Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM), in collaboration with Siemens, announced new research aimed at advancing IBM's nanostack architecture, a new transistor architecture unveiled by IBM earlier this year. The collaboration will bring together IBM's leadership in semiconductor device innovation and Siemens' expertise in electronic design automation (EDA), process simulation, lithography optimization, and advanced manufacturing software to accelerate the development of nanostack.

Nanostack is the industry's first known three-dimensional, nanosheet-based design, vertically stacking and staggering transistors to pack more transistors onto a chip, with nearly 100 billion transistors in a space the size of a fingernail at its current 7 angstrom node. The design also unlocks the use of different material combinations within each stacked layer to optimize performance and power efficiency of each transistor independent of the other. These innovations power substantial leaps in energy efficiency, performance, and SRAM scaling.

In the weeks leading up to publication, a number of software engineers and modders have decompiled and recompiled games, unlocked mods, and accelerated game emulation, resulting in everything from a browser-based Fallout: New York game to full PlayStation 5 game ports using AnyPS5. It seems as though Microsoft has now taken notice of the uptick in these AI-accelerated game mods and unofficial port projects and launched Xbox Labs in response.

In a recent email shared by Xbox CEO, Asha Sharma, she explains that the rapidly accelerating pace of game and mod development that has been a result of these AI "experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry," and that "it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators." The motivation behind Xbox Labs appears to be to get out ahead of these AI projects and "turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience."

Despite launching in early access in 2013, RimWorld's developer, Ludeon Studios has just started a switch away from the Unity game engine to its own in-house Waylith engine with update 1.7. In a new blog post, the developer notes that the switch away from Unity could result in performance improvements of "2-4×," while claiming an identical gameplay experience.

In the studio's in-house testing, game load time, startup time, world and map generation, and general tick-per-second performance all saw significant performance improvements. A stress test with a "late game colony" saw a performance improvement of 2.2×, although the studio didn't exactly share test parameters beyond that. Load times of a mod pack with 1,500 mods also improved from 14 minutes to 6 minutes. The studio notes that individual performance improvements on the new engine will depend on PC specs, but those are promising improvements if scaling holds up.

Epic Games has long been supportive of putting more generative AI into its game development processes, with the gaming giant previously revealing an ever-increasing number of generative AI features in Unreal Engine, as well as plans to create Fortnite characters with AI—which resulted in Vampire Survivors developer, Poncle, pulling out of a Fortnite collaboration with Epic Games. More recently, a report by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier claims that insiders at Epic Games say the studio will be transitioning to an AI-first game development workflow.

Reportedly, the staffer was told by a senior that there would be "no more handwritten code," and that all art would be "generated with full AI workflows." Epic's shift to AI-first coding and game art will start with an unannounced Disney shooter that was delayed but was originally planned for a March 2027 launch, according to the publication. The shooter is slated to feature characters from both Marvel and Star Wars franchises, and it will now be produced largely with Anthropic's Claude AI suite, with humans reviewing work. Jake Jones, communications director at Epic Games, told Bloomberg that "we're embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do."

Taiwanese outlet BenchLife has added more detail to last week's report that NVIDIA is pulling GB202 silicon away from the GeForce RTX 5090. According to BenchLife, board partners are no longer receiving GB202 chips for RTX 5090 production. The same applies to the China-specific RTX 5090 D and RTX 5090 D V2 variants. NVIDIA hasn't said anything officially yet. Apparently, the company doesn't see this as an end-of-life (EOL) move either, since the chips are simply being shifted to more profitable GB202-based RTX PRO cards like the RTX PRO 6000 and the recently unveiled RTX PRO 5500. In the meantime, any RTX 5090 cards still reaching shelves are built from chips partners already have. The card immediately sold out at Walmart for $4,299 last month, so buyers shouldn't expect prices to come down anytime soon.

The RTX 5080 part of the story is a bit more interesting. BenchLife says NVIDIA plans to launch an RTX 5080 with 24 GB of GDDR7 in the first quarter of 2027, replacing the current 16 GB model. However, board partners have yet to receive any development material for it. So far they've only been told verbally that it should arrive soon. That's odd, considering partners reportedly had RTX 50 SUPER silicon in hand back in July, before GDDR7 pricing put that launch on hold. We still don't know if the RTX 5080 24 GB and the long-rumored RTX 5080 SUPER are the same card. A Q1 2027 window would make CES in January a likely stage, though that's guesswork for now.

Nex Computer is the company behind the NexPhone, an upcoming smartphone that doubles as a pocketable computer running Android, Linux, and Windows 11. While the project was first announced a whole 14 years ago, Nex Computer recently published a development blog update revealing a Q1 2027 launch, indicating that the NexPhone will launch around March 2027.

Our estimated shipping window is now the end of Q1 2027 (March 2027). New preorders are priced at $599, and the device price remains protected for customers who reserved at either $549 or $599. NexPhone is now running Android 17 on development devices, with continued Linux and Windows development.

Vince "KINGPIN" Lucido has blamed NVIDIA for the troubled launch of the EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti KINGPIN, the last graphics card to carry his name. In the first video on his new Overclocking Kingpin YouTube channel, the overclocker said he wanted the card to have two 12VHPWR power connectors, while NVIDIA wanted it limited to just one. The disagreement, in his words, "really screwed up the production timeline", and he also holds it responsible for how few units were made afterward. The card did eventually ship with both 16-pin connectors when it went on sale for $2,500 with a bundled 1600 W power supply, about three months after the RTX 3090 Ti itself came out. This is only Lucido's side of the story, and it isn't clear why NVIDIA pushed for a single connector.

In September 2022, EVGA ended its partnership with NVIDIA and stopped making graphics cards, with CEO Andrew Han pointing to a souring relationship between the two companies. Every card in development was canceled, KINGPIN models included. Lucido is now working with ASUS, which sent over the hardware shown in the video, although no ASUS-made KINGPIN card has been confirmed. He did lay out one condition for such a card: the PCB and power delivery have to let the GPU reach its full potential under liquid nitrogen without the buyer modifying anything. An earlier plan with PNY never produced a card, and Lucido ended up skipping the RTX 50 generation entirely.

The recent Silent Hill franchise revival, which gained momentum with Silent Hill f and more recently Silent Hill Townfall, appears to have been a risk worth taking, and Konami has no plans of stopping or slowing down, according to producer, Motoi Okamoto, in an interview with Famitsu (via Game Observer).

[Editor's note: Our in-depth review of Silent Hill Townfall is now live]

Okamoto explains that the studio is satisfied with the performance of the three Silent Hill releases since the revival's announcement in 2022, which was a "relief," since the studio took some convincing on his part to let him release the first three games—referring here to the Silent Hill 2 remake, Silent Hill Townfall, and Silent Hill f. Now, thanks to the success of what he calls the first wave of Silent Hill games, Konami is already planning both a second and third wave of games, although he declined to give further details on what those games would be, other than that Konami is working on "a number of projects."

Microsoft says "hundreds" of AAA and indie games will run on NVIDIA RTX Spark PCs from day one, though Call of Duty will not be one of them. Windows and Devices head Pavan Davuluri made the claim at Microsoft's Windows and Surface event on October 7, where he also said Call of Duty support is coming in 2027. Apparently, no reason was given for the wait, and Microsoft didn't say which Call of Duty title they meant. That is an awkward gap, since Activision is a Microsoft-owned studio and the RTX Spark-equipped Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599 with shipping set for October 16.

Anti-cheat is probably the holdup, although Microsoft hasn't confirmed that. RTX Spark uses an Arm-based CPU, so games run on Windows on Arm, and kernel-level anti-cheat drivers have to be rebuilt for it. Call of Duty relies on Activision's own Ricochet anti-cheat, which, as far as we know, only works on x86 systems today. Davuluri did show Gears of War: E-Day running at 60 FPS on the Surface Laptop Ultra. However, the resolution and upscaling settings were not disclosed, so the figure says little about real performance. It also isn't clear how many of those "hundreds" of games are native Arm builds and how many run through emulation. NVIDIA released its RTX Spark toolkit for Windows-on-Arm game development in July, and EA, Embark, and Ubisoft committed titles such as Apex Legends, ARC Raiders, and Anno 117: Pax Romana at Gamescom.

AMD has detailed the IBS Memory Profiler, a little-discussed hardware feature in its upcoming Zen 6 processors. AMD engineer Bharata Bhasker Rao presented it at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) 2026 in Prague on October 5. Instruction-Based Sampling (IBS) is AMD's existing profiling hardware, and Zen 6 adds a separate, lighter instance that only samples data memory accesses. Each sample hands the kernel the physical address of the access and shows whether the data came from DRAM or external memory such as CXL. That matters on tiered-memory servers, where Linux has to find frequently used ("hot") pages on slower CXL memory and move them to DRAM. AMD's EPYC 9006 "Venice" chips support memory expansion via CXL 3.1.

Linux currently finds those pages by scanning page tables and trapping page faults. AMD wants to feed the profiler's samples into pghot, a proposed kernel subsystem for hot page tracking. The results, however, are a mixed bag. On a test system with 256 logical CPUs and 256 GB of CXL memory, XSBench ran at 4.57x over a no-tiering baseline against 1.18x for the current method, and Graph500 hit 3.17x against 2.34x. Redis saw no gain, and NAS BT landed slightly behind. Per-folio promotion cost fell from 26.1 to 15.8 microseconds in an overhead test, though that benchmark finished about 5% slower. These are AMD's own numbers, and the slides list no virtualization support for the profiler. The pghot patches are still in development, and EPYC Venice is in production with cloud deployments expected later this year.

Seemingly as part of the ongoing efforts to streamline and polish Steam and SteamOS, Valve has published a new beta update for the Steam client that fixes a handful of issues with the library, Steam Input, the Steam Controller's BLE mode, and Big Picture mode. More notably, with this update, Steam clients installed on Linux machines will automatically set Windows programs added to Steam as non-Steam games to launch via Proton by default.

This change only removes one step in the installation process, but it may help shift the compatibility burden away from the consumer, since they would only have to go digging for the compatibility options if the program doesn't initially launch. This simplification seems to be part of Valve's strategy to bring in more users and more or less goes hand-in-hand with recent changes that give developers more tools to optimize their games for Valve's hardware and SteamOS—again, taking some of the fiddliness out of running Linux and SteamOS by placing optimization in the hands of developers. The full update notes follow.

Gravity Well Studio, a young indie game studio founded and headed up by several Apex Legends and Titanfall veterans, has just announced that it has had to lay off a majority of its staff, totaling over 40 workers, according to a recent LinkedIn post by the game studio. The studio executives explain in the post that the layoffs were necessary because Gravity Well lost its funding and has not managed to secure a new partner.

The studio notes that Gravity Well will continue to "fight for survival," but adds that the future is uncertain. Gravity Well calls itself an "independent AAA game development studio," and the layoffs come before the studio has even managed to launch its first game, which has been in development for six years but has yet to be revealed publicly—aside from two concept images shared on the studio's site.

According to a process development engineer at SK hynix's future technology research institute, who spoke with Damnang, SK hynix is reportedly facing challenges in developing hybrid bonding technology for its HBM memory. These issues are significant enough that SK hynix has not yet begun production of samples, while Samsung has reportedly already sent out samples of HBM manufactured using hybrid bonding to customers. If true, this represents a major setback for SK hynix, whose HBM has held the top spot in global market share by revenue. This could potentially lead to a loss of market share among customers who require higher capacities, better performance, and more advanced technology from their HBM suppliers.

For those unfamiliar, hybrid bonding creates a permanent bond between two silicon chips using embedded metal bumps that are fused together to form a single chip. Multiple dies or entire silicon wafers can be connected by stacking the back ends of two chips together. This technology eliminates traditional chip bumps and directly bonds copper interconnections between the two chips. Essentially, hybrid bonding can create shorter distances, reducing latency and improving performance, lowering signal distortion, and offering many other benefits.

It seems as though the Borderlands franchise still has its hardcore fanbase, with recent projects, like Project Moonshot that merged Borderlands 2 and The Pre-Sequel into one mega-game being just one example. Following that announcement, a developer known as EpicNNG on YouTube and X has revealed that his work on reviving the cancelled China-exclusive Borderlands Online has finally concluded in a functional game.

The project is the culmination of over a year of work by the developer and community members, who used a leaked build of the 2015 game, which was cancelled before it ever launched. Borderlands Online is, as of October 4, 2026, playable for free and available on the dedicated Borderlands Online site. According to the YouTube video announcing the completion of the project, getting Borderlands Online into a playable state required significant efforts, including everything from translation and restoration to UI customization. Borderlands Online features online servers with login and account functionality, and there is an easy-to-follow set of instructions on the project website.

The use of AI-generated art to accelerate video game development is becoming more and more common, with massive game studios like EA and Capcom openly acknowledging that they will be using AI to streamline their game development workflows, despite public outcry about quality and concern for the human cost in an industry already rife with layoffs.

Addressing a question in a recent interview with Nikkei regarding how game production will change in the face of AI, SEGA's senior executive officer and deputy chief business officer, Tsuyoshi Saito, said that the company is already using AI to improve efficiencies at the company, specifically when it comes to business idea generation and publishing processes, but that it will not be using AI for creative aspects of game development.

In early 2026, Valve started giving developers more information about the systems playing their games, starting with optional frame rate reporting for games on the Steam Deck and system specifications in user reviews. It now seems to be expanding that program, according to a new blog post on the Steamworks developer news blog. The update expands Steam Deck frame rate data to show player experience.

With the new data, developers who publish on Steam will be able to access frame rate data as a distribution, effectively showing developers what percentage of the game runs at certain frame rates. Valve says that it is starting with the Steam Deck as a known system configuration, which makes the data easier to interpret and gives Steam a basis to start iterating on the sort of data it collects about game performance. The data itself will be anonymized averages and distribution, in conjunction with the previously available Steam Verified feedback.

Rapidus Corporation today announced that it will establish the Rapidus Collaborative Open Rapid Ecosystem (CORE), a global ecosystem framework to support the development and mass production of cutting-edge semiconductors.

Today, semiconductor development requires more than just manufacturing technology; it is essential to integrate the entire semiconductor value chain—including research institutions, EDA, IP, design and manufacturing—to provide customers with a development and production infrastructure they can rely on. Further, amid a global shortage of cutting-edge semiconductor talent, it is crucial to build a design ecosystem that enables customers to begin development at an early stage by collaborating with design-related companies.

Fallout: New York, a free browser game written with Claude Opus 5.5, is offline after its creator received a cease-and-desist notice from Bethesda. X user Chris First revealed the project on September 28, and the reveal video reportedly passed 3.5 million views. It only lasted a few days, however. Apparently, the notice came from ZeniMax Media, Bethesda's parent company, and said that it is obliged as a trademark owner to "monitor and enforce against the unauthorized and infringing use of its trademarks." The game has since been set to private, and Bethesda hasn't commented publicly so far.

The project was quite ambitious for something an AI model wrote. First claimed 117 locations, 112 characters, and 46 weapons, along with quests, dialogue trees, V.A.T.S., and a working Pip-Boy. It shipped without any texture or sound files, with First saying that "every building, weapon, face, and sound is generated by code." Of course, a game using the Fallout name was always going to get noticed by the lawyers, free or otherwise. Similarly, mere days ago, Take-Two sent a cease-and-desist to a project trying to bring GTA 5 to Android. As for official Fallout games in the pipeline, Bethesda has confirmed four Fallout games in development, and inXile Entertainment is also reportedly working on a new one.

Jagex has announced a fourth RuneScape MMO at RuneFest 2026. It currently goes by the working title RS4, though most people are already calling it RuneScape 4. The game is being built in Unreal Engine, and Jagex hasn't said which version. It's the first numbered follow-up since RuneScape 3 arrived in 2013. A CGI teaser shown at the event has a town in a green valley, floating islands, and a dragon rider being attacked by a three-headed dragon. Jagex says RS4 is in early development with its own dedicated team, and that it is still "a few years away." The studio also isn't ready to talk about platforms.

Interestingly, RS4 didn't start out as a full game. It began as an expansion for RuneScape: Dragonwilds, Jagex's Unreal Engine 5 survival game, and apparently grew into its own project after playtesters asked for a more traditional MMO take on that setting. The expansion was reportedly planned for 2027. The story is said to pick up years after Dragonwilds and starts in the same region, Ashenfall. RuneScape 3, Old School RuneScape, and Dragonwilds will all keep running alongside it. Of course, we don't know yet how monetization will work or whether any progress carries over from RuneScape 3, and I think it'll be a while before we see real gameplay.

Gigabyte today announced the launch of a new 64 GB unified memory version of Gigabyte AI TOP ATOM, expanding its existing 128 GB offering. Available starting October 23, the new configuration retains the hardware design of AI TOP ATOM, based on the NVIDIA DGX Spark platform, giving developers, researchers, and enterprise teams greater flexibility to select the configuration that best fits their AI workloads and memory requirements, while enabling dedicated on-premises AI development environments.

As generative AI and agentic AI applications continue to evolve, model testing, data processing, and application validation are becoming increasingly integral to everyday development workflows. Gigabyte AI TOP ATOM integrates AI computing capabilities into a compact desktop form factor, enabling users to perform model inference, prototype development, and data analysis in offices, laboratories, and educational environments. By running models and processing data locally, users can maintain greater control over development resources and project data while reducing reliance on cloud computing resources.

TDK Corporation (TSE:6762) has successfully demonstrated, for the first time in the world, a direct retinal projection (DRP) display for smart glasses using a meta-optic mirror. The flat mirror uses nanoscale reflectors, measures just 150 nm thick and can be embedded directly into a lens. With a visible-light transmittance of approximately 80 percent, it enables smart glasses with transparency equivalent to that of ordinary eyeglass lenses, giving them a natural appearance suitable for everyday use. TDK will exhibit a prototype at CEATEC 2026, beginning on October 13, 2026, and at electronica, November 10-13, 2026.

TDK has established technologies for an ultra-compact full-color laser module (FCLM), one of the smallest of its kind in the world, and a visible-light full-color laser control device capable of achieving 4K resolution. The company has also been developing the key devices required for DRP in smart glasses. Conventional DRP systems used a curved mirror mounted in front of the user's eye to project images onto the retina, making it difficult to achieve smart glasses with a natural appearance. By arranging unique nanoscale reflectors on a plane and creating a structure that changes the angle of light reflection depending on the position of the mirror, it is possible to reflect laser light incident from various angles at the reflection angle necessary for DRP. Therefore, it is possible to replace conventional curved mirrors.

Almost a year ago, to the day, Valve revealed a new Steam Store UI, which cleaned up much of the storefront's UI and presented an overall more cohesive design that is better suited to the variety of PCs, handhelds, and consoles that Valve now caters to. It appears as though Valve's next upcoming update to the Steam Store UI is more subtle, but may have a more meaningful impact on game discovery, for both developers and gamers, alike. This update also comes shortly after Valve overhauled the Steam handheld and Big Picture mode with the optional Big Art mode.

According to a new post in Steamworks news—Valve's developer news feed—Steam will soon lose the curated Discounts & Events section that appears at the top of users' Steam Store Home pages, which currently shows deal and event placements scheduled by developers or directly by Steam. In its place, Valve will introduce "something more dynamic and personalized for each customer," which Valve says will give more sale and game events a chance at being featured on the Store homepage and throughout Steam. Valve says that, in previous tests of this new methodology, it has been able to show games to 10 times more Steam users than using the old model.

It seems as though the future of Resident Evil remakes is in flux, with it initially being reported that Resident Evil 5 and 6 would not be getting remakes following the expected Code Veronica and Resident Evil 1 remakes. However, comments by Jun Takeuchi, a franchise veteran who has served as executive director, producer, or artist on several Resident Evil games, alluded to Resident Evil remakes that stretch all the way until the modern numbered games.

The comments, out of the recently launched Biohazard 30th Special Mook (via RENews on X), say that Capcom has been developing Resident Evil in two tracks: the numbered titles allow players to experience the ongoing story of the series, while the remake series allows them to experience the past. Someday, the remake series will catch up with the era of the numbered titles, and we are already thinking about what we will do when that happens. It may be the case that there were previously no plans for those remakes but that recent successes with older franchises and remakes have led Capcom to change its mind and commit to more Resident Evil remakes, as was alluded to in a recent press release.

Google has announced that actor Henry Cavill will build a video game on a Googlebook this November, as part of a marketing partnership for its new Android-based laptops. In its blog post, Google describes Cavill as an actor, producer, and tech enthusiast with his own production company and a passion for gaming and fantasy lore, and says he is already using the laptop for personal passion projects. Google hasn't shared the genre, the game engine, who else is involved, or what form the end result will take. Updates are apparently coming through a landing page and an Instagram account. Here's what Cavill had to say about the project.

"When Google reached out to me and explained what they are doing with Googlebook, and all of its new, integrated tools, it had me intrigued. So, I asked for the opportunity to have a play with it ahead of release. After being hands on and spending some time with their team, I believe this has the potential to be the start of something rather special. Time and technology are marching forward at a breakneck pace, this, and all that Google are trying to do with it, has the whispers of the next generation."

Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNPS) today announced a strategic agreement with Amazon to accelerate Amazon's custom silicon innovation and advance the development of increasingly complex AI-powered products and cloud infrastructure. The multi-year agreement marks the expansion of Synopsys' silicon IP business to serve increasing demand for application-optimized IP with Amazon as its lead customer.

Amazon continues to build on its leadership and longstanding investment in a broad portfolio of purpose-built chips, including Nitro for cloud security, network and storage, Graviton for general-purpose computing, and Trainium for AI training and inference workloads. Building on more than 15 years of collaboration, the agreement expands Amazon's use of Synopsys' IP to include application-optimized silicon IP. The agreement also expands Amazon's use of Synopsys EDA, simulation and analysis (S&A), and agentic AI technologies. Synopsys and Amazon will work to accelerate multiphysics solutions on Trainium and Graviton.