Total War: Pharaoh's release date via Epic Games Store has been delayed into early 2024, but its Steam launch time remains unchanged—it is still scheduled for October 11 (at the time of writing). It seems that Epic Games has added to the development team's pile of homework—Creative Assembly shared this information through its social media account(s): "We have moved the Epic Games Store release of Total War Pharaoh into early 2024. We were recently asked to help support the integration of additional social functions before we can launch on the Epic Games Store," it explains, "and we'll need additional time to help make that happen." Epic's listing simply states that Sega Europe's upcoming turn-based/strategy real-time tactics game will be "Coming Soon."

Customers with pre-orders already placed on the Epic Games Store should be issued notifications regarding automatic cancellations and refunds. Customer support team members will also get in contact regarding existing pre-release purchases. The Total War department apologized for any inconveniences caused, but affected folks are more than welcome to re-direct their cash to another shop: "We're disappointed too, and that we otherwise look forward to welcoming you into Ancient Egypt early next year. Otherwise our plans to launch Total War: Pharaoh on October 11th across all other storefronts remain unchanged, and we're excited to see you playing during our upcoming Early Access Weekend starting next Friday, September 29th."
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(PR) "Airship: Kingdoms Adrift" Launches Skyward on Steam
Hey Skyfarers, it's the day we have all been waiting for—grab your ships and join us in the skies! Airship: Kingdoms Adrift is officially launching on Steam, and we—Revolution Industry—couldn't be more stoked! Before we jump into commanding our ships, we want to send a massive shoutout to all you amazing skyfarers who've been with us every step of the way. We are beyond grateful for your support - you rock!

We're incredibly excited to see how you thrive in the world we have crafted. Whether you're building up a fleet, charting trade routes, or exploring the frontier at your airship's helm, we hope you love each moment as much as we loved creating this world for you to dive into! If you encounter any bugs or have suggestions, we're all ears, and would love to hear from you.
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Similarities Noticed in Arrow Lake & Meteor Lake NPU Drivers
Team Blue's marketing team has kicked into hype mode—Meteor Lake is launching at the tail end of 2023—with a shift in naming conventions comes another rebranding of internal technologies. The previously identified versatile processing unit (VPU) is now going under a different moniker: "Intel will usher in the age of the AI PC with the upcoming Intel Core Ultra processors, code-named Meteor Lake, featuring Intel's first integrated neural processing unit, or NPU, for power-efficient AI acceleration and local inference on the PC. Intel confirmed Core Ultra will launch Dec. 14." Michael Larabel, principal author at Phoronix, has noticed that newly updated versions of the Linux kernel have the "IVPU" accelerator driver bundled in. This will: "support Meteor Lake's VPU/NPU, while a patch is pending to extend that support for next-generation Arrow Lake processors."

In his opinion, there are some shared aspects across the two CPU generations: "Intel's Arrow Lake NPU appears very similar to that of Meteor Lake with the driver enablement coming down to adding new PCI IDs...(with) this patch adding the new Arrow Lake PCI IDs to the existing Meteor Lake driver code paths for this DRM accelerator driver is all that's needed to enable the VPU." Team Blue jumped two generations ahead at this week's Innovation event—Lunar Lake showed up in a live demo. Larabel believes that this late 2024 CPU family will revolve the dial to a greater degree: "The VPU/NPU with Lunar Lake brings more significant changes with the open-source driver changes already underway there. With Lunar Lake is the new VPU4 IP and the Linux 6.6 kernel with its updated IVPU driver already has initial support there."

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