Agentic AI is redefining scientific discovery and unlocking research breakthroughs and innovations across industries. Through deepened collaboration, NVIDIA and Microsoft are delivering advancements that accelerate agentic AI-powered applications from the cloud to the PC. At Microsoft Build, Microsoft unveiled Microsoft Discovery, an extensible platform built to empower researchers to transform the entire discovery process with agentic AI. This will help research and development departments across various industries accelerate the time to market for new products, as well as speed and expand the end-to-end discovery process for all scientists.

Microsoft Discovery will integrate the NVIDIA ALCHEMI NIM microservice, which optimizes AI inference for chemical simulations, to accelerate materials science research with property prediction and candidate recommendation. The platform will also integrate NVIDIA BioNeMo NIM microservices, tapping into pretrained AI workflows to speed up AI model development for drug discovery. These integrations equip researchers with accelerated performance for faster scientific discoveries. In testing, researchers at Microsoft used Microsoft Discovery to detect a novel coolant prototype with promising properties for immersion cooling in data centers in under 200 hours, rather than months or years with traditional methods.

The time has come—we're getting ready to share the first look at Marathon in this week's Gameplay Reveal Showcase! Join us on Saturday, April 12 @ 10AM PT from Bungie HQ, where we'll be revealing gameplay for the first time along with a few other surprises. Game director Joe Ziegler, franchise art director Joseph Cross, senior design lead Lars Bakken, gameplay director Andrew Witts, and senior social media manager Andy Salisbury will be sitting down to chat about everything we're sharing, and we'll be doing live Q+A from Twitch chat throughout the show.

Puzzles, decryption, and hacks
Over the last few days, the community has been sluething their way through encrypted puzzles and messages intercepted by the resistance group, MIDA. We'd like to recognize the collaborative hacking efforts of you all here today. Curious what's been happening behind closed signals? Here's the quick recap of what transpired across multiple days, social platforms, and websites.

Developers at Nightdive Studios will be the first to tell you no two projects are alike. Nowhere is this more true than the soon-to-be-released remaster of System Shock 2. Announced six years ago as System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition, Nightdive reannounced the project under a new name—System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster. This name change offered eagle-eyed fans a clue as to the remaster's release window, which is only accurate preceding August 11 when System Shock 2 celebrates its 26th birthday. Sure enough, during today's MIX Spring Showcase, Nightdive shared the exciting news that System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster will release on June 26. As exciting as it's been for System Shock fans to hear they'll soon be able to play Nightdive's long-awaited System Shock 2 remaster, one key question remains: why did it take six years?

Good things take time
Nightdive has been chipping away at its remaster of System Shock 2 in the years following its announcement, working on it in conjunction with other projects. While many of these harbored their fair share of challenges, System Shock 2 was unique in regards to the number and type of complexities the team encountered. One of the biggest according to Nightdive developer Alex Lima was a lack of access to the game's complete source code. To piece everything together, "extensive reverse engineering" was required. "The codebase is a complex amalgamation of various legacy libraries developed by Looking Glass, along with some more recent contributions from both Irrational Games and Looking Glass," Lima explains. "There's virtually no consistent coding standard. As a result, we had to depend extensively on debugging and breakpoints to understand its functionality."

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti graphics cards—built on the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture—are out now, ready to power generative AI content creation and accelerate creative performance. GeForce RTX 5070 Ti GPUs feature fifth-generation Tensor Cores with support for FP4, doubling performance and reducing VRAM requirements to run generative AI models.

In addition, the GPU comes equipped with two ninth-generation encoders and a sixth-generation decoder that add support for the 4:2:2 pro-grade color format and increase encoding quality for HEVC and AV1. This combo accelerates video editing workflows, reducing export times by 8x compared with single encoder GPUs without 4:2:2 support like the GeForce RTX 3090. The GeForce RTX 5070 Ti GPU also includes 16G B of fast GDDR7 memory and 896 GB/sec of total memory bandwidth—a 78% increase over the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti GPU.

BenQ, the globally renowned brand of digital lifestyle devices and pioneer of professional display technology, today announces the upcoming launch of the RD Series, the world's first line of monitors custom-crafted to meet the unique and extensive needs of programmers. Equipped with BenQ-exclusive Fine-Coated Panel (varies by models), with advanced anti-glare, anti-reflective properties designed specifically for coding, RD Series offers devs utter clarity to focus entirely on long lines of code. "As a user-centric company, BenQ is dedicated to prioritising the needs of its users," said Conway Lee, President of BenQ Corporation. "With a sincere commitment to serving the community, we aim to bring innovation to life and pave the way for the future by introducing the world's first programming monitors in the RD Series."

RD Series displays promote programming productivity with an advanced coding mode, delivering crystal-clear fonts for improved code differentiation in both light and dark themes adaptable to diverse development work environments. Accessible at the touch of the dedicated Coding HotKey at the centre of the function bar, the RD Series coding mode readily helps programmers achieve a focused state of flow.

With Mods (short for modifications), you can tailor your gaming experience to your unique preferences. Uploaded by creators all over the world, you can pick between anything to create the city of your dreams. Along with Beach Properties, the first wave of Cities: Skylines II Modding will be available. The Beta release of Modding will initially support Map and Code mods. With the Map Editor, you can make maps with the Terraforming Tools you're used to, import hightmaps to create highly accurate depictions of your hometown, and upload your creations to Paradox Mods.

With the Code Tools, you can show off your coding skills and create Code Mods to meet your heart's desire! Future updates will improve on these tools and come to include support for Asset Mods. As we've talked about before, there will be updates to these tools that we are currently working on, and we will see some updates before the 1.0 release. We will be taking your opinion into consideration when we continue to work on the editor and are looking forward to seeing the feedback that you might have. If you're curious on what the process of Modding will look like you can already check it out on the Cities: Skylines II Wiki here.

Alphabet Incorporated's Google AI division has today revealed a planned update for its Bard conversational artificial intelligence chatbot. The experimental generative artificial intelligence software application will become capable of assisting people in the writing of computer code - the American multinational technology company hopes that Bard will be of great to help in the area of software development. Paige Bailey, a group product manager at Google Research has introduced the upcoming changes: "Since we launched Bard, our experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI, coding has been one of the top requests we've received from our users. As a product lead in Google Research - and a passionate engineer who still programs every day - I'm excited that today we're updating Bard to include that capability."

The Bard chatbot was made available, on a trial basis, to users in the USA and UK last month. Google's AI team is reported to be under great pressure to advance the Bard chatbot into a suitably powerful state in order to compete with its closest rival - Microsoft Corporation. The Seattle-based giant has invested heavily into Open AI's industry leading ChatGPT application. Google's latest volley against its rivals shows that Bard's has become very sophisticated - so much so that the app is able to chew through a variety of programming languages. Bailey outlines these features in the company's latest blog: "Starting now, Bard can help with programming and software development tasks, including code generation, debugging and code explanation. We're launching these capabilities in more than 20 programming languages including C++, Go, Java, Javascript, Python and Typescript. And you can easily export Python code to Google Colab - no copy and paste required." Critics of AI-driven large language models have posited that the technology could potentially eliminate humans from the job market - it will be interesting to observe the coder community's reaction to Google marketing of Bard as a helpful tool in software development.