TechPowerUP NEWS

[NextPowerUP]

AEWIN is glad to launch our new member of AEWIN Network Expansion Modules, the NCT404. Built upon two Intel latest E610-XAT2 ethernet controllers, it provides quad-port 10GbE RJ45 with two pairs of Gen 3 bypass. It is full-height half-length PCIe CEM with PCIe Gen 4 x8 signals. NCT404 is compatible with AEWIN platforms and off-the-shelf systems for flexible configurations and optimized network resilience.

Intel new released E610-XAT2 features over 50% lower power consumption compared to previous generation controller (X710-AT2) which helps to lower operational costs in the meantime. In addition, Intel committed over 10-year full support lifecycle which makes it perfect to build new projects that are expected to have long-term support. For enhanced ethernet security, Intel E610-XAT2 features a hardware Root of Trust (RoT) for firmware resiliency.
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[NextPowerUP]

Dimension-hopping developer Behaviour Interactive (Dead By Daylight) and rocket-jumping publisher Devolver Digital (BALL x PIT, Baby Steps) have joined forces to unveil Serious Sam: Shatterverse via today's Xbox Partner Preview showcase. This multiversal multiplayer FPS is based on the adventures of boomer shooter legend Sam 'Serious' Stone - whose over-the-top run-and-gun classic, Serious Sam: The First Encounter, celebrates its 25th birthday this year - but with an oh-so-modern roguelite twist.

Serious Sam: Shatterverse is a co-op FPS where five players can team up, blast through shifting universes, stack wild boons, bend the rules with run modifiers and hunt the deadliest forces of Sam's relentless arch-nemesis, the villainous Mental.
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[NextPowerUP]

DEEPX, a Seoul-based fabless semiconductor company developing ultra-low-power AI inference chips for physical AI applications, has secured 27 commercial purchase orders across eight countries within seven months of starting mass production of its first-generation AI chip—a pace that industry observers describe as highly unusual for an emerging fabless company at such an early stage of commercialization.

The orders span seven major Physical AI application domains, including robotics, smart factories, edge AI servers, industrial AI, surveillance, AI IT services, and smart cities, with deployments now active across Asia, North America, and Europe.
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[NextPowerUP]

GIGABYTE Technology, one of the top global manufacturers of motherboards, graphics cards, and hardware solutions, today announced the release of its new AMD AGESA 1.3.0.0a BIOS, bringing full support and performance optimization for the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition processor across GIGABYTE's entire AM5 800 Series and 600 Series motherboard lineup.

The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition processor doubles the L3 cache stacked below the processor cores, delivering a massive leap in data-intensive and latency-sensitive workloads. GIGABYTE's latest BIOS is specifically tuned to unlock the full potential of this expanded cache architecture.
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[NextPowerUP]

ASRock, a global leader in motherboards, graphics cards, gaming monitors, small form factor PCs, and power supply units, today announced that its AM5 motherboards fully support the newly launched AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition Processor. The newly introduced AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition processor offers more cache than ever, making it the ideal processor for creators and developers.

ASRock's AM5 motherboard is able to support the newly launched processors by simply downloading and installing the latest BIOS from the ASRock official website. In addition to downloading BIOS updates from the official site, users can also take advantage of BIOS Flashback and Instant Flash for quick and convenient upgrades. ASRock strongly recommends updating to the latest BIOS version to ensure optimal compatibility and performance.
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[NextPowerUP]

Philips today introduced the Envia 32M2N8900X, a high-end planar-format gaming monitor. The 31.5-inch monitor uses a high refresh-rate QD-OLED panel. You get 4K Ultra HD (3840 x 2160 pixels) resolution at 240 Hz refresh-rate, and 0.03 ms response time. The 32M2N8900X offers VESA DisplayHDR TrueBlack 500 certification thanks to its QD-OLED technology and 515 nits maximum brightness at 10% APL, and 1000 nits peak brightness in HDR at 3% APL. Color gamut includes full sRGB, and 99.5% DCI-P3, with delta E

[NextPowerUP]

If you've been anywhere near the PC gaming industry recently, you'll have heard time and time again about companies increasing prices or delaying products due to memory shortages and price increases. While those price increases have affected the current-gen gaming consoles, with the PS5 Digital Disc Edition getting two €50 price increases in 2025, leaker @GyoJvfr on X has revealed that steeper price increases for the PlayStation 5 may be on the horizon, courtesy of a retail source.

According to the leaker's source, the entire line-up of current PlayStation hardware—even the PlayStation Portal—will see a price hike "soon," although the leaker does not have an exact price to share. Following the price hike, the PlayStation 5 Slim will cost €649.99, up from €549.99, while the PS5 Pro will increase from €799.99 to €899.99, and the PlayStation Portal will cost €249.99, up from €219.99. It's worth mentioning that it's unclear exactly how widespread the price increase will be, but recent hardware price increases have been global. No price increase was mentioned for the PS5 Digital Slim Edition, but presumably, it will also receive a €100 price increase.

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[NextPowerUP]

V Rising is one of those indie games that found a niche and excelled at delivering what its player base asked of it, earning a Very Positive Steam user review score of 89%. That being the case, players have been clamoring for a sequel or its successor. In a recent blog post, however, Stunlock Studios revealed that it would not be making a sequel to V Rising, stating that "the journey to Dracula is a complete one as it stands." Instead, the game studio is working on a new game in the same universe as V Rising, although it's still early days, so it did not share much else about the game.

Being that the new Vampire game will still take place in the same universe as V Rising, it seems logical to conclude that it will be a spiritual successor, but Stunlock also calls the new game "our most ambitious project yet in our 15-year history of making games." Not much else has been revealed about the successor to V Rising, but the studio has also commented that the new game is being designed around the studio's ambitions, commenting that "while the core workings of V Rising are strong and have allowed us to construct a wonderful bastion of dark Vampire delights, that foundation can also be limiting." This suggests something more than a few extra mechanics, better graphics, a longer story, or a bigger world, and the game studio later said that "Our next game will invite you to explore your darkest whims in a world of greater depth, danger, and mystery than ever before," suggesting that there will be more to it than the current survival RPG genre V Rising slots into.

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[NextPowerUP]

Razer, the leading global lifestyle brand for gamers, today unveiled the Razer Pro Type Ergo, an ergonomic wireless keyboard designed to make long hours at the desk feel more natural and less fatiguing, while helping users get more done with less effort.

Pro Type Ergo is Razer's answer to a productivity market that has barely moved: a split-ergonomic keyboard that feels familiar from the first keystroke, cuts strain over time, and builds powerful workflow tools directly into the layout. For professionals who live on their keyboard, it is built to support comfortable, focused work all day, every day.
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[NextPowerUP]

Eidos Montreal announced earlier this week in a LinkedIn post that it was laying off 124 of its employees and that its studio director, David Anfossi was leaving. The studio explained that the layoffs are a result of necessary cost-cutting measures and evolving project needs. The layoffs would affect both production and support teams, and the studio says that they are necessary cuts to allow the studio to concentrate its efforts where it can be most effective. Now, new reporting seems to suggest that the layoffs may have been partially caused by a game whose budget had ballooned and caused financial strain in the studio.

Following the layoffs, Insider Gaming reports that Eidos, who had previously worked on Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, has also cancelled Wildlands, an in-development open-source action-adventure game that the studio had been working on for seven years. The publication reports that WIldlands had had a somewhat troubled development cycle prior to its cancellation, with the team having gone through four different game engines and burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in budget. These reports are further backed up by Jason Schreier's comments on Reddit. Further, according to Insider Gaming's sources, the game was in the debugging phase and nearing completion before Embracer, Eidos's parent company, shut it down.

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[NextPowerUP]

The Intel Binary Optimization Tool (BOT) has been launched alongside the "Arrow Lake Refresh" series of processors, which includes the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus models. While the tool is beneficial for gamers looking to extract a few extra frames from their setups, it may be a nightmare for makers of benchmarking tools like Geekbench by Primate Labs. Recently, Primate Labs testing found that BOT changes the way .exe applications run and concluded that Geekbench runs will now flag these BOT-enhanced runs. However, in deeper testing, Primate Labs discovered that Intel's BOT may deliver significant boosts in some applications like Object Remover and HDR, increasing performance by up to 30%. This is thanks to the deep vectorization that the BOT performs behind the scenes to optimize performance.

For example, Primate Labs used Intel's own Software Development Emulator (SDE) to measure how many instructions were executed and which types of instructions the program executed. Without BOT, Geekbench 6 required a total of 1.26 trillion instructions to finish, while a BOT-enhanced run completed with 1.08 trillion instructions. This is an impressive 14% reduction. However, when examining the execution by type, we see that BOT makes heavy use of vector instructions like SSE2 and AVX2. The number of scalar instructions needed to execute a program fell from 220 billion to 84.6 billion, while the number of vector instructions increased from 1.25 billion to 18.3 billion, a 13.7x increase. This means that Intel BOT finds a way to turn inefficient scalar code into vectorized instructions that are processed much more efficiently inside Intel CPUs. These techniques indicate a very complex behind-the-scenes process than was originally believed. The Geekbench v6.7 update will include a flag for BOT, allowing future Geekbench results to be easily distinguished as BOT-enhanced or not.
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[NextPowerUP]

Blaze Entertainment is proud to announce the Evercade Nexus, the newest retro gaming handheld console from Evercade. Evercade continues to champion physical cartridges as the medium to relive the classic gaming experience, bringing more top-quality names to the ever-growing ecosystem with Rare's Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie included. The latest iteration of the Evercade gaming experience draws on the feedback of Evercade fans and the demands of gaming in the current age, while also keeping the simplicity and ease of use that Evercade provides, and the continuing commitment to the nostalgia and experience of using and collecting physical cartridge media.

The Evercade Nexus is built to play with an ultra-bright 5.89" screen, the biggest ever screen on an Evercade, with a peak brightness of over 500 nits. The new, larger design allows for dual analogue sticks, giving Evercade players the full experience of 64 and 32-bit games, and helping recreate the feel of arcade-style gaming in your hands. All of this in a new larger form factor that is still light and comfortable to use and travel with, and a sleek new look with a black color scheme and a customizable RGB light-up logo.
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[NextPowerUP]

Since the launch of the Steam Deck and the subsequent competing Windows gaming handhelds, Microsoft has been working on improving its UI for gaming consoles, culminating with the recent adoption of the Windows Full Screen Experience, which was later renamed to Xbox Mode. The latest update to Microsoft's gaming experience, however, comes by way of the Xbox app and its overlay, as spotted by ROGAllyLife. These new features will be available to everyone using compatible hardware and the Xbox app, although they are still in the preview version of the app, so they may only reach mainline status in a few weeks. The biggest update is a new display widget that was added to the Xbox Game Bar overlay, which adds controls like display refresh rate, resolution, projection mode, and Auto Super Resolution, allowing users to test different display configurations without leaving their games.

Users can now also change notification placement in the Xbox app, allowing them to see notifications without completely disrupting the gaming experience. The Xbox app now allows for eight notification placement options—three positions along each screen edge—and this can also be customized from the Game Bar overlay instead of necessitating a potentially game-breaking app switch. These updates are just the most recent in Microsoft's efforts to make handheld gaming more feasible on Windows, but it remains to be seen how Microsoft will change the regular Windows 11 experience after its recent promise to address quality and usability complaints.

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[NextPowerUP]

AMD has quietly renamed its Anti-Lag 2 technology as part of the FSR package, now calling it "FSR Latency Reduction 2.0." This move aligns with AMD's recent trend of rebranding FSR-related technologies. The AMD Radeon marketing team has successfully unified FidelityFX Super Resolution under the FSR branding, although Anti-Lag 2 was previously an exception, bundled with other AMD technologies. The advanced graphics technology, once known as FidelityFX Super Resolution, is now simply called "FSR." This change is reflected on AMD's official product page, which notes that FSR stands for "formerly AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution." However, AMD has not formally announced this rebranding. These changes occurred before the official launch of the FSR "Redstone" product in late December last year. Now, every new announcement features the standard FSR language, suggesting that this renaming might be part of a broader update to Anti-Lag 2.

Since FSR is aimed at gamers, it is now included in the FSR package as "FSR Latency Reduction 2.0." With FSR Redstone, AMD has already grouped four technologies under the FSR "Redstone" name: FSR Upscaling, FSR Frame Generation, FSR Ray Regeneration, and FSR Radiance Caching. If the renaming becomes more than just a label update, FSR Latency Reduction 2.0 could become the fifth component of the FSR "Redstone" suite. Technologies like AMD Anti-Lag 2 are specifically designed to reduce latency by improving CPU and GPU coordination. Even without frame generation, it can lower latency in a game, but it may be especially useful when synthetic frames are involved, helping to keep latency at a level where any added delay is far less noticeable.
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[NextPowerUP]

We continue to improve our Kymera desktop line, not only in hardware but also in the way you can explore and configure each system. We are presenting new product pages for our lines, along with the return of one of the most requested formats by the community.

Kymera Cristal: power you can see
The Slimbook Kymera Cristal features a design that doesn't hide its power, it showcases it. Thanks to its tempered glass front and side panels, every component of the system becomes part of the design, proudly displaying the hardware with precision. This is a solution aimed at those seeking a system that combines extreme performance with striking aesthetics. From RGB-lit configurations to more understated setups, Kymera Cristal allows you to create an environment that reflects your style.
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