live. This event promises to be an immersive and one-of-a-kind Siege experience, where players, creators and developers come together as we unveil all the evolutions coming with Siege X, and many more surprises! Tune in live with your friends over on our Twitch Channel and enjoy exclusive Twitch drops! Make sure to link your Twitch account to receive the rewards!

Witness the start of Siege's new era—Don't miss the R6 Siege X showcase
A new era is on the horizon for Rainbow Six Siege—one that sets the stage for the years to come of tactical and unique gameplay—and we'd like to invite you to be a part of it: welcome to Siege X! The R6 team has been working tirelessly to bring to life the biggest transformation in the game's history and its purpose is to reinforce Rainbow Six Siege's position at the top of tactical first-person shooters by introducing new ways to play, deepened tactical gameplay, refined game feel and major upgrades all around. To celebrate this new age of Siege, we are holding an exclusive event that you're invited to attend; The Rainbow Six Siege X Showcase.

GIGABYTE debuted its LCD Edge View display for showcasing real-time system information. Designed as a small and compact LCD display, it acts as a desktop-standing box capable of displaying critical system information like CPU and GPU temperatures, fan speeds of GPUs and CPU coolers, PC fans, as well as everything else happening inside of a PC. Interestingly, it isn't just a fixed-function display. It can show custom images/videos and display custom text, serving as a small display companion to the main monitor for users to look at occasionally or just monitor system health. The design of the LCD Edge View is to be a plug-and-play white box that could easily be positioned on any desktop, blending seamlessly with the user's setup.

It requires external power connection, and can be driven by any GPU/video output. It also features a USB port.

Hello heisters, we want to inform you that Denuvo is no longer in Payday 3. We look forward to seeing you in New York City! Payday 3's release is coming very close, and it's been a long time since we announced that Payday 3's release date is on the 21st of September, with Silver/Gold owners being able to Play Early starting on the 18th. However, one popular reoccurring question has been; At what time?

To best answer this question, our creative team has made us this fantastic asset with a world map, and the release times listed in several popular time zones all over the world. Check it out, for a fast glance at when you need can get in-game.

NVIDIA's long-awaited acquisition of Arm Ltd. is collapsing, confirm Financial Times and Reuters. According to the latest information, the deal is not happening, and the previously agreed terms are no longer valid. As we now know, NVIDIA will have to pay Softbank (Arm's owner) a break-up fee of $1.25 billion, which was the deal that the two settled on if the acquisition fails. NVIDIA has originally planned to purchase Arm for $40 billion. However, the regulators from UK and EU have been blocking the deal from happening on the terms that it would hurt competition and block innovation.

What is next for Arm Ltd. is to go public and list itself on one of the world's biggest stock exchanges, either domestically or overseas in the US. The IPO efforts of Arm are estimated to be worth around $80 billion, representing a double amount of what NVIDIA wanted to purchase the company for.Update 08:35 UTC: Here is the official press release from NVIDIA and Softbank below:

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has been selected as one of only seven individuals to receive their own cover for the upcoming print edition of the TIME 100 Most Influential People of 2021. The Taiwanese-American earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1992 before co-founding NVIDIA in 1993 where he now holds the role of CEO. He has been described as one of the most technically savvy CEOs by Andrew Ng who is a founder of DeepLearning.AI and has written about Jensen for Time.

When Jensen directed NVIDIA to focus on GPU development in 2003 there was considerable skepticism however the gamble has paid off with the company holding a market-leading position and recording profits in the billions. This latest award will add to the numerous already received by him including the Robert N. Noyce Award from the Semiconductor Industry Association and an honorary doctorate from the National Taiwan University. The special 2021 print edition of TIME 100 Most Influential People will be available to purchase from September 17th.

TerraMaster, a professional brand that specializes in providing innovative storage products including network-attached storage (NAS) devices, launches the TerraMaster F2-422 2-Bay Network-Attached Storage (NAS) featuring 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking. The F2-422 is the brand's latest addition to its 10 GbE NAS Series.

Designed for professional users, the F2-422's 10 GbE LAN port provides speeds of up to 10 Gb/s of high-speed bandwidth. This allows users to access and transfer data faster. With two Seagate IronWolf 4 TB SSD drives in RAID0, the F2-422 can deliver speeds of up to 647 MB/s read and up to 651 MB/s write.
The TerraMaster F2-422 comes equipped with a powerful Intel quad-core processor and 4 GB of DDR3 memory, expandable up to 8 GB (4 GB + 4 GB) memory. The F2-422 is also packed with multiple layers of data security to keep your data safe and secure from attacks and risks of data loss.

There is expected to be more than 79 zettabytes of IoT data in 2025, but the real value of this data is found in the insights it generates. The closer to the data source we can produce these insights the better, because of the improved security, latency and energy efficiency enabled. Computational storage is emerging as a critical piece of the data storage puzzle because it puts processing power directly on the storage device, giving companies secure, quick and easy access to vital information.

Our expertise and legacy in storage puts Arm in a strong position to address the changing needs of this market - with around 85% of hard disk drive controllers and solid-state drive controllers based on Arm, we are already a trusted partner for billions of storage devices. Today, we're announcing Arm Cortex-R82, our first 64-bit, Linux-capable Cortex-R processor designed to accelerate the development and deployment of next-generation enterprise and computational storage solutions.

Unity has grown from a relatively simple engine to one of the most flexible options available for developers, allowing everything from 2D platformers to 3D games and short cinematics, all rendered in real-time, in-engine. The new Heretic real-time demo, showcased at GDC 2019, is one such example of a 3D engine being used to render a breathtaking cinematic.

The Heretic builds upon learnings derived from both the Adam and Book of the Dead shorts, and take advantage of the latest technologies embedded into the Unity engine. Motion blur, bloom, depth of field, film grain, color grading, and Panini projection, including by real-time lights and usage of a probe-based lighting solution. Just take a look at the video yourself, right after the break, and read on for the other part of this Unity-related piece: the Megacity Tech Demo.

Crytek has released a new video demonstrating the results of a CRYENGINE research and development project. Neon Noir shows how real-time mesh ray-traced reflections and refractions can deliver highly realistic visuals for games. The Neon Noir demo was created with the new advanced version of CRYENGINE's Total Illumination showcasing real time ray tracing. This feature will be added to CRYENGINE release roadmap in 2019, enabling developers around the world to build more immersive scenes, more easily, with a production-ready version of the feature.

The rhythms of our lives have been increasing non-stop as technology advances, and we're more and more unappreciative of any lost time. We try and do everything as efficiently as possible to be able to attend to the myriad of other issues we have to take on yet. "It is simply a matter of time", said Morpheus to Commander Lock in Matrix Reloaded. That wording is true in all manner of issues, whether in digital cyberpunk fantasy-land or in real life, where time is the ultimate judge. Ascending from these philosophical depths, though, there's a simple matter that actually does take issue with time: online orders.

SuperData, a market intelligence firm, has revealed a report where it's been found that over 27% of the gamer population has left online orders in limbo, never quite finishing them. The issue? Time and convoluted purchase processes, whether with multiple registration steps, email confirmation, a slew of obligatory data checks, shipping, payment options... Everything that isn't seamless makes gamers - and I'd say, people that aren't gamers as well - leave their orders unfinished.