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Dear reader, I made the mistake of having a day off this week—and, like a time traveller stepping on a butterfly, I might have set a series of dominoes in motion. Either that or we've just collectively lost our grip on reality. Banana, a game I covered last week, has completely exploded in popularity.
It's been a rough couple of years for the games industry—and even laying it out like that feels like an understatement. Back in February, the number of layoffs and studio closures were already numerous enough to fit into a horrifying chart, and things haven't exactly slowed down since.
Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail, much like how Endwalker tackled the new player experience, seems poised to start chipping away at some of the game's most persistent problems—namely, that FF14 is a little too straightforward nowadays.
News that Microsoft had been developing its own AI-powered upscaler for games, called Automatic Super Resolution, first came to light back in February, before it became clear that this system would only be available on Copilot+ AI PCs. At the moment, the only systems in this ecosystem are Snapdragon X laptops from Dell, Asus, MSI, and others. But as Microsoft explains in a blog on how Automatic Super Resolution works, the PC just needs to have a suitable NPU in its main processor, so it could become available to more gamers.
PC enthusiasts know that if you want thebest gaming CPU, then you really can't go wrong with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. Its mighty gaming chops are helped in no small way by the additional 64MB of 3D V-cache, so when AMD announced its new Zen 5 architecture, many hoped there would be some info on Ryzen 9000X3D models. That never happened, but AMD did tell us that it's «working actively on really cool differentiators» to make 3D V-cache «even better.»
It might not surprise you to learn that PCIe 5.0 SSDs, Gen 5 by another name, isn't selling in anywhere near the sort of quantities that PCIe 4.0 is. As Micron tells me over at Computex 2024, the newer, faster SSDs haven't reached a tipping point in popularity.
Bespoke, top-end PC components often have some things in common. Wallet-crushing prices, for one, but also things like massive overclocking headroom, a mountain of ports and connectivity, or a unique colour scheme. At Computex 2024, Gigabyte went one better, though, and rounded up the CEOs of AMD, Intel, and Nvidia and got them to add their signatures to some of its latest motherboards and graphics cards.
We've seen a new memory form factor show up in a few places at Computex 2024—across modules to motherboards. Not least surprising is how often memory manufacturer Micron mentioned it to me at the show. And how enthused it was with the memory form factor, which it is first with to market.