Instagram is testing a new format called Features, which lets creators upload horizontal videos up to 90 minutes long. The test started on Monday with a small group of US creators, following an earlier trial in Brazil, and it's aimed squarely at podcasters, comedians, and other long-form creators who mostly publish on YouTube today. Instagram head Adam Mosseri and VP of Product Tessa Lyons announced it in a video. Plenty of creators already post Reels clips to promote full episodes hosted elsewhere, so Instagram now wants to host the full episode too. Reels can link straight to the full video, and Features will also be recommended on the Explore page.

While YouTube shares ad revenue with creators in its Partner Program, Instagram has no plans to do the same for Features, at least for now. An Instagram representative said the company is funding some creators directly, but that it's "too early to share a long-term monetization model." Lyons said established creators can bring their existing sponsorships and branded content along. Instagram already tried long-form video once with IGTV, which launched in 2018 and was shut down in 2022. This time, the TV seems to be a bigger part of the plan, as the Instagram for TV app, which debuted on Amazon Fire TV in December 2025, has now reached Apple TV in the US. There's no firm date for a wider rollout, and without a revenue share, it's hard to see many creators leaving YouTube anytime soon.

The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) shared an update on AV2 this week, and the clearest date in it comes from YouTube. Des Keane, Engineering Director at YouTube, confirmed the platform will begin streaming in AV2, which is the royalty-free successor to AV1 that AOMedia says offers roughly 30% better compression. In practice, that means either sharper video at the same bitrate or the same quality using less bandwidth, and the codec also adds support for multi-stream and multi-view video, higher frame rates, and improved HDR. Keane put it plainly: "YouTube AV2 streams will be available for Web as soon as early 2027."

Chrome is the other half. Jim Bankoski, VP of Engineering for Google Chrome, said AV2 playback has been demonstrated in the browser, though Google hasn't said which Chrome version will get it or whether it will be on by default. That demo dates back to CES 2026, where Google streamed AV2 videos from YouTube to a gaming laptop at 1080p and 24 FPS using a custom Chrome build with the reference decoder. Netflix and Prime Video are also exploring the format, but neither has shared a timeline. Meta wants to repeat its AV1 rollout with AV2, and Intel is working on SVT-AV2.

Electronic Arts recently announced that it is shuttering BioWare and cancelling its upcoming Mass Effect game and cutting 400 jobs in the process, after the gaming giant acquired the game studio in 2007. According to a former executive producer at BioWare, Mark Darrah, however, there may still be hope for fans of BioWare's myriad beloved franchises, including Mass Effect.

Mark Darrah on YouTubeRemember, BioWare, 100% owned by EA, so EA owns all the IPs. They own Dragon Age, they own Mass Effect, they own Jade Empire. So, that doesn't change the situation really at all... Now, there's nobody working on a game or games within the EA organization, and chances are there never will be, which might make them more likely to sell off those IPS, but it might also make them more likely to just try to forget that they ever existed and bury them in the vault.

Responding to a question from a customer with a stained copper cold plate, modder and overclocker, Der8auer, has published an analysis of Thermal Grizzly's Conductonaut Extreme liquid metal thermal interface, revealing the long-term effects of the TIM. In the video, published to YouTube, Der8auer explains that the staining that can often be seen after the use of liquid metal TIMs is a simple reaction between the copper and gallium in the liquid metal forming CuGa2 in what is known as a peritectic reaction. The resulting alloy has an effective thermal conductivity of around 100 W/m·K, which is significantly lower than pure copper but much higher than the liquid metal alone. Fortunately, this deposition grows at around 1 µm per day until it reaches 50-100 µm, and it is given as the explanation for online reports of liquid metal evaporation over time.

Moving onto the actual long-term testing and analysis, Der8auer analyzed a copper plug applied with Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut Extreme intermittently over a two-year period to see how the thermal interface material changed over time. While the liquid's surface is clearly visible under the electron microscope after the initial application, it changed significantly after just two weeks, with obvious crystallization and solid particulates forming in the TIM surface. These crystals continued to grow as the test sample sat in a de-oxygenated environment, losing any appearance of the liquid by the end of the second month after the initial application, with the surface then comprised exclusively of crystals. No further changes were observed in the liquid metal's surface between the two-month and two-year marks, suggesting that no major changes happened after the first 50-60 days, as predicted by Der8auer's initial explanation that peritectic deposition would occur at a rate of roughly 1 µm per day until it reached around 50 µm thick.

Marvel's Wolverine is now touching 20 FPS on the KytyPS5 emulator, only days after it first booted to its main menu at around 2 FPS. X user @MizoChris shared a 10-second clip of Logan clawing around at roughly that frame rate, and the numbers match a longer test by YouTuber Unreal Gaming PC on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and RTX 4080. That run apparently used Senaxx's September 30 build of the emulator, and it ate up nearly all of the card's 16 GB of VRAM. The 20 FPS figure, however, is a peak. Most gameplay reportedly sits closer to 6 to 9 FPS, but occasionally spikes to 15-20 FPS, especially during scenes with less action. The important bit here is the speed at which the game is progressing toward playability. Apparently, the game was peaking at 3 to 7 FPS just a day earlier, though the earlier tests ran on different PCs, so I wouldn't compare them directly.

KytyPS5 has done this before. Last month, it took Demon's Souls Remake from 1 to 2 FPS to 30 FPS in a matter of days, and it also got the PS5 version of GTA 5 running at up to 60 FPS. Wolverine only launched on September 15, which makes its progress even more surprising. The game being a Sony PlayStation exclusive also matters, since Sony has stepped away from PC ports for the foreseeable future. Of course, this doesn't mean GTA 6 will be coming to PC through emulation any time soon. Wolverine is still far from playable, and other KytyPS5 games still deal with crashes and performance issues. It's an impressive technical feat regardless, and PS5 emulation seems to be moving much faster than most people, maybe even Sony, expected.

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 developer has apparently gotten an experimental PS5 emulator running on the Xbox Series X. Devran Cosmo Uenal, who posted about the project on YouTube on September 8, calls it a research project that ports the open-source KytyPS5 emulator to Microsoft's console through Developer Mode. Uenal shows GEX Trilogy, Hellboy: Web of Wyrd, Marvel Cosmic Invasion, and Quake II in his game library and claims they all work with controller input, with sound working in some of them. He also says AI tools were used, but it's unclear how much of the code they wrote. Compatibility is very limited, and Uenal says a lot of work is left.

According to him, the Xbox environment doesn't support Vulkan, which KytyPS5 uses for rendering, so the graphics side has to be adapted to DirectX. That likely means progress on the PC version won't carry over automatically. We haven't seen performance benchmarks either, but the video shows Quake II running somewhere between 25 FPS and 45 FPS. The game also dips below 20 FPS in some scenes, especially when it first boots up. There is also a marked jump in input latency that can be observed, but no numbers back it up yet.

AMD's new Ryzen 5 5500F is turning out to be more than just a rebadge of the standard Ryzen 5 5500 in gaming. New benchmarks from YouTuber RandomGaminginHD show the $99 chip pulling ahead of its non-F sibling by up to 16% in CPU-bound titles, even though both processors share the same core count and land at roughly the same price. Do note that the testing is done by a mostly unknown third-party reviewer, and we don't have solid data track to back the claim, but for now it remains as a reference for future independent reviews from traditional sources.

The testing paired both chips with an RX 9060 XT 16 GB graphics card and ran through seven games at 1080p. Battlefield 6 showed the biggest gap at 16% in favor of the new 5500F, followed by Cyberpunk 2077 at 11%, GTA V: Enhanced at 9%, and Counter-Strike 2 at 8%. Titles that leaned more on the GPU, like Crimson Desert and Red Dead Redemption 2, saw that gap shrink to single digits or vanish once the RX 9060 XT became the bottleneck instead of the CPU. Of course, these are early numbers from one single test system. The reviewer also does not have a perfect track record when it comes to quality of testing, so it's important to wait for further testing to form a concrete verdict either way.

YouTube juggernaut Linus Media Group's secondary channel, ShortCircuit, accidentally published its Steam Frame first impressions video ahead of Valve's embargo, giving us an early hands-on look at the headset before official coverage. The video, framed as the team's first 30 minutes with the device, was live long enough for people to grab copies, and clips are now circulating widely on social media even though the original upload was taken down. The leaked video still doesn't confirm the Steam Frame's final price, which Valve hasn't announced yet. The video does, however, give a detailed look at Valve's new VR headset, and walks through box contents, setup, fit, and a range test.

On the pricing front, Linus revealed that the Ergonomics Accessories Kit will cost $60 as a separate purchase, covering an extra headset strap and straps for the controllers. The video also confirms the Steam Frame's controllers use replaceable batteries rather than the built-in rechargeable cells found on the Valve Index's controllers. Valve has been inching closer to launch for weeks now, updating Steam backend packages and shipping a stable SteamVR update. An insider previously pointed to September 14 as a possible release date, so we may not have to wait long to see if that holds up.

Some of the earliest known gameplay footage of Fortnite has resurfaced online, nearly 14 years after it was first shown behind closed doors at Comic-Con 2012. Reddit user u/kleuscher posted the clip to YouTube, saying they'd kept it saved on a USB drive since 2012, when they originally got the footage from a Russian forum. Apparently, uploading it back then earned them a copyright strike from Epic Games. The nearly five-minute clip is rough around the edges quality-wise, but it's a neat look at what Fortnite looked like before Battle Royale took over.

The footage shows early versions of Save the World, Epic's cooperative survival mode, with resource gathering and wall-building already present in some form. Save the World eventually launched alongside the rest of Fortnite in July 2017, years after this demo, and didn't go free-to-play until 2020. It's a nice little reminder of how different Fortnite's original pitch was, and how the game evolved. Epic once described Save the World as a mix of Minecraft and Left 4 Dead, long before Battle Royale reshaped the game into the phenomenon it is today. It'd be pretty cool if this pushed other people to dig up and share more lost footage like this.

Brazilian YouTube group TecLab has bypassed the RTX 5090's notorious melting problem in the most direct way possible. The group removed the 16-pin connector from the equation entirely and soldered power wires straight onto the PCB. The demonstration used a Galax RTX 5090D HOF OC LAB XOC, an extreme-overclocking variant with two 16-pin inputs and a custom BIOS rated for up to 2,000W, far above the 575W TDP of a standard RTX 5090. TecLab framed the mod as a sarcastic jab at NVIDIA, saying that enthusiasts are tired of hearing about connectors melting and that they wanted to show how it should have been done from the start.

The team stripped the card's stock cooler entirely, running the bare GPU under an industrial liquid chiller with two loosely mounted fans for extra airflow. Two adapters converted standard 16-pin PSU cables into bare wires, which were then soldered directly onto the connector traces on the board. No temperature readings were shared, but a roughly 50A draw on the 12V rail put the card at around 600W during testing, and it booted and ran benchmarks without issue.

Apple's affordable MacBook Neo was a shock to the system of many a Windows laptop OEM when it launched in March 2026 with enough performance for just about all casual computing tasks and home PC use. However, it seems as though the MacBook Neo's 8 GB of RAM may pose a longevity risk, because of how often the laptop runs out of memory and is forced to use the swap file on the SSD to compensate. In recent SSD longevity tests, the YouTube channel UFD Tech found that the MacBook Neo could burn through a significant portion of its SSD lifespan with Swap usage alone.

Using an SSD burn tool, UFD Tech found that the 256 GB MacBook Neo burned through an estimated 5% of its overall lifespan after 20 TB, projecting a rated lifespan of around 414 TB, while the 512 GB saw a projected rating of around 1521 TB. The Brett, the host of the YouTube channel, then went on to use the MacBook Neo for a day to estimate how much data was written to the Neo's SSD swap file as it ran out of RAM throughout the day. Using the laptop as a glorified web portal, running Chrome for research, reading, and communication via WhatsApp and Discord, the MacBook Neo wrote "nearly 900 GB" of data to its SSD in just three hours.

It's been known since Rockstar released the first trailer for GTA VI that the upcoming action game would have a massive impact on the gaming industry, and analysts have predicted week-one sales of $4.5 billion when the game launches in November. Following Rockstar's GTA VI showcase at Gamescom, reports have emerged that, between Netflix, YouTube, and Twitch, nearly 4 million users tuned into the live show—a number that had ripple effects across the internet.

For starters, in the two days since the GTA VI Extended Look video launched on YouTube, it has racked up over 14 million views, while Streams Charts, a tracker for Twitch stream data, reported 3,970,738 peak stream viewers of the Extended Gameplay stream across both the official and unofficial commentary live streams and watch parties for the three hours it tracked viewership.

Unsurprisingly, there has been more than a little backlash following Sony's recent decision to end the production of physical games media in 2028. Much of that backlash has been met with questions from skeptics about the real-world success of physical media compared to digital, and even game preservation experts have highlighted that the death of physical media hardly changes the landscape, given the dependence on day-one patches.

Now, former Valve employee, and writer for Left 4 Dead, Chet Faliszek, has added his voice to the chorus questioning the backlash, with the writer arguing in a recent YouTube video that Sony's decision is purely a result of consumer choice. He argues that consumers and gamers created the circumstances that drove Sony to make the decision to end physical media production by preferring digital media.

It seems as though the launch of Valve's Steam Deck has resulted in an almost non-stop slew of comparisons between Linux and Windows as a gaming operating system. In one recent test, Meta PCs sought out to test the two operating systems head-to-head to get some hard numbers and potentially settle the debate, however, the results brought up an interesting debate about what makes one operating system better than another.

Benchmarks were conducted on an all-AMD system running an AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D, an XFX Swift AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16 GB, and 16 GB of RAM, with the AMD Linux drivers effectively making this a best-case scenario for Linux. The benchmarks were run on the latest version of Windows 11 and Fedora Linux 44, games were tested at the same resolution, and results were an average across three runs. All games tested were also the Windows versions running via Valve's Proton compatibility layer.

Hot on the heels of the launch of the Epomaker HE 75 V2 and F108 Pro V2 keyboards, the keyboard maker has shown off the Hack70 as an upcoming mechanical keyboard, offering a larger version of the ortholinear layout that featured in keyboards like the Luma40. The Hack70 has yet to be officially announced, but the keyboard has been teased in a number of social media posts and a recent unboxing livestream to the brand's YouTube channel. The Hack70 has not yet been announced, but the only other keyboard in the Hack line-up is the HHKB-style Hack59, which comes in at $69.99 on Epomaker's online store, so pricing may be somewhat similar for the Hack70. What few details can be gleaned from the aforementioned livestream suggest that, although it is a niche product, it will likely be on the more affordable side and appeal to those who want to dip their toes into ortholinear keyboards without diving into hyper-niche DIY builds or in-depth customization.

The Hack70 will have tri-mode connectivity, meaning USB-C wired, Bluetooth, and 2.4 GHz, and it will have a plastic case with two-stage flip-out feet and a polycarbonate gasket mounted plate, judging by the included sound test. In case you're unfamiliar, an ortholinear layout—where the keys are aligned in a perfect grid, unlike the traditional row-stagger—supposedly eliminates diagonal finger movements, potentially reducing finger strain and increasing typing efficiency—although the latter is hotly debated. Similarly to the Keychron Q15 Max, the Hack70 veers away from traditional ortholinear keyboards by including more conventional 2.25u and 2.75u split spaces. The Hack70 will also be hot-swap compatible with 3- and 5-pin MX-style mechanical switches, with Epomaker Creamy Jade switches installed by default, by the looks of things, and it will have per-key RGB backlighting, although it will lack the shine-through keycaps of the Luma40. The Hack70's keycaps, which look to be dye-sublimated PBT, will be uniform height, using the XDA profile, thereby giving users the flexibility to test out different layouts or create a macro pad by moving keycaps around freely. The presenter in the unboxing livestream comments that there will be a .JSON file on the product page, suggesting that the Hack70 will be programmable in VIA.

It seems as though a recent patch to Pragmata on the PS5 Pro has increased the game's render resolution, although Capcom has yet to actually announce the change. According to recent tests by Digital Foundry and Brazil Pixel on YouTube, Pragmata's Patch 1.21 has increased the internal render resolution from 864p to 1080p. Notably, this is now the same resolution as the game uses on the base model PS5, which produced a cleaner image in some cases before the update, because it used a native render resolution of 1080p from the outset. Pragmata will still use Enhanced PSSR to upscale the image, whereas the base console uses FSR, and in Digital Foundry's testing, the image produced in Patch 1.21 is much cleaner, with little to no impact on the final frame rate.

Logitech's HITS (haptic inductive trigger system), introduced with the G Pro X2 Superstrike gaming mouse in late 2025, made serious waves in enthusiast gaming mouse spaces, but, as is the case with many of Logitech's innovations, the mouse the tech came with was imperfect and commanded a premium price. Now, it seems as though at least two Chinese peripheral makers are lining up to challenge at least some of Logitech's capabilities with their own magnetic switch tech. First, and the one we know the least about, is Keychron, surprisingly enough who is apparently preparing a micro switch called the MagOpt. The MagOpt switch was teased by Keychron on the brand's own YouTube channel, where it showed off a switch design that looks to use a hybrid optical and magnetic sensing mechanism combined with a traditional click leaf. It seems as though Keychron's MagOpt switch will attempt to mimic some of the functionality of the HITS system—like rapid trigger, adjustable actuation, and better longevity—but without a lot of the adjustability enabled by the haptic feedback of Logitech's HITS system.

The other incoming contender is Snaptiq, a product by a Russian streamer (shared by @goonerfps on X), and this system appears to have much more feature parity with Logitech HITS. The sensors in Snaptiq are analogue, like those found in Logitech's implementation, but these use magnets and either Hall effect or TMR sensor in place of Logitech's inductive switches. More importantly, Snaptiq will also mimic the tactile feedback with vibration motors, similar to HITS. How this pans out remains to be seen, but Lunacy claims that it will be able to detect movement as fine as 1 micron (0.001 mm) and that the mouse clicks themselves will be completely silent. Lunatic's Snaptiq is slated to launch by the end of 2026, although it is unlikely to launch in Western markets. However, this and Keychron's implementation may be the start of a wave of Chinese brands adopting similar tech to Logitech HITS.

One of the often-touted benefits of console gaming is how physical media enables access to games, even when there is no internet connection for the DRM to verify the game's license. Now, it seems as though the Sony's PS5 will start locking players out of digital-only games if the console has been unable to connect to PSN servers within the last 30 days. This is according to testing done by Hikikomori Media, who found the issue with Wild Arms 4 and Vampire Crawlers, both of which were purchased as digital-only titles in April 2026.

The content creator simulated an offline PS5 by disconnecting it from the internet, resetting the internal clock by removing the CMOS battery, and then booting up the PS5 without an internet connection. Effectively, he tricked the PS5 into thinking that it had been offline for an extended period of time. The end result is that both Wild Arms 4 and Vampire Crawlers were unable to launch after the reboot. It's notable that games purchased before March 2026 would still launch without a hitch. Based on this testing and further testing with a PS4, which revealed a timer showing how long it had been since the console could call home, it seems as though games purchased after March 2026 will need to connect to PSN servers at least once every 30 days in order to be playable.

Ubisoft just confirmed a recent rumor that it would host a reveal event for Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced before the end of April in a tongue-in-cheek post on X. The post, which contains a video with the opening quote "Gaming's worst-kept secret," confirms that the Assassin's Creed: Black Flag remake will be officially revealed on April 23 during a worldwide reveal showcase on the Ubisoft YouTube channel. The event will start at 16:00 UTC (18:00 CEST, 9:00 PDT).

This is around the time that previous leaks predicted the game would be announced, lending credence to the predicted early July release date. It was previously rumored that Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced would be revealed as early as April 16, but that launch date was seemingly pushed back, as were many things during the recent Ubisoft reshuffle.

NVIDIA's latest DLSS 5 technology has faced a significant community backlash, with its approval rating dropping considerably. On the published YouTube video, NVIDIA's official DLSS 5 announcement has received an overwhelming 83.7% dislikes, with only 16.3% likes. This is a substantial negative rating, with 16,107 likes and 82,515 dislikes (and counting) on a video with 1,527,915 views at the time of writing. Other videos published by the NVIDIA GeForce YouTube channel have also recorded surprisingly low approval from the community. The Resident Evil Requiem video only scored a 14.9% positive rating, while Starfield had an 18.2% positive ratio of likes to dislikes. Other demos such as Hogwarts Legacy and EA Sports FC saw positive ratings of 18.7% and 14.5%, respectively. The best rating is now exclusive to a tech demo, not even a real game, which is the Zorah Unreal Tech Demo with a 37% positive ratio.

Gamers' reactions are shifting negatively towards the technology, while NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang famously noted that gamers are "completely wrong" because these games offer massive programmability and controllability in how DLSS 5 is applied, keeping the artistic intent intact. However, according to game developers from both Capcom and Ubisoft who spoke to Insider Gaming, while the individual studios may have been involved in marketing DLSS 5, the teams who worked on them were just as surprised by the results as the rest of the gaming community. A Ubisoft developer is quoted as saying, "We found out at the same time as the public," while developers at Capcom expressed similar sentiments, stating that it was surprising to see Capcom, which has generally been protective of its IPs when it comes to AI involvement, getting involved in the marketing for DLSS 5. Furthermore, the Capcom developers expressed concern about how DLSS 5 might change Capcom's approach to generative AI and its role in game development.

Jeff Kaplan, formerly a Blizzard executive, recently announced both a new studio and a new game, The Legend of California, which is slated to launch in 2026. Since the game's launch, the reception has been somewhat mixed, but that seemingly hasn't dampened the spirits of the studio or its executive. In a recent 10-hour livestream of The Legend of California, Kaplan addressed some of the negative comments he'd seen online, mainly taking aim at players who were criticizing the game, but who he seems to think weren't the target market in the first place.

The specific demographic that spurred Kaplan's comments were Overwatch players who have had what he describes as a "nerd rage-out," and expressing their frustration at Kaplan's chosen genre, visuals, or game design for The Legend of California. In response to these players, Kaplan said "if a game comes out, and you don't want to play it, and you've never played it, shit the f**k up---no one cares. We don't need to hear that you aren't into it." He goes on to question the reasoning behind players voicing their opinions on a video game they're never going to play, asking "Who cares about my opinion if I'm not going to play it, and if I've never played it? Why does my opinion matter on that?"

Given the current state of the gaming industry, rumors have started to emerge about the next-gen gaming console launches, with previous rumors claiming that the PlayStation 6 would launch alongside a new standalone PlayStation Portable gaming handheld, and that the PS6 would have less graphical processing power than the upcoming Xbox console. In a new post on YouTube, ubiquitous leaker and industry insider, Moore's Law is Dead, claims that the PS6 Orion—the living room console—will feature 2.5-3× the rasterization performance of the PS5 and 6-12× the ray tracing performance of the PS5, or 3-6× faster ray tracing than the PS5 Pro and roughly twice the raster performance of the PS5 Pro. This is thanks to a significantly faster RDNA 5 GPU with 52-54 CUs running at around 2-3.6 GHz and delivering around 34-40 TFLOPS of theoretical performance.

The leaker also shot down rumors that recently surfaced claiming that the PlayStation 6 may be delayed to as late as 2029 due to the ongoing memory crisis, stating that the nature of memory and APU fabrication contracts make it unlikely that the PS6 will be delayed that long. Instead, we may see a brief period of increased pricing or scarcity at launch. Apparently, according to his sources, Sony has a contract with TSMC to start mass-producing the PS6 as early as Q2 2027. MLID also mentions the AMD "Canis" APU slated to arrive in the PS6 handheld console, claiming that it will feature four Zen 6c cores, two Zen 6 LP cores (for running the operating system), and 16 RDNA 5 CUs running at 1.6-2 GHz with a 15 W total board power, all being fed by LPDDR5X memory over a 192-bit bus. All of this will allegedly be targeting 1080p gameplay with a significantly higher power limit when docked. He also speculates that the handheld will feature "vastly better" ray tracing than the PS5.

Thermal Grizzly announced its TG Delidded CPUs, which would see the company sell delidded AMD Ryzen 9000 CPUs for enthusiast use with direct-die cooling solutions. The program started with the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and has since expanded to include the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, with the latest addition being the recently released AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D. The delidded 9850X3D comes in at $876.33 on the Thermal Grizzly store, which is a marked increase over the $500 MSRP, but it also includes a warranty in the case of any manufacturer defects or issues that might arise during the delidding process. The aforementioned warranty is valid for two years and covers material defects of the CPU and even extends to overclocking within manufacturer spec, as long as adequate cooling is provided. It does not cover any physical or liquid damage to the silicon, SMDs, or the PCB.

[Editor's note: Our in-depth review of the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D is now live]

Roman Hartung, aka Der8auer, famous overclocker and CEO of Thermal Grizzly, published a YouTube video demonstrating the delidding process and documenting potential performance and thermal improvements as a result of delidding and direct-die cooling. In the video, Hartung tests the 9850X3D in Cinebench R23, demonstrating a 90.2° C peak temperature on one CCD, with the average die temperature getting as high as 88.1° C with a peak power draw of 182.35 W in the 10-minute CPU benchmark run. Individual peak CPU core temperatures ranged from 78 to 88.2° C, whereas after applying liquid metal and a direct-die cooling solution resulted in peak CPU core temperatures of 66.1-75.3° C and a peak average CPU temperature of 75.3°C—temperatures were down around 15° C across the board following the delid. Power draw was slightly lower during this test, at 178.09 W peak package power, although the same settings were applied in BIOS ahead of the tests. Hartung also goes on to test the overclocking capabilities of the delidded CPU on the direct-die cooling solution, which can be seen in the video below.

Marathon is slated to launch on March 6, 2026, but a handful of influencers in China have apparently already been testing the game out ahead of the official launch, according to a post on Reddit and UCG on YouTube. The post and YouTube review detail some of the reports from the hands-on testing, revealing both in-game content and some first impressions about gameplay. First off, it's notable that the game has received a massive visual overhaul in terms of assets and UI, which is something the Marathon dev team has already shown off in previews and gameplay teasers, but the game world is overall much darker and more mysterious. The first-hand experiences in the post claim that there is deep world-building with a focus on the narrative and personalities in the game. The PvE is reportedly "extremely challenging," with enemy AI proactively calling in reinforcements to keep up the pressure, offering players little rest between combat encounters.

That's not to say players should expect to be getting buddy-buddy with other players, since the loot game pushes players to see each other as an easy way to grab loot. The reviewer also suggests that Marathon will seemingly emphasize the late game experience rather than encouraging early PvP and combat. Players are instead encouraged by the game systems to focus on completing missions, levelling up base stats, and upgrading gear before heading into combat situations. According to the reviewer, there will be decent variety when it comes to weapons and skills, and the skill balance is well tuned between the seven different character classes we know of so far. There are apparently 28 guns in the game, each with at least two skins, and the ability to change the gun model in some cases. Some additional information posted in the comments from the Chinese game event claim that there will be "more verticality than players expect," and that completing faction quests can unlock permanent map shortcuts between zones. There is also apparently an in-game creature called the Anomaly, which will be able to reshape the map mid-game. One source also claims that, in one game, there were three teams of six players each, bringing it up to 18 players per match.