AMD launched the Gorgon Halo Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 in May 2026, and the powerful new APU seems to finally be making its way into the wider mini PC and laptop market, with Colorful being the latest brand to launch new workstations based on the new AMD silicon. Colorful has launched two new systems under its Colorfire brand: the Lingchuang Mini Pro mini PC, with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495, and the Ryzen AI Max+ 395-powered Lingchuang K16, a new mobile workstation laptop.

Colorful hasn't revealed much about the new mini PC other than that it can be configured with up to 196 GB of LPDDR5X-8533 unified memory, 160 GB of which can be assigned to VRAM to feed the Radeon 8065S. Pricing has not yet been announced, but configurations will start at 96 GB for the Lingchuang Mini Pro. The Lingchuang K16, meanwhile, has been listed on Chinese storefront, JD.com, with a price of ¥34,999, which converts to around $5,218 at the time of writing.

An unofficial, native Android port of Grand Theft Auto 5 is reportedly in development, though it looks like only a small portion of phones will actually be able to run it at launch. The project comes from M0jso of Paralympics Productions, the same developer behind the unofficial GTA 5 port for the original Nintendo Switch that we recently covered. Unlike solutions that run the Windows version through compatibility layers like Winlator, this port is being built to run GTA 5 natively on Arm. It reportedly uses the same base as the Switch port, which itself was built on GTA 5 Legacy 1.0.2699 and the leaked 2023 source code.

Minimum requirements are said to be a Snapdragon 865, 8 GB of RAM, and 65 GB of storage, with support extending up through recent Snapdragon 7 and 8 series chips. The first public build is Snapdragon-only, so Exynos chips (including the 1480, 1580, 2200, 2400, and 2600), Pixel Tensor with PowerVR graphics, and MediaTek Helio chips are apparently left out for now, at least until Mali GPU support gets added later. There's no word on an actual release date yet, and it's still worth treating this as an early and unofficial project until we see it running. However, it is confirmation that GTA 5 will be coming to Android phones pretty soon, if the Nintendo Switch port timeline is anything to go by.

Samsung Electronics today announced it has entered into a strategic partnership with Mistral AI to enhance its semiconductor engineering and manufacturing capabilities that will reinforce its leadership in AI chip technologies. The announcement of the partnership was made during the state summit held in Paris between South Korea and France. Under the agreement, Samsung will integrate Mistral's AI services and solutions—including its flagship large language model, Mistral Large—across its semiconductor operations to develop customized on-premises AI models optimized for intelligence-driven infrastructure.

Mistral's powerful AI platform is expected to provide Samsung with a unique stack of tools that will transform how semiconductors are designed and manufactured. The on-premises enterprise solutions will especially ensure security and flexibility required to process highly sensitive technologies and operational data entirely within the boundaries of Samsung's semiconductor infrastructure, maintaining total control over its mission-critical technologies.

GOG's Game Preservation Program has just surpassed 300 games in its support roster, as of September 8, when it officially added five new games to its list of preserved games. The new additions are Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Armikrog, Descent, Hitman: Codename 47, and Myst. This means that those games will not only be preserved on GOG's servers, but that GOG will put actual software development resources towards making those games playable on modern systems—this often includes support for modern CPUs and GPUs, higher frame rates, and modern display aspect ratios and resolutions that were all previously unsupported.

In addition to the new games, which bring the GOG Preservation Program's library up to 304 total, GOG has announced a partnership with Big Box Collection, another preservation program that aims to preserve physical game art by 3D scanning game boxes and other physical media inside the boxes and storing it online as both a 3D model and a printable format that can be used to recreate the game art. As part of GOG's partnership with Big Box Collection, GOG's new games will also come with those 3D models for viewing on a PC or as printable versions for papercraft recreations. GOG has confirmed that the five new games will have Big Box Collection's art, but it's unclear how far this support extends at the time of writing.

Samsung Electronics and ASML today announced an expansion of their long-standing strategic partnership, deepening collaboration on High NA EUV lithography and advanced semiconductor manufacturing technologies that will help drive the next generation of innovation in the AI era.

Building on years of successful cooperation, the companies will work together to accelerate the development and deployment of technologies that support the increasing performance and efficiency requirements of advanced semiconductor manufacturing.

It's no secret that Riot Games has been working on an MMO set in the League of Legends universe, but there have been questions surrounding the fate of that game, given the poor performance and subsequent cessation of development of 2XKO, its League of Legends-flavored tag-team fighting game. In a new panel at PAX West, Riot Games co-founder, Marc Merrill, addressed a fan question about the future of the League MMO, shedding light on its future.

Merrill basically confirmed that the game is still in development, but his comments also suggest that it hasn't been the easiest genre to develop. "We know what players' hopes and dreams are, and it's on us as a team: Can we exceed in the execution, you know?" He goes on to suggest that the MMO is "the Holy Grail," and that it may be a difficult path, but that "the future's incredibly bright." The YouTube video with the full panel appearance at PAX is embedded below.

Crytek, makers of the legendary, PC-crippling Crysis and The Hunt: Showdown 1896, has seemingly conducted another round of layoffs—making this the second in as many years, following layoffs in February 2025—per reporting by Insider Gaming. The layoffs have not yet been officially announced, but insiders told the publication that the September 2026 layoffs have affected teams in both Istanbul, Türkiye, and Frankfurt, Germany.

According to the reports, a whole quality assurance team, was laid off at the company's Istanbul office, and the layoffs in Germany primarily affected the social media, QA, and publishing teams. The layoffs were described as unexpected, and it is currently thought that at least 30 people have lost their jobs. At the time of writing, the studio's page still lists the "4th installment in the Crysis franchise" as a project in active development, even though that was reportedly put on hold in 2024, as announced by Crytek during the February 2025 layoff press release.

It seems as though gamers excited to hop back into the shoes of a young Geralt of Rivia will have to wait a little longer than anticipated. According to recent comments from CD Projekt Red to Gamespot, the remake, announced in 2022, has taken a back seat, due to the development teams shifting focus to both The Witcher 4, and Songs of the Past, the latest expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

Fool's Theory team is focused mainly on the development of Witcher 3: Songs of the Past, while a relatively small part of their team is supporting the development of The Witcher 4. As we have previously announced, the development on The Witcher Remake has been temporarily integrated with The Witcher 4 due to production process dependencies. As The Witcher Remake will be built on the foundation laid by The Witcher 4, we need to have the necessary assets, tools, and pipelines ready for efficient development.

Since the launch of Borderlands 2, the game's modding scene has been very active, adding a bunch of quality of life improvements and fun tweaks to the genre-defining looter-shooter. One such modder, who goes by Enderkiller124 on X, has been working on implementing some features and characters from Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel in Borderlands 2, since both games take place roughly around the same time, and The Pre-Sequel was built on much of the same underlying tech and engine as Borderlands 2.

The mod, known as Project Moonshot, started out as a way to play The Pre-Sequel characters and laser weapons in Borderlands 2, which has already shown promise, per clips shown off on the modder's X account, but it has since morphed into a full-scale port of The Pre-Sequel into Borderlands 2. Conceivably, this would allow players to play The Pre-Sequel's quests as Borderlands 2 characters and with Borderlands 2 weapons, and vice versa. The mod is not yet complete, but you can follow the development progress on the developer's X account. The modder has already shown off several The Pre-Sequel areas with Borderlands 2 characters and in-game features, like the Grinder crafter in Concordia, The Pre-Sequel weapons working on Pandora, and the full Concordia model and materials rendered in Borderlands 2.

The launch of the Steam Deck and Valve's Proton compatibility layer was something of a watershed moment for Linux gaming. Not only did the handheld gaming PC basically force publishers and developers to consider Linux gaming more than ever before during development, it also made it so that Linux gamers could access a host of games that they may not have been able to before.

According to SteamDB, which tracks all manner of official Valve data, Steam now officially has 30,023 games that are officially listed as "Verified" or "Playable" on the Steam Deck or SteamOS. By ProtonDB's metrics, this number is slightly lower, at 29,988 Verified or Playable. ProtonDB also tracks other interesting metrics, one of which is the percentage of Steam Deck Playable and Verified games that are currently trending. According to those metrics, 40% of the current Steam Top 10 games by concurrent player count are Verified or Playable, with that number jumping up to 46% in the Top 100 games by player count.

Doom: The Dark Ages Revelations is the only story expansion ever launched for The Dark Ages, and it was well-liked by the community, scoring a "Very Positive" review rating on Steam. However, as revealed in a new Insider Gaming interview, the expansion's quality came at a cost to its developers.

According to former Id Software developer, Andrew Willis, "There were two months where I was working something like at least 12 hours every day. I know I hit 17 a couple of days. It was brutal, and the majority of the game got made in three or four months." He adds that the crunch affected everyone on the team, however, he explained that the crunch wasn't mandated by company policy, but that developers were given a workload that was impossible to complete without the crunch.

We recently reported on the open-source overclocking tool, mVolt+, unlocking power limit control on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5000-series GPUs, allowing certain GPUs, like the RTX 5090, to draw up to 125 W of additional power and enabling significantly higher core clock speeds as a result. With the latest driver update 616.56, however, it seems as though NVIDIA has blocked the core power control functionality.

Based on reports from the Overclock.net forums, via Uniko's Hardware on X, any attempt to input any extra current results in a black screen, reminiscent of a driver crash. Reportedly, a beta build of Hydra 2.3 is still able to access its core power overrides on NVIDIA GPUs, even after the driver update. It's unclear if NVIDIA has intentionally blocked mVolt+ or if it's simply an untested combination of mVolt+ and the new NVIDIA driver causing an incompatibility.

A gigantic 12-terabyte archive from Valve's old Steam2 content servers has leaked online, containing internal development builds spanning from 2003 to 2013. The trove includes a July 2009 build of Portal 2 with unused sequences and beta menus, along with assets from F-Stop, the canceled Portal prequel. There's also a playable 2008 build of Left 4 Dead and early Counter-Strike: Global Offensive content.

The most talked-about find is a "Weaponizer" model appearing in the Portal 2 files, long rumored to be a concept weapon from the canceled Half-Life 2: Episode Three. The model has surfaced before, but never inside an actual game build, so its presence here is of some significance. However, it may simply have been repurposed as an unrelated placeholder asset.

As expected, there has been a lot of chatter online about The Witcher 4 since it was announced that the game was in full development at CD Projekt Red. Now, as per an interview Game Developer, CD Projekt Red's Michał Nowakowski has revealed what he meant when he said that the studio had learned from the launch of Cyberpunk 2077: The Witcher 4 already runs on all of the target systems—PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series X|S.

Michał Nowakowski, co-CEO of CD Projekt RedYou come to the studio, you launch Witcher 4 right now. You can launch it on PC. You can launch it on PS5. You can launch it on Xbox Series X, and it's going to run...

Kioxia Corporation, a subsidiary of Kioxia Holdings Corporation (TOKYO: 285A) and Sandisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK) today announced anticipated significant investments in Japan, totaling over $31 billion (approximately 5 trillion yen) contingent upon government support. The investments through 2032 will continue to strengthen the Kioxia and Sandisk partnership, one of the most successful joint ventures across any industry. The partnership has helped drive decades of NAND flash memory innovation and invested over $50 billion (approximately 9 trillion yen) in Japan over the past 25 years. Kioxia and Sandisk will continue to deliver leading technology to support the growing demands of an AI and a data-driven world.

Aligned with market trends, these investments will support the ongoing buildout of infrastructure at the Yokkaichi Plant and the Kitakami Plant, along with related infrastructure, technology. Kioxia and Sandisk each has committed to drive meaningful, multi-year bit growth and ensuring stable supply to address the strong demand for their innovative flash memory technology. In line with these commitments, the announced investments are intended to fuel the joint venture's long-term success and ability to deliver leading-edge flash memory innovations at scale and with stability.

It's no secret that 1047 Games has had a rough time of it lately, with the launch of both Splitgate: Arena Reloaded and its most recent movement shooter, Empulse, marred by low player turn-out. Apparently, things haven't improved, according to a new post on social media from 1047 Games itself revealing that the studio will soon end development on both Empulse and Splitgate: Arena Reloaded.

The studio explains that "neither game is generating enough revenue to support the ongoing cost of dedicated servers," and says that it has "continued covering those costs because we wanted to give both games every opportunity to grow, but we have reached the point where that is no longer sustainable." This news comes after the studio laid off a number of staff following the launch of Empulse. On the bright side, this doesn't necessarily mean players of Empulse or Splitgate: Arena Reloaded will be locked out of their games.

There has been a trend of game studios involving prospective audiences more actively during the development process in the last few years, with Early Access games, like Subnautica 2, being a prime example of this. Now, it seems as though Ubisoft has finally caught on and is soft launching its own version of an early player feedback system in The Player Council. The Player Council is a new initiative by Ubisoft to solicit player feedback during various stages of game development and to give players insight into the development process.

Players who wish to sign up to The Player Council can do so on playercouncil.gg. Initially, the program is soft launching with four games: Codename Split Point, an online 1v1 PvP turn-based tactical game that is currently in the early concept phase; Codename Rook, a single-player strategy game based on tactical decision-making, planning, and calculation; Riders Republic, the already released MMO extreme sports game; and Atomega, a 2017 first-person arena shooter. For the latter two games, Ubisoft is requesting player feedback for upcoming content. Two more games, Codename Decagon and Codename Harlequin, are planned to be added to the program sometime between the launch and December.

Micron Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: MU), the only U.S.-based manufacturer of memory and storage solutions, today opened a 60,000-square-foot Micron Training Center (MTC) in Boise, a strategic investment to strengthen the skilled talent pipeline, support advanced semiconductor manufacturing and expand education and apprenticeship pathways in Idaho.

Located near Micron's Boise campus, this unique, collaborative training facility accelerates new-hire readiness through an intensive onboarding boot camp and hands-on training in fab operations and manufacturing systems. The center also serves as a site for community college students and career seekers pursuing semiconductor pathways through the College of Western Idaho (CWI).

KDE Plasma is by far one of the most popular and recommended desktop environments in the Linux world, and it seems as though the development team has no plans to slow down. In the latest KDE Plasma 6.8 release, which is building to a September beta 1, there are numerous improvements to both performance and user interface that should be included in the eventual October stable launch of Plasma 6.8. The upcoming changes were detailed in the weekly This Week in KDE blog post.

The first change that most people will notice when they first update is that the lock screen now features selectable authentication types and better button alignment. Automatic brightness now also intelligently learns brightness preferences when users manually adjust their brightness. Performance improvements come by way of significantly reduced RAM usage by the Discover background notifier process, improved Plasma login speed, better speed and efficiency of the KWin screenshot functionality, improved screen recording smoothness when recording high-refresh displays.

Despite the game's overwhelming success, Arc Raiders's Expeditions has always been a contentious gameplay mechanic. The challenge offers players a window to complete a challenge and reset their Raider in exchange for permanent player upgrades, like more skill points, additional loot storage, cosmetics, and buffs, but, according to a new post by Embark Studios, Expeditions will be paused after The 5th Expedition, which starts on August 21.

The 5th Expedition window will open on September 8 and close on September 29, and even with this Expedition, Embark has introduced changes to the challenge structure in order to make the character reset less tedious for players who have run more than one Expedition in the past. The studio behind Arc Raiders explains that some of the issues highlighted by player feedback "need more than incremental fixes," and call for bigger changes, which it aims to implement after an Expedition pause, which will last until "early 2027."

Ahead of the game's launch, 2XKO seemed to have a fairly bright future, with gaming giant Riot Games clearly dedicating a decent amount of resources to getting the new tag-team fighting game off the ground. However, shortly after launch, it became clear that the game's audience was not sustainable, and Riot ended up laying off about half of the developers working on the game. Now, just over six months after that round of layoffs, Riot has confirmed that it will be pulling development support from the new game.

In the announcement, Riot says that the game's trajectory "is painting a clear, consistent picture" that the game's retention isn't sustainable. It explained that, while the game started off with decent player counts, those numbers dwindled after players got a taste of the game. The result, thus, is that Riot will stop developing 2XKO in December 2026. However, it's not all bad news, because, while there will be no new content after that date, Riot still plans to add new content to the game before then, and it is not planning on shutting down game servers just yet.

Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) today unveiled Micron Research Labs, a U.S.-based long-horizon premier research institution headquartered in Boise and backed by a planned $10 billion investment over the next decade. Building on Micron's technology and manufacturing leadership, the new hub will bring together customers, academia, government and the broader semiconductor ecosystem to pursue breakthroughs beyond today's technology roadmaps and help define what's possible in the decades ahead. Key research areas include critical memory technologies, advanced memory and compute architectures, packaging and future semiconductor manufacturing.

As the first dedicated memory research hub of its kind in the U.S., Micron Research Labs will center on a flagship Boise campus designed to support advanced research across critical technology domains. The planned investment will also fund extensive university collaborations, global satellite labs and deep ecosystem partnerships, creating a connected research network focused beyond the next generation of technologies for the AI era.

OpenMouse was announced in early August as a new open-source, browser-based mouse configuration software with support for some of the most popular gaming mice around, including brands like Logitech, Razer, Endgame Gear, Pulsar, and the Orbital Pathfinder, but it seems as though the dev team is now expanding into other peripherals.

The official X account for OpenMouse just posted a screenshot of preliminary support for the Wooting 60HE+ gaming keyboard in a development build. It's unclear which features are currently supported, but the dashboard shows the keyboard's connectivity mode—suggesting both wired and wireless keyboards may be in development—firmware version, actuation distance, and Rapid Trigger distance. There are also tabs for Performance, Lighting, Buttons, Profiles, and Advanced. Support for the Wooting 60HE also suggests that Wooting's other keyboards, like the 80HE, should be fairly easy to implement, since they all use the same protocol.

Linux gaming is once again getting gaming performance improvements, this time thanks to scheduler changes scheduled to launch with Linux Kernel 7.3. The merge request noted in a kernel mailing list archive post note several changes to the scheduler that make it more efficient, improve latency, and add support for asymmetric CPU architectures, like Intel's modern mix of P-Cores and E-Cores.

The result of the changes is that low-power PC hardware should see notable improvements to average game FPS, 1% and 0.1% low FPS, and to frame time consistency, all of which should make gaming feel more fluid. In the Shadows Awakening benchmark running via GOG and GE-Proton 10-34 on an Intel Core i7-2600K and AMD Radeon RX 580, average frame rates were improved by 25%, while average frame times were 50% better than before, and minimum FPS jumped from 4.0 to 29.0—a 7.25× boost.

It seems as though even PlayStation, who recently said that it would be doubling down on live-service games, may be feeling the turning negative player sentiment over the live-service gaming industry. A report by Bloomberg claims that PlayStation and Guerilla Games are overhauling Horizon Hunters Gather, the live-service co-op game announced in February 2026, after negative player feedback.

According to insiders, Guerilla Games has been stripping out the live-service aspects of the game in favor of a more traditional co-op gaming approach since June 2026. The resulting game will have a reduced scope and a story mode. It also sounds like the game was on the brink of being cancelled, with the insiders stating that executives told staff in a recent meeting that the team working on the game would have until December to impress executives with the next milestone.