When you’re looking for a phone provider, all the details you need to think about can make your head spin. What’s different about each plan? How does data work? How long is the contract? Are there hidden fees? It’s enough to make you wish someone would come along and just take care of all that for you.

Well, Fizz pretty much does that. It removes all those headaches by allowing you to create a plan that’s tailored to you. There’s no sifting through several different preset options to try to figure out which one fits you best. You’ll decide exactly what your plan looks like, how much it costs, and you don’t have to lock yourself into a contract.

That flexibility without long-term commitment is a big reason why the company has grown in recent years, now offering network coverage across Canada. So if you’re thinking of switching providers, here are some of the primary reasons why you should consider Fizz.

Build Your Plan for Your Life

Everyone’s lives and priorities are different, which means the things they need out of their mobile provider are different. Many providers offer levels of plans that can require you to pay for things you won’t actually use, but Fizz avoids that by letting you create your own plan.

That means you can individually set the levels of your data, coverage, text messages, and call minutes based on your personal preferences. You’ll be able to see the price of your plan as you build it, and there are no surprise fees for activation, overcharges, roaming, or anything else. The price you see is the price you’ll pay, and as long as you stay on that plan, your price will stay the same.

Whatever plan you build, it’s not set in stone. You don’t have to sign a contract or make any other commitment. If things change or you realize you misjudged what you’d need, you can just change the details in a few clicks directly in your account, and your new plan will go into effect when the next payment cycle starts.

Convenience Is King

Fizz is a 100% online company, which means you’ll never have to call anyone or visit a physical location to sign up, activate, or change a plan. You just create an account on Fizz.ca to get started.

You can order a new phone directly through Fizz as well, with options that include iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, Google Pixel, Motorola, and more. You can pay upfront or split up payments over time, or you can bring your existing phone with you to a Fizz plan. All you have to do is check your phone’s compatibility, order your SIM, customize your plan, and activate your SIM. Or if you don’t want to wait, you can activate an eSIM for free. Fizz also offers refurbished phones as an affordable option that are fully inspected, guaranteed to work, and good for the environment.

If you want to make changes to your plan, that’s all done through your online account too. Just like when you first signed up, you’ll see the price of your altered plan in real time before you finalize, so there’s no surprises on your next bill.

Data Doesn’t Die (And Can Be Gifted)

No matter what plan you build or the level of data you choose, unused data doesn’t simply disappear. It automatically rolls over to the next month. Fizz also allows data gifting, so if you realize you’re going to be short on data one month, you can request some from anyone else on the network.

If you’re the generous sort and realize you’re going to have extra, you can gift yours to anyone whose plan includes data. You don’t have to pre-designate friends or family to gift your data to, you can give it to strangers if you want. However, it is important to note that you can’t gift rolled over data, just what is part of your current month’s plan.

Data gifting does more than just give you the satisfaction of knowing you did a good deed, though that part is nice. It also earns you My Rewards points, which is exactly what it sounds like: a rewards program. You can also get points just from signing up for a Fizz account, inviting friends to join, buying a phone, getting add-ons, or any number of other activities.

The more points you accumulate, the more you level up within the loyalty program. This unlocks upgrades and perks, like free mobile data, dollars off your monthly bill, as well as other discounts and benefits.

All in all, Fizz offers a combination of flexibility, customization, and ease of use that’s difficult to match. So if you’re thinking of switching mobile providers and want something that’s tailored to your needs without requiring that you make a long-term commitment, Fizz is worth checking out.

The recently released Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 is both the world’s thinnest (4.5mm unfolded) and lightest (201 grams) foldable, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t tooled up for everything the most committed power user wants to throw at it.

Benefitting from both its 10:16 cover screen and immersive 4:3 main screen when opened, the handheld shapeshifts to suit whatever content you want to enjoy, balancing display immersion and multi-window productivity with its world-class power management.

LARGE-SCREEN ENTERTAINMENT

For those who want to stream movies and tv shows on the go, both screens’ Dynamic AMOLED 2X technology supports HDR10+ content, offering true blacks and high contrast, with high peak brightness thanks to the 3,000 nits displays. The key benefit of the Fold of course being that you can take a big screen experience on the road, within a compact form factor that fits comfortably in your pocket.

Gamers benefit from this too, with that ‘2X’ referring to the screens’ 120Hz refresh rates, and that main screen’s 4:3 display offering greater immersion and FOV whilst giving space for games’ UI’s without them getting in the way of the important action.

What’s more, with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chipset under the hood, you can achieve high-end graphical fidelity without ever having to compromise on performance.

For those who want to tweak things, Samsung’s Gaming Hub gives you plenty of customisability options. The Game Optimisation feature in the Game Booster menu option, for instance, will allow you to instruct the device to prioritise performance. This forces the Snapdragon 8 elite chip to prioritise graphics rendering and frame rate consistency, which should both eliminate micro-stutters in the most intense fast-paced shooters and open-world action RPGs, and optimise battery life for extended play sessions.

There’s also a Labs feature which can force strict 16:9 scale where needed, to ensure games with less-flexible resolution options never crop critical UI elements from your field of view. You can even set up a Game Mode routine which will automatically activate when you launch any game, blocking pop-up alerts and activating do not disturb. We all love hearing from mum, but sometimes a badly-timed interruption can really let the squad down…

MULTI-TASKING

Much has been made of the Galaxy Z Fold8’s ability to offer two-way and three-way split view, thanks to the latest operating system, One UI 9. Whilst this may naturally feel like more of a business-use benefit, it actually comes into its own when gaming.

If you’re having trouble getting through a certain level, you can have video walkthroughs, map layouts or guides available right there alongside you without ever having to stop play. If you’re into something multiplayer, text channels, discord chat or WhatsApp can sit comfortably alongside the game screen to liaise and receive updates in realtime, without ever having to pause out. In the instances where you need both, the three-way split view has your back.

It’s also ideal for casual gaming. If you enjoy gacha games or idle RPGs, you can keep them ticking over while you catch up on social media or news articles, or even have multiple games running side by side.

ALL-DAY BATTERY LIFE

All of the above would be no use of course, if you were having to plug in regularly, but the Galaxy Z Fold8’s 4800 mAh battery is more than up to the challenge. Built in AI software actively monitors your usage habits, deep-sleeping idle apps and dynamically managing power consumption to maximise the time you get out of it, without compromising on performance.

If you’re streaming video, you’re comfortably looking at 26 hours, so you’ll be falling asleep long before the handset will. And with gaming, if you’re not taking those comfort breaks every 45 minutes (we all do, right?) it’ll still go for hours before you need to charge up. And when you do, go grab a bite to eat and you’ll be good to go again - the 45W wired fast charging means you can get from 0% to 65%+ in just 30 minutes.

In short, however you like to use your phone for entertainment, the new Galaxy Z Fold 8 will help you to enjoy more, simultaneously, for longer, without ever compromising on the experience.

With the annual releases of each new Samsung phone, it’s easy to lose sight of just how far things have come since the earliest foldables. As this year’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Ultra offer us their thinnest and lightest foldables yet, we thought it would be a good time to take a trip down memory lane and remind ourselves of just how far things have come.

POWER

Compared to previous iterations, charging devices from this range is something of a new experience. Despite having much higher capacity batteries these days (not a bad thing in itself, of course!), the upgrade to 45W wired fast charging (up from 15W) means you can now get up to 50% charge around a third faster, and a full charge in just over an hour, compared to almost two back in 2019. This is in part due to the switch from Lithium-Ion to Silicon-Carbon tech, which allows higher charging speeds without overheating, all packed within a thinner frame that helps keep things pocket-sized despite so much more on the inside.

DISPLAY

The original Samsung Galaxy Fold arrived seven years ago in September 2019 with a 4.6” external screen, and a 7.3” internal. By contrast, today’s Z Fold8 Ultra offers the biggest ever 8” internal screen, but where it makes huge leaps is in its 40%+ bigger 6.5” external screen, thanks to a far better use of the handset’s real estate.

It’s not just a question of bigger is better though, as without improvements to resolution and pixel density these would be worth very little, but significant increases in both mean the phones of yesteryear can’t hold a candle to their modern day counterparts. Refresh rate has also doubled from 60 to 120Hz in the intervening years, offering far more fluid motion than before. In truth, those earliest handsets might have had 60Hz theoretically, but their ability to use it was limited in practice.

It’s also hard to overstate just how much brighter the displays have become. Even the largest luddite should be able to appreciate the original’s increase from 380 nits to this year’s three-THOUSAND nits is literally a night and day comparison.

GAMEPLAY

In terms of gameplay, there’s really no comparing 2019’s original and today’s behemoths. The first Fold’s Snapdragon 855 processor and Adreno 640 GPU would struggle with graphic-heavy contemporary titles, with choppy sub-30 framerates an uncomfortable reality. By contrast, today’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy and the Adreno 840 can comfortably handle modern 3D titles at a stable 60 to 120 FPS. Hardware-accelerated Ray Tracing and AI-powered upscaling are something you can take for granted now that would have seemed impossible back then.

PERFORMANCE

Performance has massively improved in this relatively short space of time, thanks to huge advancements in mobile chip technology. Improved thermal management means the phone can keep cool during heavy gaming sessions or multi-window work, avoiding any forced slowdown or stuttering to protect components. Huge advancements in AI have seen more and more squeezed out of the hardware too, with constant, iterative, and dynamic adjustments being made in the background to remove unnecessary workload from the phone and maximise performance.

It will come as no surprise to those who were there, that the original foldables were fragile and experimental. The visible crease on the main screen was the source of much derision but today’s models are virtually seamless thanks to titanium alloy film and the supporting flexible plate beneath. On the outside, there’s no more pocket lint getting stuck in the wedge shaped gap on your closed device and causing untold problems for longevity; the Z Fold8 folds completely flat.

AND THAT’S NOT ALL

If you got the 2019 model wet, it was almost certainly game over, whereas today’s handsets offer IP48 water resistance. If you were taking photos, you’d have to make do with 16MP, compared to 200MP today on the Fold8 Ultra. The latest foldables have also made the leap to 8K and HDR10+, unimaginable just seven years ago, whilst internal storage has doubled from 512GB to 1TB.

Whilst year-on-year iterations of Samsung phones can sometimes make it seem that improvements are marginal, it’s clear when you take a step back that the advances made in just a short period of time have revolutionised what we can expect from our foldables.

I have spent the last three days scrolling through some of the most insane mod videos I've ever seen. Modders are taking games that have been decompiled with Claude, and mashing them up with other games. As the week has gone on, there have only been more clips of these mods pouring out on X/Twitter.

One person created a mashup of World of Warcraft and Call of Duty: World at War; another combined Escape From Tarkov with Skyrim. There’s even one that takes Insomniac’s Spider-Man and combines it with Batman Arkham City, where the player is able to swing around Batman’s turf.

These mods are everywhere online right now, though they thankfully haven’t filtered into modding websites like Nexus Mods yet. But, with the sheer volume of these mods and with how accessible Opus 5.5 is, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before the gates are fully torn down. And if that happens, it could change the face of the modding scene entirely.

Why Now?

Claude Opus 5.5 launched last week, promising cheaper tokens and more efficient code work. I'm sure that Anthropic meant for it to be used by professionals, but gamers have used it to create some of the weirdest mods I have ever seen.

Opus is a model that can power AI agents, which can be deployed to create entire games from the engine, to the art and enemy behavior. Brendan Jowett has a great video on YouTube of the model in action: He develops little slices of video games and compares them directly with the same tasks from OpenAI’s Astra 6 model. While the results of both are far from what you’d expect from a fully featured game, Claude’s new model has clearly come a long way.

The problem with the examples in Jowett’s video is that while the models are good at piecing together disparate parts of a game, enemy AI (lol) and art assets are lackluster to say the least. In one of the slices, a space combat sim, the space fighter flys at a diagonal angle, while moving in a straight line ahead, and shooting. In another slice enemies completely ignore the player character.

As good as Claude Opus 5.5 seems to be, it’s still lightyears away from developing something like a true mashup of Minecraft and Elden Ring from scratch. But the model doesn’t have to start from scratch.

The big, driving force behind a lot of these mods is decompilation, where people are pointing Opus at a game and letting the agent break it down to its source code (here’s a handy blog if you want to really get in the weeds). Just earlier today, we covered Halo: Combat Evolved being decompiled and ported to run natively in a browser. Once that step is complete, it takes little effort to take that source code and work huge swaths of games into other games as mods, and with very little input from the user.

Couple that with the relatively affordable tokens, and it shouldn’t be surprising that X/Twitter’s generally pro-AI users went wild with it, creating hundreds of mashups. And it doesn’t seem like it’s slowing down any time soon; what started off as a weird video that my boss sent me on Tuesday has now evolved to the point where I can’t even open X/Twitter without seeing a deluge of these mods.

Piracy?

The obvious problem with all of this is that these models are breaking open games developed by real people, getting the source code and then just mashing stuff together without consideration or permission from the original developers. That’s nothing particularly new – the modding scene is definitely no stranger to mashups, all the Thomas the Tank Engine mods are proof of that. However, this trend might be breaking into new territory, thanks to decompilation.

This could be another reason none of these mods have made their way onto any distribution platforms. Nexus Mods doesn’t outright ban AI-generated content, but it doesn’t let people use AI tools to upload content that they don’t have the rights to.

In a blog post from 2023, Nexus laid out its rules around AI generated content. The policy states that, “In order to prevent any issues with your mods, we encourage you to avoid using these tools unless you have explicit permission to use all the assets. This is particularly true for AI-generated voice acting but also covers images, models, code and anything else that you can use this technology to create.”

Every single one of these passthrough mods are using images, models, and code that the people generating them don’t have the rights to. But it’s only a matter of time until some platform holder allows these mods to be hosted, and I’m sure a massive legal battle will happen immediately afterwards.

The Modding Community Hates This

Way before all of these Claude-authored mod videos started cropping up online, people had been creating mods by hand for years, typically out of pure love for the game. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that a lot of mod authors aren’t fans of this phenomenon.

Mod authors have been expressing their frustration on X/Twitter as this has been happening. “I mod games and I'm not shy about the fact that I use AI to do it. I hate this bullshit ‘trend’. Pure slop, there's nothing creative about this at all,” kran27_ posted. “AI has a lot of potential in the modding scene, but the shit that's getting the clicks is this jingling keys bullshit.”

Kran wasn’t alone, with discountmodder ready to just leave the scene, saying, “Dude I'm really disappointed. If this becomes the permanent state of modding, this may be my last project. I don't wanna be involved in an AI slop-factory.”

I can’t escape the feeling that most of these mashups are born from people just playing with a new AI model and seeing what will happen, and I hope that this weird trend will die off soon. Modding is one of the best parts of PC gaming, and there is a lot of incredible content that people make just because they love a game. Some of the best games started off as mods, after all, and without them we never would have got the likes of Half-Life or League of Legends.

I hope that this is just a trend, rather than a sign of where the modding scene is heading. Fortunately, because these mods seemingly only exist to farm engagement on Twitter (at least so far), you don’t have to worry too much about them if you just want to start a new modded run of The Witcher 3 Remastered. If anything, it just means that if you want to avoid AI content, you need to pay even more attention to who you’re getting your mods from.

AI upscaling continues to be a huge part of the modern graphics pipeline, and while PSSR brought this tech to the PS5 Pro, the base PS5 was left without it due to its weaker GPU. That's been remedied with QSSR.

In a blog post, Sony detailed a new upscaling model that runs on its base console called Quick Spectral Super Resolution, or QSSR. Just like the PSSR that debuted earlier this year on the PS5 Pro, QSSR was born from the Project Amethyst collaboration with AMD that kicked off last year.

The new model is much more lightweight than PSSR, and so it won't be quite as good at maintaining detail as PSSR is on the PS5 Pro, but it should be much more accurate than the temporal upscaling traditionally used on the console.

QSSR debuts in Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei, and the respective developers seem pretty enthused about working the technology into their games. Sony's blog quotes Insomniac Head of Technology Mike Fitzgerald, who said, "QSSR adds more pixel-level clarity and stability to our environments, bringing out extra detail amidst the busy streets of Madripoor, the dense alleyways of Shinjuku, and many other areas across Logan’s epic journey. It’s a perfect companion to the launch of Marvel’s Wolverine, and it brings a great taste of the PS5 Pro experience to our players on PS5."

Likewise, Jasmin Patry, the Lead Rendering Engineer at Sucker Punch, said: “At Sucker Punch, we’re excited to bring QSSR to Ghost of Yōtei players so that they can experience the world we’ve created with even more clarity and detail. QSSR excels at resolving the fine details in our characters and environments and does so with a level of temporal stability that hasn’t been possible on the PS5 console until now. We’ve long wished that all PS5 players could experience the incredible image quality that PSSR brings to PS5 Pro, and QSSR is a positive step towards that goal!”

The blog also shared a couple of clips from the respective games showing QSSR in action, compared to the standard temporal upscaling on the base PS5, and the results are promising. In Wolverine, the clip zooms in on distant buildings, and while the QSSR sample is still quite blurry – it is a watered down model, after all – it is able to maintain a lot more detail in fine objects than the standard clip on the left.

Then, in Ghost of Yotei, the camera zooms in on foliage in the foreground. In the original PS5 sample, the grass is almost a collection of floating green lines, with aliasing that cuts it up into sections. With QSSR enabled, the grass maintains its actual shape, even if it's still a bit noisy.

Obviously, the model running on the more powerful PS5 Pro is going to be better at maintaining image quality than QSSR ever will. But, the PS5 Pro will now set you back $900, and so this lighter model at least brings this upscaling to more people. Sony does say that it is making QSSR available to all developers, so I'd only expect more studios to use it going forward.

Still, we've only seen this model in action in a couple of clips on Sony's blog, so I'm not sure exactly how well it'll perform. Luckily, the patch for Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei will be going live later today, so I'll be able to see how well it holds up. But I do hope it works well, because QSSR could help bridge the gap for anyone who won't be able to afford a likely expensive PlayStation 6 for at least an extra few months.

Ordering food through DoorDash is probably one of the biggest examples of how modern life has grown incredibly convenient, but apparently, there are still some people who think scrolling through an app is too much work. Now, you'll be able to just text DoorDash and have it order food for you without needing to figure out what, exactly, you feel like eating.

DoorDash announced the feature earlier this week, and the idea is that you'll text an AI agent through iMessages – apparently Android support will come sometime in the future – an idea of what you want for dinner. Then, DoorDash's AI agent will browse through all the restaurants in your area and give you suggestions based on your past orders and what you included in your text.

One of the examples DoorDash includes is asking its bot for your usual Friday night order, and it'll remember what you usually get, along with any modifications you usually make. This is already pretty easy to do within the app, which usually has your last few orders at the top of the screen anyways. Ironically, texting a robot for your usual order might end up having more button presses than just opening the app and ordering normally.

In some ways, this actually feels like a blast from the past. SMS ordering used to be a thing, before the rise of smartphones. Dominoes introduced a way to order pizza by sending them an emoji all the way back in 2015, according to TechTimes. Though, to be fair, that was just one restaurant.

If you want to cut scrolling through an app out of your DoorDash routine, you can sign up to test this feature on DoorDash's website, but only if you're on iOS. Android users will just have to order food the new-old-fashioned way for a while longer. It's not clear when this feature will leave beta, but either way, it seems like ordering food will get even easier, regardless of whether or not it actually needed to.

UPDATE:

AMD Radeon driver Adrenalin 26.9.2 is now available and should solve the graphics issues for AMD users. original story continues below.

ORIGINAL STORY:

The Witcher 3 Remastered released earlier today, and while it seems to work great for Nvidia graphics cards, AMD users are reporting a wealth of bugs and visual artifacts.

Some of the issues reported are trees missing from the environment and black artifacts appearing through the the game, according to a post on the /r/Radeon subreddit. Another Reddit post shows the foliage in White Orchard in a way that appears like it was run through a negative filter. Then, over on Twitter, user NikTek shared a clip outside of Novigrad, with a lot of the same graphics glitches, only this time when he goes into the river, the surface of the water starts blinking like a strobe light.

If you're on AMD, don't bother playing the game until AMD releases the new drivers because it doesn't work

For now we have the ultra glitchy special limited edition https://t.co/tJ2CR8CoX4 pic.twitter.com/sY63MQuRYU

— NikTek (@NikTek) September 29, 2026

The common factor among all of these issues is AMD Radeon graphics cards. CD Projekt Red does seem to be aware of the problems, and has posted on X/Twitter recommending players upgrade their graphics driver to a supported version. For now, though, the problem is that the supported Radeon driver, Adrenalin 26.9.2, has not yet been released. The most recent Radeon driver, Adrenalin 26.8.1, was released on August 20.

For anyone trying to play The Witcher 3 Remastered on an AMD graphics card right now, the best option is to just wait for AMD to release its new driver. It's not clear why CD Projekt Red released the game without making sure it works on existing AMD drivers, but it's possible that the Radeon driver was delayed. I've reached out to both AMD and CD Projekt Red for comment on this, and I'll update this story if and when I hear anything.

But regardless of temporary glitches on AMD hardware, the remastered version of The Witcher 3 comes with a whole host of gameplay and graphics improvements that really bring the game into the current generation. Just keep in mind that if you want to max the game out with path tracing, you're going to need an incredibly powerful gaming PC.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Remastered is available as a free update on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2. To ease you into Geralt’s life on the road, check out the things The Witcher 3 doesn’t tell you, plus IGN’s The Witcher 3 walkthrough and The Witcher 3 endings guide, which outlines all of the major quests and choices in the base game and expansions (now bundled in with the Remastered edition). When you’re ready for the tough choices, check out our The Witcher 3 sex and romance guide to see who Geralt can smooch and all the opportunities to do so. And to make Geralt as strong a monster hunter as possible, check out all the Witcher gear locations, Places of Power locations, and even Gwent card locations.

The Witcher 3 Remastered comes out tomorrow with a whole host of improvements that yet again bring it into the current generation. But it seems like if you want to max the game out with path tracing, you're going to need an absolute beast of a gaming PC.

CD Projekt Red updated The Witcher 3 system requirements ahead of tomorrow's update, and while it is still reasonable on the low end, if you want to enable path tracing at 4K, you're going to need an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080, which is going for about $1,650 on the low end right now. Even with that beefy graphics card, the system requirements suggest that you'll need both DLSS upscaling and frame generation to hit 60 fps, which means Nvidia's penultimate GPU still struggles with the 11-year-old game.

So, I of course plugged in an RTX 5080 to see how the game runs with path tracing in a lap around Novigrad, and it isn't great. At 4K with everything enabled, including path tracing and hairworks, with DLSS upscaling set to 'Performance,' the Nvidia 5080 gets an average of 30 fps. That goes up to 59 fps with frame generation, but at that low of a base frame rate, there are some very noticeable artifacts, particularly in the ground textures.

To be fair, hairworks has been nuking frame rates in The Witcher 3 since it first launched back in the day. You can (and probably should) disable hairworks to get much better performance, but even then, the 5080 can't hit 60 fps without frame gen. With hairworks disabled and path tracing enabled at 4K with DLSS set to performance, the game manages a 44 fps average, which jumps to 80 fps when frame generation is enabled.

The best way to get good performance out of The Witcher 3 Remastered right now, short of buying an RTX 5090, is to disable path tracing entirely. When you do that on the RTX 5080, the frame rate jumps to 55 fps, which is more reasonable, especially considering that all of this testing was done in Novigrad, which has been notorious for performance issues since 2015. Keep in mind that even with path tracing disabled, there are a ton of other ray tracing effects that you can disable to further improve your performance.

Luckily, the new system requirements suggest that the game will scale down well to lower hardware. It'll just be a question of which settings you are willing to disable to get good performance from this massive game. Still, it does sting to play an 11-year-old game with one of the most expensive graphics cards on the market and not be able to max everything out at a good frame rate.

We've got plenty more on The Witcher 3 Remastered, including a roundup of all the improvements, and the global release times. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Remastered is available as a free update on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2 from September 29. To ease you into Geralt’s life on the road, check out the things The Witcher 3 doesn’t tell you, plus IGN’s The Witcher 3 walkthrough and The Witcher 3 endings guide, which outlines all of the major quests and choices in the base game and expansions (now bundled in with the Remastered edition). When you’re ready for the tough choices, check out our The Witcher 3 sex and romance guide to see who Geralt can smooch and all the opportunities to do so. And to make Geralt as strong a monster hunter as possible, check out all the Witcher gear locations, Places of Power locations, and even Gwent card locations.

It's no secret that GPUs are worth their weight in gold right now, with the ongoing RAM crisis shooting prices through the stratosphere. That's probably what some thieves were thinking too, as they stole two Nvidia-branded trailers thinking they were getting a load of expensive GPUs. But they just ended up with sand.

According to Wired, the thieves stole two trailers branded with Nvidia and PlusAI's logos in Newark, California last week, but rather than expensive hardware, they were loaded up with 20,000 pounds of sand each. That's a weird thing for a tech company to be loading a trailer with, but Nvidia and PlusAI have been teaming up to test autonomous trucks, and the trailers full of sand were being used to simulate loads.

PlusAI was notified that the sand was missing when an executive got a text message from a friend, who had seen the trailers parked outside of their Newark-based office. PlusAI was then able to recover the trailers, and all the sand within, as it seems the thieves abandoned them. No arrests have been made.

The most expensive part of the setup – the tech-equipped trucks themselves – were parked inside the warehouse, and were left alone.

As AI hardware has continued to go up in price to fuel data center growth, these thefts have grown more popular, according to a report about Q2 2026 theft risk from Verisk CargoNet: "Organized groups also continued targeting enterprise-grade computer and networking equipment, components and cryptocurrency mining hardware. These shipments may be worth several million dollars but frequently move through the supply chain as conventional dry freight, creating a significant mismatch between their financial value and their ordinary transportation and security profile."

These thefts probably aren't helping with the cost of hardware. RAM prices have continued to climb since the start of 2026, and Nvidia graphics cards specifically have had massive price jumps this year. Plus, it doesn't seem likely that Nvidia will be releasing new graphics cards any time soon, either.

Discord artists are tearing the company's purple mascot, Wumpus, limb from limb in increasingly gruesome ways to protest its controversial age verification system.

Despite the backlash already surrounding Discord's new system, its launch started innocently enough. Then, when the company took to X/Twitter to sarcastically refer to the changes as "extremely popular" amid early bugs, fans unleashed hell on the cutesy purple avatar.

when you launch an extremely popular age assurance update that everyone on Discord was really looking forward to and it has bugs https://t.co/I9dVu9ZhET pic.twitter.com/BLAz9fWTSn

— Discord (@discord) September 24, 2026

"When you launch an extremely popular age assurance update that everyone on Discord was really looking forward to and it has bugs," Discord said.

The post in question was posted earlier this week and has 36K likes, but the nearly 10K replies already signal that not all is well amongst users. Open up the quotes for the post, and you'll be met with what feels like an endless sea of fan art featuring none other than Discord's plum mascot, Wumpus. These days, he's looking more red than purple, though.

The top post quoting the original message is accompanied by no text. Instead, it features a hyper-realistic version of Wumpus being subjected to a form of torture called "quartering," which sees an individual pulled into pieces by horses tied to each of their limbs.

This post alone has 260K likes. It is far from the only image of its kind.

https://t.co/tiscKCgzOj pic.twitter.com/teeA9k8vS0

— fishman (@asianfissureman) September 25, 2026

“Extremely popular” pic.twitter.com/vq9Ke1seg9

— radionerd (@radionerdxbox) September 25, 2026

I will never be a memory, Wumpus. https://t.co/ZcXfKG1e1T pic.twitter.com/t58VixRwmv

— Capidol 🍀|| C0mms OPEN (@CapidolArt) September 26, 2026

pic.twitter.com/MoamXpthQT

— Conor D. Oil (@RealConorOil) September 24, 2026

Whether he's facing eldritch horrors, Broly, Sephiroth's Masamune, or packs of wolves, Wumpus is going through it. Everyone online is having a great time watching the leaf-wearing avatar get torn to shreds, but they've also made it clear that the violence being unleashed upon him isn't coming from a positive place.

It's all in response to Discord's age verification system, which has faced its own onslaught of backlash since it was first announced earlier this year. As the platform has been reminded today, many of its millions of users have been vocal when it comes to privacy concerns following a significant data breach just last year.

"If you want to be a serious grown-up data stealing company you can’t smol bean post anymore," one user said in response to Discord's post.

"Stop trying to quirk chungus your data harvesting scheme," another said. "We cannot stand your ass."

lol https://t.co/T5DLuzxjdQ pic.twitter.com/Sdvb8jXmcN

— Junjou Laina 🔥 GIGGINOX 4 ASCENDANCE 🔥 (@Jun_on_Fire) September 26, 2026

"'Extremely popular age assurance update.' Are we f**kin serious," another user asked.

"No we are so fckin sarcastic," Discord replied.

Shortly after Wumpus was (quite literally) thrown into the line of fire, Discord posted an update saying that bugs blocking age-restricted servers had been fixed. The company has not addressed the criticisms filling its replies section since the new system went live.

Microsoft debuted Copilot+ about two years ago in an effort to bring AI PCs to the mainstream. Now, the company's most recent Surface devices have abandoned Copilot+.

At the Qualcomm Summit in Hawaii, Microsoft debuted its new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, both of which were mysteriously missing the Copilot+ branding. Microsoft Surface CVP Brett Ostrum told Windows Central when asked about the missing branding that, "These are not called Copilot+ PCs. They do meet all the requirements of our previous bar for what Copilot+ devices are." Those requirements revolve around an NPU (neural processing unit) with at least 45 TOPs of AI compute performance.

Microsoft seems unwilling to share why it's ditching the Copilot+ branding, but the program has been divisive. When the first Copilot+ PCs rolled out, Microsoft had manufacturers change keyboard layouts to include a new Copilot key that'd bring up an AI chatbot. Windows 11 also had Copilot Recall added, which continuously takes screenshots on your PC, so that you can use AI to scrub back through them to help get work done in the future.

Even though Microsoft seems to be abandoning the Copilot+ branding, the company is still very heavily in favor of AI. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella continues to obsess over AI and even tweeted earlier today that "we're building Copilot as a new OS for work that spans every model, every form factor, and every task." Microsoft's weird hardware initiative is gone, but the AI push is far from over.

Luckily, it does seem like Xbox isn't being pushed too hard to broadly adopt AI. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma reassured gamers back in February that Microsoft won't force studios to use the technology. Although, Microsoft does continue to apply for patents that would use AI to show you ads in the middle of your games and even play your games for you.

Meta finally announced its long-rumored Meta VR Glasses last night at Connect. While they seem like a cool little gadget, they're coming in at a $1,299 asking price – the same that Valve is charging for its 1TB Steam Frame. The difference, though, is that Meta's headset has less RAM and storage, even if it comes in a flashy new form factor.

The Meta VR Glasses do all of their processing through a 'computing puck' that you keep in your pocket, according to Engadget. That puck includes 12GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, which is paired with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon Reality Elite chip. That chip is built for VR and XR, and is probably going to be faster than the aging Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 found in the Steam Frame, but I don't think it's so much better that it's worth the tradeoff of less RAM and such a tiny drive.

A lot of the price of the Meta VR Glasses probably comes down to engineering a VR headset that weighs just 100g on your head – again, that's not including the 'computing puck' – but it's a stark increase over the Meta Quest 3 that preceded it. What's more, unlike something like the Steam Frame, Meta is likely going to aggressively push extra subscriptions and add-ons to unlock the full potential of the device — and that's not to mention all the data you're likely signing away when you set the thing up.

Those extra services and data harvesting should mean a more affordable device. For all we know, it might be cheaper than it would be without it, but it's just another sign that the ongoing RAM crisis is raising the price on all kinds of devices. It's hard to say how much this headset would have cost before RAM and storage went through the roof, but at least for the latter, the high prices are probably why Meta went with 128GB of storage instead of the 512GB that comes with the Meta Quest 3. Luckily, the puck does have an microSD card reader.

Back when I reviewed the Steam Frame, I kept looking at the Meta Quest 3 as this kind of golden ideal of how much a VR headset should cost, even though it's clear that Meta has defied gravity by avoiding raising the price on it so far.

The Meta VR Glasses do have more of a professional sheen to them than something like the Quest 3 ever did, but the company still spent a huge amount of time on stage talking about them like they're a "private theater screen." To be fair, that's absolutely how I would use them, but at $1,299, you start getting to the point where you can buy a pretty nice TV for far less money.

At the end of the day, if there was any company I'd expect to use software sales and data harvesting to subsidize VR hardware, it'd be Meta. And if these VR Glasses are coming in at $1,299 this spring, it's hard to imagine that any upcoming hardware is going to very affordable.

Tech companies have gradually invaded the film festival space, but Meta’s secret new project was a perfect fit for this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, both because of its entertainment capabilities, and because it feels straight out of a movie. Not far from where I’d soon watch the new Zack Snyder film, a makeshift gallery played host to covert keynote presentations, each with an audience of one, as a well-dressed entertainment executive showed surprising candor.

“We are… self-aware,” she sighed. A strange way to begin a marketing pitch, but a surprisingly welcome one, as she echoed thoughts that have likely been on the mind of anyone who has thus far rejected the industry’s clunky VR-sphere, and its closed-off headsets akin to ski goggles. The Meta Quest (and like it, the Apple Vision Pro) haven’t exactly pivoted society towards Ready Player One, and perhaps we’re better for it. However, the reveal of Meta’s new entertainment-centric gizmo, Meta VR Glasses, arriving this spring, might just be enough of a departure to entice agonistics like myself, starting with the fact that wearing them doesn’t make you feel like you’re in an episode of Black Mirror.

They are, for all intents and purposes, a pair of slick dark glasses. They still have the noticeable bulge of a VR device, but they’re more along the lines of X-Men’s Cyclops than Johnny Mnemonic. These streamlined shades feature a cable leading to a “puck” the size of an iPhone, a battery-and-computer pack you can place in your pocket or handbag, or clip to your belt. Its 45W fast-charging will probably come in handy, since it only holds enough juice for three hours of continuous playback, but the dangling accessory isn’t too obtrusive a trade-off, given the device’s larger, heavier predecessors. The glasses themselves weigh only about a hundred grams — a quarter of a pound — compared to the five to six hundred grams of the Meta Quest.

The biggest upgrade from the Meta Quest, however, is the complete lack of hand-held controllers and the reliance on physical gestures instead. Apple’s equivalent already has this, but the Meta VR Glasses offer the chance to use these flicks and pinches without feeling like you’re in a Saw trap.

The initial adjustments seem pretty easy, between switchable nose pads of different sizes and lenses you can slide left and right to ensure they’re at the correct distance. There’s no official info on what to do if you wear glasses just yet, but some leaks out there suggest prescription lens capability is the plan. Tiny cameras alongside the glasses' stems capture minor movements, like using your thumb to imitate scrolling on a touch remote, or pinching an invisible button, which in turn trigger and toggle menus affixed to the space around you. The cameras on the front re-create your regular vision, with a bit of a catch. The world around you gets noticeably noisier (as in, filled with digital noise) and the frame rate doesn’t exactly sync up with fluorescent lightbulbs, so you might see a bit of a flicker when looking past the floating UX at actual surfaces.

Navigating the real world will still probably be a challenge, and the tech’s hologram features (and spatial audio) for video calling weren’t part of the demo. However, Meta VR Glasses feel aimed at sitting down to watch movies and TV rather than augmenting reality. With its 5K display made of micro OLED panels, 37 pixels per degree, and Dolby Vision enhancements, you’re getting a pretty high-quality image, and navigating it is gamified too. Once you sync your eye movements to the cursor, simply looking at an app icon will light it up. Just pinch to select. But what about the actual offerings? Well, that’s where things get interesting.

In addition to all your streaming favorites (Prime Video, YouTube, DIRECTV, AMC+, Crunchyroll, Plex, and vitally, Tubi), Meta has teamed up with IMAX to bring the world of full-frame, 1:43:1 IMAX movies to your headset. Currently, this is poised to be the only way to watch something like The Odyssey in its native aspect ratio outside of a handful of cinemas. Sadly, that option wasn’t available during our limited tech demo, but it sets Meta VR Glasses apart even from Blu-ray and UHD, which only expand to the size of your HD television — a paltry 16:9. With films like The Odyssey, Sinners and Dune: Part Three reflecting an increased demand for the format, which can’t fully be met, this is the next best thing.

But what does actually watching a movie in one of these look like? Well, you have a couple of options. For most films, a screen pops up at a certain distance, which you’ll eventually be able to move back or forth. This feature wasn’t yet available, leaving part of the screen outside the glasses’ field of view, which isn’t ideal, but it’s still early days since the product is several months away from release. Your second option, for select films and experiences, is an “Immersive Cinema” virtual reality viewing room by ILM, built in sync with the movie itself. For this Disney+ demo, I picked Avengers: Infinity War — specifically, the scene where Thor harnesses the power of a dying star to forge his new hammer, Stormbreaker. If you’ve ever fantasized about watching a movie while seated in a grungy space factory as lava splashes from around the screen, you’re in luck. For Marvel and Star Wars offerings, environments like Tatooine and Avengers Tower appear to be in the works.

The 3D isn’t too bad either (as evidenced by a short clip of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), though the effect is no more or less immersive than most current 3D television sets. Upon launch, 3D offerings will be available from the likes of HBO Max, Paramount+ and Peacock. However, where things get really novel is the switch from movies to sports, where you have the option of not just watching your game of choice with a 180-degree field of view — in this case, Game 4 of the 2026 NBA finals; go Knicks — but sitting in a variety of courtside seats and glancing around. This isn’t magic; the folks at Meta had cameras appropriately placed to capture the effect, so future games will have to be equipped for this sort of broadcast if you want to, say, wave at Spike Lee as he jumps around euphorically. Then again, between the NBA finals and the FIFA World Cup, if this summer has proved anything, it’s that sports are a social event, so closing yourself off this way might at best be a backup for plans that fall through.

The speakers on the glasses — which you can control using tiny buttons along the bottoms of the stems — provide a fairly immersive surround sound experience courtesy of Dolby Atmos. This comes in handy for playing music-based games like Beat Saber, one of 75 built-in games available at launch (this particular version was enhanced for the device’s handsfree capabilities) in addition to the XBOX Cloud Gaming, i.e. streaming games directly to your headset. You also have the option of scrolling social media, and typing on a nifty keyboard projected on flat surfaces in front of you, as you look down at your digital ghost hands and their spectral glow. The novelty will probably wear off after a while, but at first, it’s pretty thrilling if you’ve never used this kind of technology before — which appears to be the target market for Meta VR Glasses. Of course, there’s a work capability too; you can mirror your Mac or PC into this virtual space, either wirelessly or via USB-C.

On the other hand, the device’s $1,299.99 price tag — more than a solid TV and Blu-ray player combined — might be a deterrent to the average consumer who hasn’t yet dipped their toe into VR. That is, unless Meta plans to roll out highly involved tech demos for every potential buyer. The only way to be remotely convinced of the technology is to experience it for yourself, which a re-creation on a flat screen (say, a YouTube video) can’t fully convey. There’s a candy store feeling to wearing one of these and turning around to see a fully (or semi) rendered space behind you, waiting to be filled.

There are kinks that still need to be worked out by launch, like the glare from light sources behind you leaking into your field of view (perhaps the one downside to opening up those goggles), but a head tilt here or there can probably solve that issue. Also not part of the tech demo was the ability to re-orient where exactly in your horizontal field of view a given screen appears, but this was something Meta’s engineers demonstrated for us on the fly, with the promise that we’d eventually be able to do it ourselves. Much like legs in the Metaverse, it’s coming, baby.

Look, it can be hard to trust big tech in our increasingly dystopian world, and who knows what data this particular chapter of the company will try to harness or sell. But the lineup of streaming services and viewing features on offer makes Meta VR Glasses one of the more intriguing developments in the field if you’re unsure about stepping into virtual spaces. Compared to existing devices on the market, the openness of the design — which still allows you to peek out from time to time and go back to the real world pretty easily — makes for the kind of compromise that fence-sitters like myself might just be able to accept. If nothing else, it’s more convenient, and slightly less embarrassing, than buying a scalped IMAX ticket on eBay.

YouTube is launching a new feature that allows creators to test different cuts of their own videos, leading fans to worry that it could be used for weaponized negativity.

Earlier today, YouTube unveiled a bunch of new features coming for creators in 2027. One of the most notable new features is an A/B test that allows creators to try out different cuts of their videos, allowing them to experiment with different hooks, pacing, and more. In YouTube's own example, the runtime differs by several minutes across three different cuts being tested, so the difference can be pretty radical.

Some have feared that this may encourage creators to test videos that skew positively or negatively before deciding which one gets the most traffic and using that as the permanent choice. One example provided by someone on X is someone making a YouTube video where they review the upcoming remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time with a positive and a negative review.

stop guessing what hooks your audience 🎣 with video A/B testing, you can test up to 3 edits of a Short or video simultaneously. review the stats, pick the clear winner, and seamlessly lock it in as your video.

launching to select creators in 2027. pic.twitter.com/ne9gDvH2K9

— YouTube Creators (@YouTubeCreators) September 23, 2026

This has also led some to wonder how this might be reflected to viewers. Will some audiences watch completely different videos and be left wondering what others are referring to in the comments or on social media? All in all, the feature poses some flaws, but hopefully YouTube can prevent it from being abused.

Photo by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images

Just a week after the Steam Frame presented Valve's vision for VR gaming, Meta took the stage at Meta Connect 2026 to reveal a number of new products.

Rather than a followup to the Meta Quest 3, Meta debuted the Meta VR Glasses, which is super thin and light VR headset that you wear on your face like a regular pair of glasses. The focus on those seems to be professional work and watching movies, but Meta did confirm that there were new VR games coming to the platform. Plus, the entire Meta Quest library will work on the new glasses, though you might have to buy controllers to actually play them.

Beyond the new VR headset, the majority of the event focused on updates to Meta's lineup of smart glasses. While the existing Ray-Ban Meta glasses will be getting a new generation, Meta also announced Audio Glasses, camera-less smart glasses that are focused on delivering high-end audio.

Of course all of this is built to work with AI, and Meta is going to pair all of it with Muse, its new AI agent. It seems like you will be able to customise Muse quite a bit, but at least based on the live demos, it seems a little rough around the edges. But, that's of course something that Meta can improve over time.

Meta Connect 2026 Live Blog

All times are in EDT

7:59pm: And that's the show. We got a whole bunch of smart glasses and a genuinely fascinating VR headset. Again, if they're able to figure out light bleed, the Meta VR Glasses seem awesome. I just hope that it's not too aggressive about shoving VR features in your face.

7:58pm: Of course Zuckerberg has a 'one more thing', which is 'Muse Charm' a handheld AI companion, that you'll be able to keep in your pocket. This kind of thing has been done a dozen times at this point, though, and it's hard to imagine the point when you can do the same work on your phone.

7:56pm: Now the real question. The Meta VR Glasses will come out in Spring 2027, and are going to cost $1,299. That's expensive, for sure, but it is a pretty unique device.

7:54pm: The Meta VR Glasses will also support hologram calling. You'll be able to call other users, and appear as a full-bodied hologram.

7:51pm: There are actually games coming for this thing! There will be 20 new hands-only VR games coming out, and it also supports the entire Quest library with optional controllers. The Meta store will have a bunch of streaming apps going live later this year, from Disney+ to HBO Max and Hulu. There will also be sports events natively on the Meta VR Glasses.

7:50pm: There's a live demo, where someone is watching some National Geographic nature documentary. He then brings up his workpace, with the obligatory AI assistant. This one is a test pilot. He then gives a bunch of commands to Muse, and it legitimately takes it 20 seconds to respond. There will probably be more polish before it actually hits store shelves, though.

7:45pm: Of course, the Meta VR Glasses are built for Muse. The AI agent has been built straight into the OS, and you can use speech and gestures to get the agent to perform tasks for you. Or, you can just use your hands as a mouse or even type on it. Zuckerberg claims someone has already managed to reach over 100 wpm on the glasses.

7:43pm: The trailer suggests that the Meta VR Glasses will have the same kind of gesture-based controls as the Apple Vision Pro. A lot of the talk is about image quality. It supports DisplayPort over USB-C, too. It has apparently even inspired James Cameron.

7:41pm: This is going to be a new kind of VR device, in a form factor that's a pair of glasses "for the first time ever." They've apparently been sitting among the shelves full of AI glasses the whole time. Meta VR Glasses. Again, I'm super curious how these perform, but they weigh just 100g, 1/5th the weight of the Meta Quest 3. "About the weight of a deck of cards."

7:40pm: Meta has an update for the Ray-Ban Meta display glasses, and it sounds like availability has opened up. They're going to be available to buy online, and will even launch globally. But there's one more pair of glasses that Zuckerberg wants to show off, and he mentioned Reality Labs. Finally, some VR hardware.

7:31pm: Meta is introducing audio glasses, that will not have cameras, but are instead focused on delivering high-quality open audio. And they also look a lot thinner, and more like actual glasses. Meta is also updating the entire smart glasses lineup with Meta Ray-Ban Gen 3 smart glasses. They'll have thinner frames, better battery life and Dolby Atmos spatial audio capture. The latter will let the glasses pinpoint where in the room the audio was coming from.

7:28pm: Hearing Enhancement will turn Meta's smart glasses into an "FDA-cleared over-the-counter hearing aid."

7:25pm: Now he's talking about security, debuting Muse Security VM, which will store your information on a private virtual machine that Meta supposedly won't have access to. But with Meta's reputation, I'm not sure if I'd trust that Meta won't have access to the data.

7:22pm: Zuckerberg has started a second live demo, and this time he's wearing smart glasses. It finds him a free slot on his calendar. But it's not just about professional work, but will apparently help you with health and fitness, too.

7:19pm: Now for the live demo. Zuckerberg pulls up his phone, compliments Muse's toga (really), who then asks him what they're going to build. He then describes a project and Muse says like it'll work on it, but Zuckerberg naturally puts down the phone before any of the results are actually displayed. But while he doesn't show off the results of Muse's work, he does walk us through changing the agent's voice to sound more like a cowboy.

7:17pm: Mark Zuckerberg is back on the stage in front of "a whole room full of smartglasses to show us today". Each of them will apparently be able to let you interact with Muse wherever you are. He mentions that two billion people already have glasses, and seems to think most of them will upgrade to smart glasses apparently.

7:13pm: Muse is going to help you with online shopping, too. Meta is building partnerships with platforms like Shopify and PayPal to let Muse buy things online. I'm skeptical of giving a robot access to my debit card, but hopefully Meta will actually safeguard privacy and data security. It'll even be able to buy food for you on Doordash.

7:09pm: Alexander Wang, Chief AI Officer at Meta has taken the stage to talk more about Muse. It looks like you'll be able to customize the way your Muse looks, Wang changed his to look like his dog Euler. It looks like you'll be able to have Muse fill out documents for you, and can drive any app on your Mac. He emphasizes that this will only be with your explicit permission.

7:05pm: After a long speech about how Meta is popular because it believes in people, Zuckerberg has said that the future of that endeavor is in Muse, which is an AI agent. It is cute, though. Muse will be able to create custom feeds of content for you. But Zuckerberg claims that Muse will be able to make you money, and will be making the agent free for "a large amount of tokens" with the hope that Meta will be able to make a portion of transactions that are processed through Muse.

7:00pm: The show has begun with a live demo of someone working on code and design documents in a VR space. Then there's a call, with a person popping up in the middle of the screen with some seriously lagging audio. Mark Zuckerberg has taken the stage to talk about the technology that makes 'creating' possible. He says "we at Meta, we're optimists, we believe in the power of people." I just wish he would take those glasses off.

6:58pm: We've now moved from a zoomed-out Meta logo to a zoomed in one with a timer. The show is truly about to begin.

6:50pm: The show officially starts in 10 minutes, and the stream has gone from a still Meta logo to a slightly animated one with ambient music playing in the background. At least Apple's events have a better soundtrack.

6:30pm: We're 30 minutes out, and I'm still hoping Meta at least teases a Quest 4 headset.

6:00pm: If the leaks and rumors are to be believed, the headline device this year is going to be a sort of VR headset, but instead of it being closed off like the Steam Frame or the Meta Quest 3, it'll be worn similarly to regular glasses, but with traditional VR optics built into them. If that's true, I have serious doubts about how Meta would stop light from leaking in.

5:30pm: Meta Connect 2026 officially starts in about an hour and a half. I'm already bracing myself for a heaping of AI features. But, hopefully we'll get some cool hardware too.

Both Sony and Microsoft have had a series of patents come out in the last week or so, and one of them would potentially bring NFC payments to the PlayStation 6.

Sony filed a patent called "video game controller-driven information transfer," which describes a controller with NFC capabilities that would let you tap your phone or your credit card to your controller to send information to your console. The most obvious use for this would be for payment, but it would also let you more easily import your PlayStation account to a new console.

Just like with any patent, there's no guarantee that this would result in an actual feature for any device, but if it did, it wouldn't be the first time this type of feature has existed. Pretty much every phone under the sun right now has similar functionality, which lets you tap your card to add it to your wallet, or tap bluetooth headphones to pair them without digging through the settings menu. So, it seems like a no-brainer to bring that functionality in some way to a console.

There are of course some security issues that Sony would have to work out before implementing this, particularly if Sony wants you to import your whole account via this method. Without the right precautions, it'd be easy to grab someone's phone, tap it to your controller and effectively use their account.

Apple gets around this when setting up a new iPhone or iPad by bringing up a cloud that you have to scan with the new device's camera that will then give permission to import the account data. It's unlikely that Sony is going to put a camera in a controller, but a more simple option would be to have your phone display a pin number that you'd have to enter into the console to get past a security check.

What's particularly wild about this patent, though, is some of the rationale behind developing it. In the patent documentation, Sony talks about the traditional methods to input this data, like an on-screen keyboard or a QR code that you scan with your phone. But, then goes on to say "facilitating and coordinating these operations by performing multiple operational steps using multiple devices often causes performance of the video game console to suffer and/or one or more operations of the video game console to fail."

The idea here seems to be that importing all the account data through NFC will be more reliable than the current methods, and could prevent any kind of system failures during setup. NFC communication has become a lot better in recent years, to be sure, but whether it's going to make the system less prone to failure than typing in your data via a keyboard is something that'd I'd need to see to believe.

With all of the patents that have been coming out in the last couple weeks, it sure does seem like the next-generation consoles are actually on the way. Microsoft and Sony have both filed some pretty dystopian patents, but this one seems like it'd be genuinely useful. Either way, though, expect both the PlayStation 6 and Xbox Project Helix to be quite expensive, especially if they're announced amid the ongoing RAM crisis continues.

Image credit: Anusak Laowilas/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Anyone who's had a console knows that, on a long-enough timeline, they will have some kind of technical bug that you need to troubleshoot. Sony is trying to get around that reality with an AI tech support agent.

Sony has filed a patent for an AI that would keep an eye on your system, looking for any kind of red flags, and then use an LLM to write up a patch for your system to either preemptively fix the issue or to send a report to engineers at Sony. The problem is, that unless you can turn this feature off, all the data processed on your PlayStation would potentially be visible to this agent. It would likely need total access to successfully monitor a system for any and all hardware and software issues.

It's also possible that the system could make small issues into much larger ones. As Patentlyze found, the patent says "an automated system sending repair instructions to a device in your living room needs careful guardrails so a small hiccup does not become a larger one." After all, the PlayStation 5 (and likely the PlayStation 6) are just specialized computers, and there have been plenty of times that I've broken something by fixing a small problem that I probably could have just ignored (or wasn't a real problem to begin with).

There's also a possibility that, unless the LLM has particularly strong training and guardrails, that it could make a mistake when coding these on-demand patches, and accidentally brick people's PlayStations.

It's not clear when or if this patent will actually materialize into an AI tech support agent for your PlayStation. However, with the death of discs for the PlayStation 6, it's likely that Sony's next generation console is going to require an always-on Internet connection to begin with. And with that constant communication with Sony's servers, an AI system like this would be trivial to implement. So if anything, I'd guess that this feature will make its debut with Sony's next-generation platform, which will hopefully give the company enough time to work out the logistics and privacy risks that are inherent to remote AI monitoring.

Microsoft already shows you ads whenever you log into the Xbox Series X, but it seems like it's exploring an ad-supported way to essentially rent out games on Xbox consoles.

Microsoft filed a patent called "contextually aware management of interactive software application access," which describes a process of pausing your game at the operating system level and presenting "audiovisual promoted content" (in other words, an ad), which would then grant you a credit once it's over. That credit, at least in the way it's presented in the patent documentation, would grant you access to the game for a limited amount of time, from 15 minutes to an hour.

It's important to keep in mind that there's no way to tell whether or not the technology presented in this patent will ever get implemented. But, considering the troubles Xbox Game Pass has been dealing with lately, it's not that bizarre to imagine an ad-supported tier where you have to watch an ad every 15 minutes to keep playing your game.

Microsoft also recently limited playtime on Xbox Cloud Gaming to just 15 hours a month with Game Pass Ultimate. That's not a lot of time to play games, and anyone relying on cloud streaming, now that RAM prices have gone through the roof, could be stuck dealing with the ads just to play games for more than 30 minutes a day.

Hopefully, if this patent does materialize into something real, it'll be a way to let people play for free, rather than being snuck into games that people paid full price for. However, even Disney+ is going to work ads into its most expensive subscription plan, so it's not off the table for Microsoft to do the same.

This patent comes at a time when Microsoft is aggressively trying to make Xbox more profitable. The company just had another round of layoffs, where it handed Halo to Activision and got rid of a Halo Studios cinematic director the same week that he was promoted. Project Helix is also lurking around the corner, and it's probably going to be incredibly expensive, thanks to the ongoing RAM crisis.

We're nearly two years out from the RTX 5090 launching at CES 2025, and if everything was normal, Nvidia would likely be getting ready to release its next generation of graphics cards at CES 2027, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

The next-generation Nvidia graphics cards, likely based on the Rubin architecture, have reportedly been delayed to 2028, according to known Nvidia leaker Kopite7Kimi on Twitter. This isn't the first time Nvidia has been reported to either delay or cancel a graphics card in the last year, either. Back in February, the same leaker suggested that Nvidia's typical mid-generation Super refresh was also canceled, thanks to increased demand for GPUs and memory for AI data centers.

I hope Jensen can see everyone's passion and launch new products for gaming as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, GR20x is a product from 2028. That means they have postponed again. 🙃🙃🙃
I will try to minimize updates until there is definite news. (Lessons learned)

— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) September 21, 2026

It is important to keep in mind, though, that leaks for Nvidia's next-generation graphics cards are all over the place. Just last week, YouTuber Moore's Law is Dead cited nebulous sources inside Nvidia, suggesting that the Rubin-based RTX 6000 graphics cards would be launching sometime in the first half of 2027.

You should take both of these leaks with a grain of salt, but Nvidia delaying its next-generation graphics cards to 2028 would make a lot of sense. After all, the flagship GeForce RTX 5090 is now commanding prices around $9,000, despite launching for $1,999 last year.

The RTX 5090 isn't the only GPU going up in price, either. We're now 10 months into RAMageddon, and it's unlikely to end any time soon. Thanks to that ongoing shortage, every graphics card on the market is much more expensive now than it was a year ago. Even without that happening in the background, Nvidia would probably raise the price on its next-generation graphics cards, but now that memory and GPU costs have gone through the roof, I shudder to think how expensive the RTX 6080 would even be.

Nvidia has also dropped the gaming category from its earnings reports, lumping GeForce in with the 'Edge Computing' category, along with robotics. In its recent Q2 2027 earnings report, Nvidia didn't even mention gaming, instead focusing on the mountains of money it's making from AI. So, Team Green is likely also in no rush to get new consumer graphics cards out there.

Only time will tell whether or not Nvidia has anything up its sleeves for gamers next year, but if it's anything like 2026 so far, we're likely just going to get more software tricks – not that that's necessarily a bad thing.

The Steam Deck has been around for four years at this point, and while I mostly use it to play Ball x Pit while I watch TV, scientists at Airbus in the UK have used it to test the the ExoMars Rover.

In a video published by YouTuber Tom Scott, an Airbus senior engineer walks him through progress on the new rover, which is being tested in a simulated Mars setting. Ultimately, this rover will be controlled autonomously through mounted 3D cameras thanks to the distance between Mars and Earth, but for now, it has to be controlled locally with a computer.

Initially, she gives the prototype rover instructions through a laptop, telling it to go forward. Later on in the video, Scott is handed a Steam Deck that's running some kind of custom program, which allows him to control a different prototype rover in real time thanks to the controller that's built into the handheld.

Unfortunately, the video doesn't go into a lot of detail about what's actually being run on the Steam Deck, but it isn't the first time Valve's handheld has been used to control robotics; a couple of years ago, fans spotted Disney operators using the Steam Deck to control droids at Galaxy's Edge. Due to the open nature of Valve's hardware, it's likely that the Steam Deck is being used for all kinds of things we don't know about.

That's a fate that's probably going to be shared for the Steam Machine and Steam Frame as well. All of these devices are running on Linux and make no effort to stop users from installing different programs or even operating systems, so it's only natural that they're being used for things other than gaming.

Back when I interviewed Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat for the Steam Machine, they seemed completely open to this, with Aldehayyat telling me, "I don't think it's a coincidence that a good PC is also a good gaming device. At the end of the day, good hardware is good hardware. So in a lot of ways, the challenges you're trying to solve are, a lot of them are pretty much the same." I'm sure that Valve didn't envision the Steam Deck being used to test Mars rovers, but it's still in the spirit of people finding different ways to use the hardware.

The side effect of the Deck, Machine, and Frame being open for things other than gaming is that the hardware is more expensive. Because Valve doesn't lock down its hardware at all, there's nothing stopping scientists from buying Steam Decks just because they happen to be great for controlling robotics, rather than buying and playing games from the Steam store.

It's going to be especially interesting to see the different ways the Steam Frame is used in the future. I can only imagine what scientists will be able to do with an open VR headset with all kinds of motion-tracking capabilities. If the Steam Deck is being used to control Mars Rovers, just imagine what the Steam Frame will be able to do.