APC

It’s all happening, people. The sheer volume of truly exciting and legitimately next-gen components hitting the market right now is stupendous. Never mind the unfortunate reality that some are in extremely short supply, that will sort itself out and we don’t think that situation will last long. AMD’s hit a double home run with its Radeon 9070 XT GPU and Ryzen 9950X3D CPU. The 9070 XT is a legitimate contender for the mid-range crown – especially when stacked up against Nvidia’s also-new 5070/Ti GPU. We’ve got them all reviewed in this issue, with Lindsay running Olympic-pace days of benching, writing and deep contemplation. Also new is the simultaneous arrival of both Intel and AMD’s new budget to mid-range motherboard platforms. Intel’s B860 and AMD’s B850 may be awkwardly similarly named…

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Everything you need to know from the month in tech Xbox thinks AI can make you a better gamer. Xbox has announced its new “Copilot for Gaming”, dropping the news on The Official Xbox Podcast. A new AI assistant for console, mobile, and perhaps PC, Copilot for Gaming promises to help with all parts of the gaming experience – from picking a new game, to picking up where you left off in an old save file, to getting good at skill-based games. Fatima Kardar, Xbox’s CVP of Gaming AI, and Jason Ronald, VP of Next Generation, joined Xbox’s in-house podcast to explain what an AI assistant for consoles looks like. Copilot for Gaming comes as a way to help address common pain points for gamers, like returning to an old…

Is this just another label for the same old AI hype? Well, yes and no. If you ask a passerby in the street what AI means to them, their answer might in fact be a definition of AGI – short for artificial general intelligence. The term refers to an AI that’s so broad and versatile that it can mimic the intelligence and functions of a human. To be clear, though, a genuine AGI wouldn’t be just a dumb copycat – it would be a free-thinking entity in its own right. How does this differ from the various types of AI we have today? The idea of emulating organic intelligences is a fundamental step beyond the workings of ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Natural systems learn by gaining and losing connections in…

It’s a universally accepted truth that Xbox is running a distant last behind Nintendo, Sony and Valve in the race for gaming platform domination. As a result, Microsoft has spent the last six months trying to convince the world that platforms don’t actually matter. Xbox is something that can be enjoyed everywhere, on anything. Xbox is its library, its developers, its subscription service and its cloud streaming. Xbox is not its poorly-selling console, no siree. In other words, Xbox really wishes it were Valve right now, and to put emphasis on this, it looks like an Xbox handheld may be released before the year is out. According to The Verge, efforts are underway to basically merge Xbox’s OS with Windows, and to allow OEMs to host that hybrid on their…

Nvidia’s Blackwell RTX architecture has been unleashed and I’ve now had plenty of one-on-one time with the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, and I want to talk more about Multi Frame Generation (MFG) in particular, because it’s a major marketing bullet point for the RTX 50-series GPUs. Where DLSS 3 interpolates one frame between two rendered frames, MFG can generate one, two, or three frames. Nvidia calls this MFG 2X, 3X, and 4X modes, with the last being “up to twice as fast” as 2X framegen. A factor in making MFG work is that the AI network needs to run faster than before. Plenty of games with DLSS 3 support seemed to hit a bottleneck with the OFA fixed function hardware, yielding less than stellar improvements in frame rates. My…