• Nvidia's RTX 3060 has returned to retailers, amid the ongoing RAM crisis
• MSI, Gigabyte, and Asus models reportedly started at $339.99, but have seemingly increased
• It's a sign that the current state of the PC hardware market is in complete disarray in terms of shortages and pricing

The PC and console hardware market is in the worst place its arguably ever been, with the RAM crisis leading to high prices on components utilizing memory. That's why the return of a popular GPU is one that doesn't come as a huge surprise.

As reported by Tom's Hardware, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card has returned to retailers, notably on Newegg, with numerous Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte models available.

While Tom's Hardware highlights that prices for these returning GPU models were seen at $339.99 (which is $10 above the MSRP when launched), listings range from at least $416. It's already a big ask at $339 for an old graphics card that doesn't have the same advantages of the current-gen RTX 5060, so the increase won't do it much favors.

It's worth noting that the RTX 3060 has been the most popular GPU on PC, according to Steam's Hardware & Software Survey results, consistently ranking at number one each month for several years. The same trend is evident in May's results, and likely the same for June.

The 12GB GPU is still very much capable of providing solid performance in games at 1080p or 1440p, especially when using DLSS upscaling, and that explains why it's still so popular among Steam users.

However, it's not exactly being received well among consumers. My colleague and PC enthusiast, Matthew Hanson, views the return of the RTX 3060 "like a s**t Frankenstein", and frankly, it's a reasonable observation and one that highlights just how messy the PC hardware market is.

Users on Reddit haven't been shy about highlighting why the GPU's return doesn't make much sense, with one stating: "Even Nvidia enthusiasts would be hard-pressed to get this for $339.99. At that point, just get an RTX 5060.

"The only real benefit to this card is the VRAM, so we all know who this is really for - The AI crowd."

It's not that the RTX 3060 is a bad graphics card, because that's far from the case. However, at the current price the models from MSI and others are available at, it makes little to no sense, since the RTX 5060 is within the same price region, and it has the advantage of Multi-Frame Generation over the RTX 3060.

Regardless, one more option on the market doesn't hurt, especially since it doesn't seem as though its unstable condition will change anytime soon.

These days, if you're looking at tech news, it won't be long before you come across a mention of the RAM crisis. The dwindling supply of memory chips is proving increasingly problematic, and at this point, it seems that the AI industry hasn't just eaten the consumer's lunch, but also their dinner, pudding, and the little mints that usually arrive with the bill afterwards. And did it tip? Not likely.

I have got a tip for you, though – yeah, I know, smooth segue – or rather five tips as we face the inexorably on-rolling memory shortage, which is crushing all wallets in its path. In this article, I've picked out five pieces of computing hardware that I believe you should buy now, or in the very near future, before the PC component crisis — because it extends beyond mere RAM, of course — renders this hardware a good deal pricier.

Nothing is guaranteed in life, not even my expert predictions (ahem), so consider them with that in mind. But I'm making these recommendations — from MacBooks to SSDs — based on what's happened most recently in terms of said crisis, for good reasons that I'll expand upon when I come to each individual pick.

So here are my five devices or components which I believe you should move sooner rather than later with if they're on your shopping list. Bear in mind that with Amazon Prime Day just around the corner (and discounts on the go already), it could also be worth keeping an eye out for bargain deals at that retail giant.

1. Apple MacBooks — especially the MacBook Neo

Earlier this week, Tim Cook came forth with some information that everyone who's mulling buying a new Mac needs to know about. The Apple CEO told us that its products are going to get substantially more expensive before long, liberally sprinkling around words like "unavoidable" without going into any specifics.

Price hikes, and likely sizable ones, are coming to Apple's major products, then, and that includes MacBooks (as well as iPhones and probably iPads too, and more besides no doubt). What I'm particularly worried about though, as I discussed at the time, is what this could mean for the MacBook Neo.

Long story short: Apple ditched the entry-level Mac mini last month, the product which cost an enticing $599 (£599 / AU$999), making the next-tier-up model, which has twice the storage (512GB instead of 256GB), the cheapest option at $699 (£699 / AU$1,099). Might the same thing happen to the MacBook Neo? I believe there's a chance that Apple could mirror this move, because given the need to address MacBook pricing, when it comes to the Neo, applying a hike this early in the device's lifespan doesn't look good. Especially not when it's built entirely on its value appeal as a budget model.

So, a way of rejigging things without a price hike would be to just ditch the current entry-level Neo, just as happened with the Mac mini, leaving folks to pay a hundred notes more for the baseline model (while getting more storage, granted). Then this could be framed as a configuration adjustment rather than a cost adjustment.

With that in mind, the MacBook Neo at its current entry-level price might be a steal, and that's especially the case if you can get a bargain on the laptop. Indeed, there's already a good early Prime Day deal in the UK (at the time of writing) — and there may be others too.

Of course, there could be deals on other MacBook models, and just as with the Neo, it's likely a smart move to grab a bargain on a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, or any Mac you might be considering buying this year. All these PCs may be hit with what'll seemingly be substantial price hikes, and so I think buying now is very much the thing to do.

A MacBook Air M5 at $950 currently (the discounted price in the US on Amazon, again as I write this) might look pretty good compared to the Neo at $700 a little way down the road, potentially.

2. SSDs

My second port of call given recent rumblings with the component crisis is to grab a relatively affordable SSD if you can, though granted, this comes with caveats — it may not be easy to find one.

Still, I think it's worth trying — again, Prime Day might help here — and to pick an example, Samsung's 990 Pro SSD has been at reasonably palatable pricing (for the current climate) of late. Okay, so a current deal on the 1TB model costs about the same as the MSRP of the 2TB flavor before the RAM crisis hit, but still, a bit over $200 in the US is not bad in the overall picture.

And the thing to bear in mind here is that earlier this week, an exec in the SSD supply chain (a VP at Silicon Motion, which makes drive controllers) gave us an alarming soundbite that ran: "The retail SSD market has almost disappeared." With SSDs all being funneled towards data centers and OEMs (PC manufacturers), there's precious little left heading to the shelves where the average consumer can pick them up.

Unlike RAM, where price inflation may not have much further room to maneuver — given that consumers will just stop buying at some point — there is still some space for SSDs to rise. What the Silicon Motion VP said all sounds rather ominous, and points to a picture where the decent deals — relatively speaking — that we can get right now on SSDs may evaporate before too long.

3. External hard drives

This comes right off the heels of the above in the world of storage, as there's evidence pointing to a rise in hard drive prices. While as noted, SSD prices have shot up — especially for larger capacity or high-end models — hard drives hadn't really been affected, at least not until a few months ago.

Based on the findings of 3D Center, which monitors the German retail market, hard drives are becoming increasingly expensive. Last month, they were 34% more expensive than a year ago, and as of June 2026, that ante was upped distinctly to 58% (effectively a price increase of close to 20% in the span of a month).

So, if you need an external hard disk for your backups or NAS — or to provide extra capacity for your Mac with a small SSD — you might want to consider buying it now before price increases shift up another gear, which looks like what's going to happen.

4. Windows 11 laptops

MacBooks aren't all you need to worry about when it comes to price hikes, as naturally the broad upward pricing pressures on components affect all notebooks.

I previously wrote about why it's a good idea to buy a Windows 11 laptop now, following Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, predicting that the RAM crisis might spin onwards until the end of this decade.

The crux of the matter is that affordable notebooks are still very much a thing, especially during sales, but with the additional gloom cast on pricing woes in recent times — particularly by Huang, who is well placed to forecast — I feel there's a distinct danger that it could be harder to buy a cheap laptop before long.

I doubt you'll regret buying a Windows 11 laptop at today's prices, put it this way, particularly with a discount applied.

5. Graphics cards

Finally, if you're pondering a graphics card upgrade at some point going forward, this is another component that I reckon it'd be smart to grab soon.

While price increases for Nvidia GPUs have been more confined to higher-end models — products with more video memory (VRAM), which is where the pricing misery mainly stems from — I think that they'll apply more to mainstream cards as 2026 rolls on.

Why? For starters, I don't think it's a great sign that Nvidia is resurrecting half-decade-old GPUs from the generation before last to help bolster supply levels of its boards. (These RTX 3000 models use GDDR6 VRAM, which is a useful alternative memory vein to tap away from the GDDR7 that's in current-gen graphics cards). We've seen nasty hikes applied to the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB already, and the RTX 5070 price is creeping up too, based on the latest data from our sister site Tom's Hardware.

The RTX 5070 and RTX 5060 8GB can still be had at relatively palatable prices, though, so they may be a solid buy with a bit of a Prime Day discount in the offing perhaps. (Even if they aren't hugely well-liked GPUs, in all fairness, for one reason or another — the scant VRAM allocation being the main bone of contention for many gamers).

Where I'd be more inclined to look, though, is at the AMD RX 9070 XT. That GPU is in a similar position to the RTX 5070 in the US with a relatively mild (roughly) 10% price hike right now, the difference being that it packs 16GB of VRAM and considerably better performance (at least away from ray tracing).

We've seen some decent deals on the 9070 XT recently, and if you can grab one, I think that could be a great move as a GPU upgrade that'll last you. Particularly given that AMD's CEO Lisa Su has forecast pricing misery to come later this year, with Team Red serving up some relatively strong signals for the likelihood of incoming Radeon graphics card price hikes.

• The first HDMI 2.2 products are likely to arrive in 2027
• Massively increased bitrates with 4K 480Hz support, or 10K resolution
• Great for PC gaming, but won't make much difference to TV viewers

HDMI 2.2 is coming, and it could be a very big deal for gamers. That's because it delivers double the bandwidth of HDMI 2.1: up to 96Gbps.

That means HDMI 2.2 is capable of delivering uncompressed 4K at up to 240Hz (current HDMI can only do this using Display Stream Compression, aka DSC) or uncompressed 4K at 480Hz with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, and it can also deliver uncompressed RGB 8K at 60Hz. And using DSC, it's capable of delivering 1440p at rates exceeding 1,000Hz.

There is an important qualifier, though: devices can be HDMI 2.2 certified without delivering the very fastest data speeds, so you'll need to study the spec sheets of any potential purchases.

As FlatpanelsHD reports, the HDMI organization expects the first HDMI 2.2 devices to go on sale in 2027; testing and certification are already taking place.

According to Rob Tobias, CEO and president of the HDMI Licensing Administrator, "We're hearing chip manufacturers will start to sample their FRL2 [Fixed Rate Link, the signalling technology used by HDMI] chips this year. And so we should start to see some 96 or up to 96 gigabit HDMI 2.2 products next year."

Will HDMI 2.2 be a big deal?

The specifications are impressive, though it'll be available in three flavors, all of which are faster than HDMI 2.1: 64Gbps, 80Gbps and 96Gbps.

The performance for gaming is particularly impressive, but we already have DisplayPort 2.1 at up to 80Gbps in many of the best gaming monitors so there isn't a hugely pressing need to upgrade. And HDMI requires licensing fees that are likely to be higher than for DisplayPort.

Chances are if you're into high-end gaming hardware you've already gone down the DisplayPort route, especially if you have a multi-monitor setup, but HDMI 2.2 should mean more choice among premium displays.

HDMI has more benefits in living rooms, thanks to features such as ARC (Audio Return Channel), CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) and ALLM (Auto Low-Latency Mode), so it's conceivable that the PlayStation 6 could embrace the higher bitrates of HDMI 2.2 — although games only rarely achieve the 4K 120Hz that's already achievable over HDMI 2.1, and we're not sure that's going to really change with the PS6.

But some 4K 240Hz games might be possible, and the best gaming TVs might offer the refresh rate to support it, so there may be some benefit for the most hardcore. For most living room uses, though, HDMI 2.1 is probably overkill — it's really best for PC connectivity when it comes to the pure data rate.

However, there's another benefit to HDMI 2.2: LIP, which stands for Latency Indication Protocol. LIP improves sound syncing on home theater setups, such as soundbars or AV receivers — this can be a pretty common problem with even the best soundbars, so we'll be keeping an eye on how well this works.

For most of us, I think HDMI 2.2 is generally something to keep an eye on rather than something to demand as soon as it debuts. HDMI 2.2 has been made with 10K resolution in mind, but the vast majority of commercial and streaming video tops out at 4K.

It's something to think about when buying new AV hardware in the future (there's good chance we'll need to wait for 2028's CES for widespread adoption in TVs), but initially at least, it'll be more about marketing than real-world benefits for most of us.

And bear in mind that HDMI adoption is really driven by the companies that provide the connection hardware.

Even today, not all high-end TVs have four HDMI 2.1 ports, because the most powerful processing chips used by many manufacturers don't support this. Some lower-tier TVs from the same makers do, because those chips have more up-to-date HDMI control elements — it's a bit of a mess. I suspect HDMI 2.2 will have the same kind of slightly chaotic support.

On PCs, we'll be relying on GPUs to support the tech, and new models aren't expected until late 2027 or after that — so there's a good chance of seeing HDMI 2.2 on them. But like HDMI 2.1, it'll probably launch on the highest-end models first.

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• PUBG's Ally Duo mode is now in testing on Steam
• Nvidia's ACE tech is powering the AI teammates in this mode
• You can play with an AI teammate against other human + AI duos until the end of June

PUBG Battlegrounds now offers the option to play with an AI teammate — powered by Nvidia — in a new mode which is available to try in beta for the next two weeks.

As VideoCardz noticed, the Ally Duo Mode is now available through PUBG Arcade, and represents Krafton and Nvidia teaming up to use Team Green's ACE technology — as aired back at the start of the year — to create an AI teammate called Ella.

PUBG Ally was in testing early in 2026 and has now reached the point where it's ready for public consumption — at least as a beta, where the mode will be playable through to the end of June on Steam.

This is an opportunity to "collect invaluable real-world player feedback, to guide the future of AI agents in games," Nvidia tells us.

How does Ella work exactly? The best way to find out is to watch the demo in the YouTube video below.

As you can see, the idea is that you have an AI teammate you can talk to, and more to the point, give orders, or ask for help, using natural spoken language (or typed text if you prefer), with responses from the AI designed to be suitably 'human' in feeling and tone.

At least that's the idea here, but watching the brief demo leaves me with a lot of doubts about what "represents a new generation of AI game characters designed for deeper immersion" according to Nvidia.

Analysis: reaping what was sown a long time ago

It should be no surprise that Nvidia is dressing this up in a lot of fancy talk. Last year when it introduced the concept, Team Green talked about revolutionary Co-Playable Characters or CPCs, as opposed to boring old NPCs. Of course, as my colleague on TechRadar Christian Guyton noted at the time, these are just glorified bots – and we've had bots for ages (PUBG has, too).

In fact, I was deathmatching bots some 30 years ago in Quake, when the Reaper Bot mod arrived. (The Reaper was a horrifically accurate CPU-controlled creation — positively lethal if it got hold of the lightning gun – but overall it had the strategic skills and gaming savvy of a house brick, and was easily trounced by a reasonably good player, but hey, these were very early days here.)

So, this isn't a revolutionary idea, or the next step on from NPCs, or whatever accolades relating to gaming greatness that Nvidia might want to heap on PUBG Ally. However, there is more to Ella than this, in fairness to Team Green. One half of Ella is the bot intelligence to actually play the shooter well enough (hopefully), but the other side is the AI models — the Nvidia ACE trimmings.

These are small language models (SLMs requiring an Nvidia GPU with at least 8GB of video RAM) driving the AI companion's "realistic" decision-making processes, and facilitating communication via speech models. Ella is "equipped with the ability to understand and respond to game situations in a human-like manner" over and above your typical game bot, but I'm not convinced from the demo.

Ella feels painfully artificial — not human — and borderline sycophantic in the game footage shared by Nvidia. OK, so this is still early testing, but I'm not getting any real 'revolutionary' vibes about the gaming skills or chat on show here.

Maybe we'll get selectable personalities eventually — and even true-to-life gaming types. For realism there definitely needs to be an occasional AI teammate who throws a massive hissy fit about how rubbish you are before abruptly quitting, surely?

The general reaction to the emergence of PUBG Ally has been as you might expect: some gamers are curious, while others are mystified or even scathing, and there are more in the latter camp. Some are convinced this will be highly amusing: "I look forward to the comedy that this feature will produce." While others on the same Reddit thread are already trash-talking the AI's ability to play.

I'm not surprised at the feedback thus far given the way Ella has been realized by Nvidia, and the AI being overly chatty hasn't gone down well either. Players engaged in a competitive game don't want flowery chat putting them off their flow, and maybe obscuring important sound effects that are clues as to where the enemy might be and so forth.

The whole thing leaves me rather cold at this stage, frankly, but among more casual gamers — or those who don't have friends to play with at the time, and don't want to hang around in lobbies, or be exposed to toxicity in pick-ups — Nvidia's AI teammate may yet find a place.

As long as the gamer in question owns a decently beefy Nvidia graphics card, that is, and another concern of mine is how much of the GPU's resources are these AI models demanding? Presumably not a lot —they are 'small' by nature — but gamers are notoriously unhappy about anything running interference with their FPS, no matter how slight.

• Rumor has it that Intel's CPU with integrated Nvidia RTX GPU is planned to debut early in 2028
• We could see an announcement at CES 2028
• This will be a powerful mobile chip that could be a huge step forward for gaming laptops and handheld devices

Intel processors with integrated Nvidia RTX graphics are coming, we know that, but we now have a rumor of a rough timeframe, namely early 2028.

VideoCardz reports that according to YouTube tech reporter Erdi Ozuag on X, Intel's silicon roadmap currently has its processors featuring built-in Nvidia GPUs as launching in the first quarter of 2028.

In theory, then – assuming this is true, and the planned timeline doesn't slip – we could be looking at a CES 2028 launch for these chips which are codenamed Serpent Lake.

Also regarding the timeline, it aligns with the expectations for the release of Nvidia's next-gen of GeForce RTX GPUs, which is currently forecast to debut in 2028.

Ozuag adds that the prospect of Intel producing Apple silicon continues to advance, and the final quarter of 2027 is apparently the target for Team Blue to be making chips for MacBooks or iPhones (probably lower-end models, the rumor mill has previously suggested). This (theoretically) represents Apple diversifying somewhat away from TSMC for chip production duties.

Analysis: a lot of potential – but some questions too

An Intel processor with Nvidia RTX chiplet on-board to provide graphics muscle should be a huge move for the PC world. Granted, we know very little about the chip as it stands, but packing next-gen RTX graphics is likely to mean this could usher in SoCs which are revolutionary for the performance of thin-and-light gaming laptops. Indeed, these Intel processors should prove excellent for elevating gaming handhelds too.

If this rumor is true, it means these Intel chips are potentially only a year and a half away. Or at least that's when we could first see the silicon announced, although the notebooks packing the chips themselves may take a fair bit longer to arrive on shelves.

Of course, a lot of how this timeline plays out may be heavily dependent on what happens with the current RAM and component crisis, and its impact on the world of laptops in general. (Which could get substantially nastier as time rolls on – as I've discussed elsewhere recently, I think now could be a smart time to buy a laptop based on the indicators we're hearing from various key players in the PC sphere – and indeed phones for that matter).

Other questions remain, such as: where does this leave Intel's own Arc graphics plans? And how will this partnership play out given that Nvidia is now spearheading a fresh thrust to make Arm devices more relevant in the realm of Windows 11 laptops with its RTX Spark chip – a prospect that'll surely worry Intel (despite the brave face in public)?

There are a few unknowns as to how all this will unfold, let's put it that way, but this Intel and Nvidia collaboration still remains an exciting prospect.

• AMD's RX 9070 XT GPU is finally in the Steam hardware survey
• As of May 2026, it's suddenly the most popular AMD GPU
• It has a 1.33% market share, but Nvidia is still way ahead of AMD overall

While Nvidia's current focus certainly isn't on its gaming graphics cards, it still has the desktop GPU market firmly in its grasp — although things might be looking up for rival AMD.

As reported by TweakTown, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is suddenly the most popular AMD GPU, according to Valve's latest Steam Hardware Survey. As of May 2026, the 9070 XT has leapt to 1.33% of Steam's market share, placing it above the likes of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 Ti (whereas previously the AMD card failed to register at all in the survey).

As always, it's worth noting that Valve's Steam surveys are only a limited perspective on the whole market. Not everyone runs Steam, of course, and the survey is limited to a relatively small slice of gamers on the platform. That said, Valve's survey results are an interesting glimpse into the state of hardware and software popularity.

The RX 9070 XT's popularity shouldn't come as a huge surprise, considering its raw performance capabilities, with the additional benefit of FSR 4 (FSR Redstone) providing solid image quality and performance when upscaling.

What's more surprising is why this GPU wasn't present in Steam's GPU rankings at all before now. TweakTown theorizes that the sudden appearance of the 9070 XT could be down to recent updates to the survey regarding how GPUs are classified, which is one possibility.

Still a one-sided battle

Since the GPU market is still in disarray due to the RAM crisis and its impact on video RAM, both the Radeon RX 9070 XT and 9060 XT (which is also now present among Valve's May survey results) are arguably the most value-packed GPUs available. They're not as cheap as Nvidia's low-end RTX 5000 series GPUs, but these Radeon graphics cards are still affordable and provide much better performance.

Still, it's hard to see Nvidia's GeForce GPUs falling out of favor anytime soon, and they remain clearly dominant in the desktop arena. Team Green's DLSS upscaling technology remains superior to AMD and Intel's equivalents, and it really impresses on the image quality and performance fronts.

Nvidia's RTX 3060 is still leading as the most popular GPU, as it has for years in the Steam survey results, but it's good to see Team Red's latest GPU line-up putting up a fight finally — even if the competition is still very one-sided.

• The Nvidia RTX 3060 and 3050 are apparently making a comeback
• A graphics card maker in Asia has new models planned as budget alternatives, and this practice could spread to other regions
• Meanwhile, we're hearing that SK Hynix plans to accelerate development of its memory chip production capacity and triple it by 2034

The RAM crisis appears to have another side-effect, namely bringing back old GPUs, but there's some more positive news for the future from one of the big memory chip makers.

VideoCardz noticed the resurrection of a couple of Nvidia graphics cards that aren't even from the past generation, but the one before that: the RTX 3050 and 3060, which are GPUs from 2020 that have been brought back by Manli, a graphics card maker that mainly supplies Asia.

The Manli RTX 3060 which has returned from the dead is a 12GB model, whereas the RTX 3050 has 6GB of VRAM and a 70W power envelope, meaning that it can run off the PCIe slot (with no need to be connected to the PSU).

Elsewhere, the future of RAM is looking rosier, with news from SK Hynix, one of the major three players in making memory chips, that it's ensuring that manufacturing capacity is being ramped up in a big way going into the next decade.

Chey Tae-won, the chairman of SK Group, said in an interview with Nikkei Asia (via ComputerBase, as spotted by TweakTown): "Since we're proceeding with the plan to expand as much as possible, our calculations show that our wafer capacity will double within five years. But honestly, once all these facilities are built, it won't just double, it will triple by around 2034."

So that means by 2031, SK Hynix will have doubled its manufacturing capacity, and it'll only be a few years more until that's trebled, moving notably faster down the line. That said, this is a best-case scenario we're told, and those expectations could always slide.

Analysis: a notable acceleration

This represents SK Hynix putting its foot down on the RAM production pedal in a big way. We're now looking at eight years for a trebling of manufacturing capacity for DRAM and NAND flash memory chips, whereas previously the timeline for this was 20 years. Yes – two whole decades.

This is a measure of how much RAM demand SK Hynix is expecting going forward – and that the current memory-hungry environment isn't going away. As we've been hearing recently, if anything, the AI boom is set to continue and gobble up even more RAM in the foreseeable future.

As for the Nvidia GPUs which are being brought back to life, this may be just in Asia for now, but it indicates that this could happen elsewhere, too. There have been previous rumors about the RTX 3060 12GB making a comeback, so here we're seeing some hard evidence that this is actually happening.

Are you wondering why it's happening? Well, both of these GPUs are back to serve as budget-friendly options in a time where current-gen GPU availability is becoming more problematic, and prices are rising. (Indeed, at the higher-end for Nvidia GPUs, price inflation has been getting quite nasty this year, and the fear is that it'll only worsen).

The RTX 3060 was a popular offering for a long time, and the 12GB variant proved tempting for gamers who didn't want to be shortchanged by newer Nvidia budget graphics cards that only served up 8GB of VRAM. While you may question the wisdom of an affordable GPU that packs on the video RAM in this memory-starved climate, remember that this Nvidia card uses GDDR6 VRAM, not GDDR7 as seen in current-gen Blackwell GPUs, so it's a different kettle of fish in that respect. It theoretically allows for some extra breathing room to produce some more wallet-friendly graphics cards without tapping into precious GDDR7 resources.

Of course, we don't know how wide a scope this apparent revitalization of old Ampere GPUs might have, and it could be quite a limited affair. Time will tell.

• Nvidia's CEO has said the RAM crisis will last for "quite a few years"
• The comment came ahead of the announcement of a multiyear partnership between Nvidia and memory chip maker SK Hynix
• It's one of the bleaker predictions we've heard, and it might be wise to take it on board if you're thinking of buying a laptop, PC, or components in the near future

If you were hoping the worst of the RAM crisis might soon be over — and we've heard some hints to that effect in recent times — you can think again, according to Nvidia's CEO.

Reuters reports that Jensen Huang just predicted that the memory shortage is a crisis that'll last for "quite a few years", and this doubles down on some of the more pessimistic forecasts about the RAM crisis.

Given that this comes from a heavy-hitting source – Huang was speaking ahead of the announcement of a collaboration between Nvidia and SK Hynix in a "multiyear technology partnership for next-generation memory" — it's a distinct worry for me.

As I noted at the outset, we've recently heard some more positive inklings, suggesting that the RAM crisis could be peaking and a recovery might arrive sooner than expected. That includes the ex-chief of Samsung's semiconductor business forecasting that the RAM shortage could possibly ease in just a year's time, or certainly by early 2028, partly due to the efforts of Chinese memory chip makers.

Previously, though, we've also heard that more RAM price hikes are on the cards due to disruption to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, as well as predictions that the memory crisis could be prolonged until the end of the decade.

Interestingly, that latter claim of RAM pricing misery continuing through to 2030 came from the chairman of the parent company of SK Hynix, which Nvidia just signed its deal with, and Huang appears to have adopted the same line of thinking. For me, the declaration of "quite a few years" means at least three, and hints at more, effectively backing that previous 2030 worst-case prediction.

What does this mean for the average consumer? The words from the Nvidia CEO carry some considerable weight, I think, and this is a rather ominous development in my opinion, although it's not quite as simple as "if you think prices are bad now, just wait — so buy, buy, buy, while the going is still relatively good".

Of course, calling the going 'relatively good' given the price of RAM sticks themselves is more than a stretch, but the truth is that there are certain categories of hardware you should probably consider pulling the trigger on now, to avoid what might be even more painful price hikes by the time next year rolls around.

Here's what I think we all need to consider given the current picture and predictions relating to the RAM crisis, in terms of different types of hardware. I should caveat all this by underlining that it is just my opinion, and I may, of course, turn out to be wrong.

Laptops: don't hang around for too long here

What immediately sprang to mind when I read Huang's comment was that this additional gloom nugget is another sign that the time to buy a laptop is now. Or rather, perhaps as part of an Amazon Prime Day deal (later this month) or come Black Friday, with these big tech sales in 2026 likely to represent your best chance to get a new notebook at a relatively affordable price.

The trouble is that if the RAM supply situation really is set to be a very rocky road through to the end of the decade, even the big laptop manufacturers are going to run out of all their inventory of memory bought at (relatively) cheaper prices – and the same is true of storage (SSD price hikes have also been seriously nasty).

If all this plays out as Huang expects, continued pressure on just those two component categories are going to hike laptop prices substantially over a few years. And that's not considering other pressures such as with discrete GPUs (that use VRAM) on gaming laptops, or price increases on other notebook parts, notably CPUs which are starting to feel the heat a bit in the broader component crisis.

If you're thinking you'll need a new notebook in the not-too-distant future, and you can score a good deal with a laptop that's on sale this year, I can't see you losing out. It seems unlikely that you'll find something cheaper next year, put it that way — and if there's one piece of hardware I'd advise buying with some level of urgency, it's a laptop.

Do bear in mind, however, that more Windows 11 laptop makers are now dropping models back down to 8GB of RAM as a cost-cutting measure to reduce those sticker prices, and there are caveats for future-proofing here, which I've discussed at length elsewhere.

Desktop PCs: ditto, sort of…

I think everything I've written above about laptops is also true of desktop PCs to an extent, as the same pressures around the same components exist broadly, certainly for prebuilt computers. Matters are worse in so much as a desktop will usually have a discrete GPU (much more often than a laptop will), and the price hikes therein add some extra misery into the mix, particularly at the higher-end (although the same is true of gaming notebooks).

So, again look to the likes of Amazon or Black Friday sales, and if you need a new desktop, a discounted prebuilt might turn out to be a pretty smart move this year.

However, a DIY PC build is a bit different and more painful these days, as you are sourcing individual components all with varying price hikes, and some of those increases are huge – you're lacking any of the cost cushioning that you might get from a prebuilt (where the PC maker gets cheaper prices for bulk buying components, of course). In this case, I'd be far more cautious, as it's not exactly clear how things will play out with component pricing more widely as I'll come on to next.

RAM and SSDs: the real pain points

The RAM crisis kicked off all this pricing pain when it began back in September 2025, followed by SSDs (which also use memory chips, of course), and at this point, price tags on both are massively hiked.

Having to buy system RAM is as bad as it gets when it comes to the extra damage to your wallet, although the exact extent of that can depend on the type of memory you're looking at. Prices of DDR4 and DDR5 RAM have trebled or even quadrupled in price, though, which is ridiculous, frankly.

In short, I'm loathe to recommend buying RAM at this kind of premium to anyone. That said, Huang's comment here hints that perhaps memory does still have further to go in terms of hikes, and as Tom's Hardware recently reported, a Lexar executive just predicted a further doubling of RAM prices by the end of 2026.

So, in spite of some recent evidence of memory price stabilization or even slight decreases, it seems the worst isn't over yet. At the same time, there's a ceiling as to what consumers will pay in terms of price hikes before they collectively fold their arms and refuse to buy. Overall, it's unclear how this will play out, and while the Lexar exec's prediction feels alarmist to me, it's not a great overall indicator of where we're headed – particularly now in light of what Huang's chipped in with.

I simply can't recommend buying RAM at the price it's at, and the same is true for SSDs in many cases. Indeed, I have to wonder how much worse the prices on these components can get before it becomes farcical, frankly. But for now, I'd err on the side of playing a waiting game to see how these fresher predictions begin to pan out.

GPUs and CPUs: a more positive picture, but not entirely

As for computing components outside of RAM and SSDs, the main concerns are the other key staples of any PC – the processor and graphics card.

If you're in the market for a desktop GPU in the near future, I think it's probably a good move to buy (again, perhaps with a bargain in the next big sale – though I think we're less likely to see any sizeable discounts on graphics cards as opposed to, say, laptops). That's because pricing is relatively palatable currently for mainstream products, meaning mid-range and lower-tier GPUs – we've seen some solid deals on AMD's RX 9070 XT GPUs recently for example.

For high-end GPUs – meaning Nvidia models – sadly price hikes have been a lot heftier (what with more copious amounts of video memory being involved for one thing). It's quite possible these graphics cards could see further cost increases, though, into next year, but the RTX 5070 Ti and upwards are already seriously over and above the MSRP to the point where I balk at recommending them.

CPUs are a different matter, with price inflation being much more restrained here, and with the possibility of processors getting more expensive down the line, I think it's a safe bet to buy one now if you need an upgrade. There's even a new budget Ryzen 7700X3D set to launch next month, and we could see further additions along these lines at the lower-end from AMD apparently, so I think the picture for CPUs looks stable enough for the foreseeable.

The enterprise world is currently witnessing a stark divergence between AI ambition and real-world execution. While the narrative of the last eighteen months has been dominated by the transformative potential of Large Language Models and Generative AI, the operational reality for many businesses is a "Proof of Concept graveyard".

Organizations are making significant investments but are frequently failing to realize the expected return on investment.

To understand why these projects are stalling, we must look past the software and the user interface. The bottleneck is not a lack of imagination; it is a profound foundational fragmentation occurring at the infrastructure level.

As we move from the era of experimentation into the era of implementation, the industry is discovering that the "plumbing" of AI is far more complex than the applications themselves.

The false start and the public cloud paradox

For many organizations, the initial move to the public cloud provided a logical and low-barrier entry point for AI experimentation. The ability to quickly spin up instances of compute power allowed for rapid prototyping without the need for immediate capital investment.

However, as these workloads transition from small-scale testing to full-scale production, the limitations of this model have become a significant financial and operational burden.

Public cloud infrastructure is inherently flexible in the short term, but it often introduces unpredictable costs that impact long-term financial planning. When AI workloads are run at scale, the "metered" approach to billing can lead to budget "shocks" that cause boards to pause or even cancel projects.

Furthermore, the concept of data gravity is becoming a primary concern. This is the idea that as datasets grow, they become increasingly difficult and expensive to move.

Massive proprietary datasets are effectively being locked into hyperscaler ecosystems. When you factor in egress fees and the latency penalties associated with moving data back and forth from the cloud, real-time processing becomes nearly impossible.

This creates a physical separation between the data and the compute power, leading to architectural bottlenecks that stifle performance and prevent the business from seeing real results.

The three pillars of fragmentation

The current gap between investment and ROI is fueled by three specific areas of fragmentation that most enterprises are currently unequipped to handle internally.

1. Fragmented data and the sovereignty crisis Organizations today struggle to unify data that is siloed across different regions, departments, and regulatory jurisdictions. As residency and sovereignty requirements tighten globally, the ability to train and deploy models where the data actually resides is becoming a prerequisite for success.

We are seeing a major shift towards the requirement for Sovereign AI. This is the need for organizations to maintain total control over their data, their intellectual property, and the physical location of their models.

Without this level of control, an enterprise risks not only regulatory non-compliance but also the potential exposure of sensitive intellectual property. If the infrastructure does not support sovereignty, the project is often doomed before it leaves the pilot phase.

2. The specialized skills gap AI requires a highly specialized intersection of data science and systems architecture. It is no longer enough to have a generalist IT team managing these environments. Successful AI deployment requires expertise in high-throughput storage, low-latency networking, and power heavy GPU distribution.

Many enterprises find themselves with the right software tools but without the deep technical knowledge required to optimize the entire stack. This leads to what we call "accidental architectures" which are inefficient and fragile.

These systems are ultimately unable to support the throughput required for production-level AI, leading to performance degradation that kills the business case for the technology.

3. Infrastructure complexity and the rack-level challenge Building a production-ready AI environment is no longer just about buying individual hardware components. It is about validating a complex ecosystem at the rack level.

From high-density power management to liquid cooling integration and multi-node GPU clustering, the physical requirements of AI are immense. When these components are sourced and managed in a fragmented way, the risk of architectural failure increases.

Many projects fail during the critical transition from a controlled sandbox environment to a mission-critical production environment because the underlying infrastructure simply cannot scale at the same pace as the data.

The economic barrier of procurement

A significant and often overlooked factor in the Proof of Concept graveyard is the economic mismatch between how AI is built and how it is paid for. Traditionally, enterprise infrastructure required massive upfront Capital Expenditure.

In the fast-moving AI landscape, committing millions to hardware that may be superseded in two years is a risk many Chief Financial Officers are unwilling to take.

Conversely, the Operational Expenditure model of the cloud, which seemed attractive for experimentation, becomes prohibitively expensive when used for constant, high-intensity workloads.

The industry needs a middle ground. It requires the economic predictability and physical control of on-prem infrastructure, combined with the cash-flow flexibility traditionally associated with cloud consumption.

Until the channel can offer staged deployment approaches and financing models that align infrastructure costs with actual workload adoption, the ROI gap will remain wide.

Moving beyond the sales pitch

To bridge this gap and rescue projects from the graveyard, the industry approach to AI delivery must evolve. The traditional model of fragmented hardware procurement where a business buys a server here and a storage array there is insufficient for the demands of modern AI.

We are moving towards a requirement for unified ecosystems. This means a shift away from flashy sales pitches and towards rigorous technical validation. The industry needs environments where organizations can test their specific workloads on validated stacks before a single pound of capital is committed.

This requires a new level of collaboration between hardware vendors, specialized AI consultancies, and infrastructure integrators. The goal must be to de-risk the process by proving the outcome before the investment is finalized.

The path forward: AI as a utility

The transition from AI as a trend to AI as a utility requires a fundamental rethink of the technology stack. Sovereignty, performance, and economic predictability must be the three metrics by which success is measured.

For AI to truly deliver on its promise, organizations must be empowered to run their models where their data, policies, and priorities dictate, rather than where a hyperscaler decided to build a data center.

By addressing these foundational infrastructure challenges and moving towards a more collaborative, validated ecosystem, we can finally move past the era of experimental failures. Only then can we build a sustainable, ROI-driven AI future that delivers genuine value to the enterprise.

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• Nvidia's rumored RTX 5000 Super refreshes are seemingly back on track, and could be out this year
• As well as the previously rumored variants, we could also see an RTX 5060 Super with 12GB
• This goes against existing rumors insisting that Nvidia isn't producing any new GeForce GPUs at all this year

Nvidia's long-rumored RTX 5000 Super refreshes might just be back on track, according to the latest from the GPU grapevine — and there could be an interesting twist here.

Namely, we could see a lower-tier GeForce graphics card get the Super treatment, as there's, in theory, an RTX 5060 12GB model inbound that could carry this naming.

As VideoCardz flagged, according to MegaSizeGPU, a regular leaker on X, this new refresh and the other previously rumored RTX 5000 models are "back on track" and may be released in 2026.

To recap, those earlier rumors pointed to an RTX 5080 Super and RTX 5070 Ti Super with 24GB of VRAM, and an RTX 5070 Super with 18GB. So, you can possibly add to that an RTX 5060 Super with 12GB. Nvidia has produced xx60-class graphics cards in Super variations before, of course (indeed, I have an RTX 2060 Super myself).

Analysis: is 'Kicker' back in play?

This is an about-face from the previous rumor mill chatter, which had floated the theory that Nvidia wasn't going to release anything in the way of new Blackwell GeForce GPUs this year. Of course, that could still be true as MegaSizeGPU isn't certain about the 2026 release timeframe – but the leaker seems fairly confident that these refreshes (supposedly codenamed 'Kicker') are back on the table for Nvidia.

Still, all of this should be taken with a good deal of seasoning, especially as this is a lone rumor for now. When other leakers back up the idea, we can start to become a bit more ready to believe that Nvidia may indeed have these Super GPUs in the works again. For now, though, I remain highly skeptical.

The reason why Nvidia seemingly shelved the RTX 5000 Super refreshes (and remember, these GPUs have only ever been rumors) is due to the cost of RAM, which is particularly applicable to these models as they pack so much video memory.

So, what changed? Nothing, according to MegaSizeGPU, it's just that Nvidia "can always get what it wants!" and therefore this won't be an issue as such. Team Green will still provide its card-making partners with GPU chips and VRAM bundles, we're told (meaning they won't make those board manufacturers source their own video RAM).

It still doesn't make a huge amount of sense that Nvidia might want to go ahead here, because with the higher-end VRAM configurations, those RTX 5000 Super refreshes are going to end up very costly, there's no two ways about that.

Okay, so maybe Nvidia simply won't make many of them – perhaps Team Green just wants to keep the GeForce range ticking over so gamers can't accuse the company of abandoning them this year (for greener AI pastures). In that case, though, stock will end up thin on the ground, and the GPUs will be potentially even pricier as a result.

We shall see, but if heavyweight RTX Super refreshes are incoming, I expect them to be wallet-damagingly priced. An RTX 5060 Super with 12GB, on the other hand, would be very welcome in helping address one of the major stumbling blocks with this particular lower-end model. Again, though, would Nvidia want what would effectively be a lower-end RAM drain that's (relatively) not very profitable? Again, time will tell...

In February 2026, Moltbook, a social network built for AI agents, learned a familiar lesson in a new way: you can’t scale AI without building the right infrastructure underneath it.

Despite rapid traction and heavy funding, the company rushed into production with parts of the stack generated by AI agents, without fully validating the infrastructure.

The cracks showed quickly. Researchers found fundamental gaps in how data was stored, accessed, and protected, allowing unauthorized posting and exposing sensitive user information.

Vibe coding, no doubt, has applications in today's software world. However, Moltbook had received millions in venture capital money and has since been acquired by Meta. This wasn’t an experiment; it was a production system handling real user data.

And that’s the point: once AI moves from prototype to production, shortcuts in architecture across compliance, data privacy, and auditability become real business risks.

The lesson here is about more than security, it’s about how AI is raising the cost of getting data infrastructure wrong.

The growing challenge in AI infrastructure

AI agents don’t just use data, they’re constantly creating it, moving it, and acting on it at a scale most systems weren’t built for. And now that foundation models are widely available, the model itself isn’t what sets companies apart anymore.

The real advantage comes from the infrastructure behind it. For IT leaders, that shifts the risk from theoretical to operational: broken pipelines, gaps in compliance, and security vulnerabilities as data moves through the system.

The challenge is architectural. AI workloads don’t stay in one place, they move across on-prem environments, the cloud, and the edge, with machines authenticating and interacting with each other nonstop in the background.

And with AI projects going from experiment to production so quickly, teams are being forced to rethink how data actually flows: how fast it moves, how reliable it is, how it’s governed, and where it should live.

That’s why many are starting to move back toward on-prem and hybrid models, designed around where data naturally sits, rather than what’s most convenient in the cloud.

It’s at scale where things start to break down. Caches go stale, data formats don’t line up, and pipelines that worked in testing begin to strain, dragging down performance and creating inconsistent user experiences. Behind the scenes, access controls built for human behavior don’t hold up in a machine-driven world.

Governance rarely fails all at once; it slowly slips as teams focus on improving models instead of maintaining the data layer. And over time, that leads to something much riskier: a data foundation that’s increasingly messy, exposed, and out of compliance.

Why storage and governance must be foundational

AI initiatives at enterprise scale don't fail because of models, they fail because the data supporting them isn't ready. Training pipelines stall when data storage can't sustain the throughput GPU clusters demand.

Inference degrades when feature data is scattered across siloed environments with no consistent access layer. Governance breaks down when there is no single authoritative record of what data exists, who accessed it, and under what policy.

The consequences of treating storage as an afterthought are structural, and this is a pattern seen repeatedly across large financial institutions from my personal experience.

When the data under AI workloads lives in fragmented silos spanning on-premises systems and cloud environments, every AI practitioner becomes an integration engineer first. Teams spend cycles moving data instead of working with it. Compliance teams chase lineage across systems that were never designed to provide it.

Risk surfaces multiply precisely where visibility is lowest, in the data path between raw objects and the models consuming them, creating operational and regulatory exposure.

For regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare, making storage the governance layer, not a separate concern bolted on afterward, is the only solution.

With policy enforcement, encryption, and IAM controls embedded in the data path across both object storage and industry standard table formats, AI practitioners gain self-service access without sacrificing auditability or control.

Structured and unstructured data are governed under a unified platform, which means compliance teams have consistent lineage and access records whether the workload is model training against raw objects or analytics running against Apache Iceberg tables.

The data under every AI initiative becomes a controlled, observable, high-performance foundation.

What leaders must prioritize now

As organizations move from experimentation to production, the data layer becomes the factor that determines whether AI actually scales. It’s a subtle shift, but an important one: success is no longer defined by the sophistication of the model, but by whether the infrastructure around it can support real-world demands.

That means:

• Treat storage as a strategic decision, not a backend concern. Data integrity, governance, and performance are architectural requirements, not supplementary support. High-performance, S3-native object storage that can keep pace with GPU clusters and AI pipelines is now table stakes.
• Design for AI agents as primary data consumers. Autonomous systems depend on fine-grained access control and full auditability for machine-to-machine interactions.
• Stay cloud-flexible without becoming cloud-dependent. The ability to run consistently across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments without egress penalties or lock-in is what gives organizations real control.
• Eliminate the silos AI exposes. Bringing governed, SQL-accessible structure to the same platform as raw object data closes the gaps where visibility and control tend to break down.

Autonomous, production-scale AI is within reach, but it’s only as strong as the foundation beneath it. Deploying AI tools without enterprise-grade data infrastructure isn’t bold, it’s a liability. The organizations that treat the data layer as foundational will be the ones that scale AI safely, reliably, and for the long term.

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• Nvidia just announced its Q1 fiscal 2027 results
• This came with a change in the way GPU sales are reported
• They won't be detailed separately any more, but buried in another category — Edge Computing — and there are reasons to be nervous

Nvidia is flying with the revelation of its latest financial results, hitting a record-breaking quarter. But hidden among the trumpeting of success there was a move which I find somewhat disturbing regarding Team Green's gaming GPUs.

Tom's Hardware noticed that aside from the record revenue in Q1 fiscal 2027 – which hit a staggering $81 billion – Nvidia is making a change to the way the company reports its financials going forward.

From this quarter and in the future, Nvidia won't separately report sales of client graphics cards, meaning consumer (GeForce) and professional (RTX Pro and others) GPUs. Instead, sales of those graphics solutions will be absorbed into another bigger category: Edge Computing.

So, Nvidia will have just two main categories with its financial reports: Data Center (which encompasses cloud, AI and supercomputing) and Edge Computing (which is PCs, workstations, consoles, as well as robotics, automotive and telecoms). We won't get a breakdown of sales of graphics solutions at all.

Analysis: shifting priorities

All this sounds mightily dull, of course, so why does it matter to gamers? And why might it worry them, more to the point? Well, what it means is that it'll no longer be possible to see how the GeForce and RTX side of Nvidia's business is performing.

In short, it's effectively draping a cloak of obscurity (I found one in Baldur's Gate 3, I think) over Nvidia's graphics revenue so nobody can easily see how this side of the business is doing.

Of course, this is a reflection of a few things: most certainly that Nvidia has become an AI juggernaut. And also that all investors really care about is AI now, and Team Green doesn't feel that graphics are important enough to report directly. The various RTX graphics cards that Nvidia sells — whether GeForce, or non-consumer RTX models — can just be filed away quietly, in the background.

The worry for me is that this is also a way of keeping graphics sales out of the limelight if Nvidia is going to deprioritize its GeForce lineup going forward. With no visibility in the financial reporting, there's going to be no easy way to spot gaming GPUs dwindling.

That may seem like a leap to a conclusion, but it isn't just this latest move with the financial reports to consider — there's also Nvidia's wider attitude towards GeForce in recent times. With the RAM crisis, we've seen GPU price hikes and concerns over production and stock. On top of that, there have been rumors of GeForce models that were supposed to be released: RTX 5000 Super refreshes, which were heavily rumored, and supposedly designed and readied, but have now been shelved.

The chatter from the grapevine is that we won't see any new GPUs from Nvidia this year at all — not one — and that's very rare (in fact it hasn't happened in three decades). This is because Nvidia needs all the chips it can get — and perhaps more to the point, all the video RAM — for AI graphics cards, which are far more profitable than consumer models.

And let's not forget that Nvidia's keynote at CES 2026 — a show that's about consumer electronics — didn't mention anything to do with GeForce GPUs. (Not the hardware, anyway, although we did hear about DLSS 4.5, but that's not quite the same — the only hardware touched on was gaming monitors).

There's an increasing feeling among gamers that priorities are shifting more radically towards the AI side of the market for Nvidia, and away from gaming GPUs, and I can't blame people for thinking this way. This latest move to bury graphics sales in Nvidia's financial reports feels like another step on this path of marginalizing the GeForce family, and yes, I agree, we can't be jumping to conclusions, but it's all adding up and feeling rather ominous to me.

• NVIDIA releass new GPU driver updates for Windows and Linux
• Fixes 14 vulnerabilities across GeForce, RTX, Quadro, Tesla, NVS, vGPU, and Cloud Gaming software
• The most severe flaw, CVE‑2026‑24187, is a use‑after‑free bug rated 8.8/10 that enables code execution, privilege escalation, data theft, or system crashes

Nvidia has issued a new patch for its GPU display drivers, fixing 14 vulnerabilities in both Windows and Linux.

The majority of the flaws are labeled as “high-severity”, which is why Nvidia urged its users to apply the fixes without delay.

In a newly released security advisory, Nvidia said it fixed bugs in GeForce, RTX, Quadro, Tesla, and NVS product lines, as well as its vGPU and Cloud Gaming software.

How to patch up

The biggest vulnerability to be fixed is a “use-after-free” memory flaw, now tracked as CVE-2026-24187. With a severity of 8.8/10 (high), this bug allows threat actors to execute arbitrary code, steal data, escalate privileges, and even crash entire systems.

Several other high-severity vulnerabilities allow malicious actors to do similar things, from code execution to privilege escalation, and from data tampering to information disclosure.

One affects both Windows and Linux systems through improper access to GPU resources in the kernel layer, while another targets Windows specifically through a timing flaw that could be exploited to manipulate system operations.

Among the fixed flaws are two in Nvidia’s Unified Virtual Memory subsystem on Linux, which could lead to denial-of-service attacks without the need for elevated permissions. Nvidia's vGPU software, used in virtualized and cloud environments, also received patches for two vulnerabilities in the virtual GPU manager component.

Users can now download the updated drivers either through the Nvidia Driver Downloads page, or through the Nvidia Licensing Portal, depending on which products they’re running. Windows users should look for the driver version 569.49 and newer, while those running Linux, version 590.48.01.

Besides making sure the software is patched, users should also always keep their Windows Defender (or other antivirus programs) up and running at all times.

The company credited several external security researchers for responsibly reporting the flaws, including researchers from Seoul National University and Binarly Research Team.

• This brand new perception chip supports real-time awareness at huge efficiency
• Always-on tracking could also improve smartphone camera performance
• Object recognition, positional tracking and scene understanding also supported

Swiss semiconductor startup Mosaic has successfully raised $3.8 million in funding to build super-efficient so-called perception chips, which would be installed across smart glasses and other wearables to bring more powerful processing into smaller form factors.

Company co-founder and CEO Alfio Di Mauro argues that “spatial intelligence shouldn’t require an application-class processor and a GPU,” hence the inception of Mosaic SoC, which aims to deliver “real-time perception at a fraction of the energy.”

Mosaic says its “next-generation perception chips” will address some of the current bottlenecks wearable makers face today, including battery size, heat output, device thickness and engineering complexity.

Are perception chips the answer to powerful yet slim wearables?

While cameras and sensors continue to improve, manufacturers are under increasing pressure to add more compute and processing power inside devices while maintaining (or even decreasing) form factor.

The perception chip is said to be able to provide real-time environmental awareness, object recognition, positional tracking and scene understanding while consuming only a fraction of the power a conventional smartphone-class compute stack would consume, making it ideal for future AR glasses and headsets.

“The Mosaic SoC chips are designed to be small enough and efficient enough to make smart glasses indistinguishable from regular glasses, while still delivering full spatial awareness,” the company declared in a press release.

Early smart glasses like Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta devices currently lean heavily on smartphone pairing to get the most out of the technology they provide because the physical constraints of size and weight prevent them from being able to install the relevant hardware. On the flip side, Apple’s Vision Pro often draws criticism for its sheer weight (750-800g), which makes it uncomfortable to wear for longer periods.

However use cases extend far beyond just glasses – in smartphones, perception chips could power always-on tracking and classification to deliver continuous awareness with minimal impacts on battery life.

Extra power and big goals

Where Mosaic’s perception chip differs from others is that, where others rely on single- or dual-code ARM-based designs, this one uses a proprietary design and a multi-core architecture of eight or more cores, which maximizes performance per watt to back up Mosaic’s bold efficiency claims.

Mosaic also claims to remove original design manufacturer (ODM) complexity, shipping its chips with a full application layer developed and maintained by the startup.

While the company has already achieved “meaningful revenue” through NRE contracts with ODM partners, future plans revolve around far more than being a chip provider. This startup has big visions to become a platform supplier, where applications are developed specifically for its silicon.

“The next billion smart devices will see and understand the world around them,” Antonia Albert, an investor with leading Swiss pre-seed fund Founderful, commented. “Mosaic SoC's product is the chip that makes that possible at scale.”

• AMD has announced its Q1 results, with booming revenue driven by AI
• There's bad news for the gaming division, though, due to 'higher memory and component costs, ' AMD's CEO Lisa Su observed
• AMD's CFO has forecast 'gaming revenue to decline by more than 20%' in the second half of 2026 compared to the first half of the year

AMD just revealed its latest financial results, with good news for investors in the form of a major surge in revenue, but bad news for consumers, with more RAM-related worries looming on the horizon.

Tom's Hardware reports that AMD's Q1 2026 fiscal results witnessed a new record for data center revenue, as the AI boom drove further growth, but CEO Lisa Su warned of PC component price spikes going forward.

Su predicted that demand is going to wane with its client and gaming businesses – essentially the consumer side of AMD's hardware – in the second half of 2026 due to "higher memory and component costs".

So, yes, that means AMD's chief executive believes that after next month, as we head into Q3, RAM and other components are only going to get pricier.

With gaming, the damage done by price hikes could be quite considerable, as AMD's Chief Financial Officer, Jean Hu, observed: "We expect second half [of 2026] demand in gaming to be impacted by higher component and memory cost. We now expect second half gaming revenue to decline by more than 20% compared to the first half."

Analysis: Radeon price hikes – or indeed pricier consoles?

In other words, compared to the first half of the year (of which less than two months now remain – with time flying by, as ever), the second half of 2026 is going to be considerably more sluggish for AMD's gaming revenue. The expectation isn't just a 20% drop, but a more than 20% fall, so that could be a quarter less money raked in, or maybe more, up towards 30%, even.

This would seem to indicate that AMD's Radeon graphics cards are going to be in shorter supply in Q3 and Q4, and that there may be further price hikes on RX 9000 models. Clearly, AMD is expecting things to slow down with these graphics cards as 2026 rolls on, but its gaming revenue isn't just about Radeon, of course – Team Red also makes the semi-custom GPUs for the PlayStation and Xbox consoles.

Sales of those consoles are softening naturally, mind you, given that they're in the later stages of their expected lifespan now, so we're reaching saturation levels for would-be buyers. What could also be factored in here is the price hikes for console hardware, causing further unwillingness to buy – or possibly, AMD is anticipating further PS5 or Xbox price rises later this year, compounding the misery.

That's just guesswork, but clearly the outlook isn't great for the second half of 2026, and this is the latest in a quickfire round of pessimistic RAM crisis predictions, two of which have come from memory chipmakers themselves. Micron has warned of growing AI demand and more pressure on RAM supply, while Samsung has observed that 'significant shortages' of memory will continue to plague us through 2027 as a best-case scenario.

There isn't much faith out there in Reddit-land that RAM pricing will recover anytime soon, or indeed that prices will ever reach the levels we saw last year, before the memory hikes started coming thick and fast.

As one Redditor put it in reaction to this news from AMD: "My prediction is that over 2027 prices will drop from an insane 400% [price increase] to a nice and summerly 200%. But they'll never fall lower than that ever again. The RAM economy will permanently change and data centers will be a nuisance for the rest of recorded time."

• A PC modder just built a room-sized gaming PC, fit with an air conditioner and a sauna
• The gaming PC has hardware components larger than a human
• The RAM sticks are props that are estimated to be 18,000GB of RAM each

Gaming PC builds come in all different shapes and sizes, either targeting improved airflow and temperatures or prioritizing desktop space — but this one takes the cake.

As reported by VideoCardz, a modder known as Soda Baka on Bilibili, has built a gaming PC the size of a room, with gigantic fans, a large GPU, CPU, and an AIO cooler. These are accompanied by an air conditioning unit to help control room temperatures and a literal 12,000W sauna with added water to help simulate the heat of a regular-sized gaming PC.

It's worth noting that the RAM sticks in this build are only props, and that's no surprise, since the estimated capacity based on their scale is 18,000GB of RAM each. That would already cost a fortune on its own, but we're in the middle of a RAM crisis, so I couldn't even imagine how costly each RAM stick would be.

Baka's project is easily one of the most ludicrous PC building projects out there, and has almost no real-world use case, as I struggle to imagine anybody has the resources readily available — or better yet, any reason to build a system like this, but it's great for aesthetics.

It's quite an amusing solution to summer heat (minus the sauna), with a significant amount of room for a gaming PC's operation and the addition of an air conditioning unit.

However, in a more practical and reasonable use case to help keep temperatures cool, it's best to simply invest in an AIO water cooler for the CPU, and look toward undervolting the GPU where possible. I've done exactly that with my main gaming PC build, and temperatures for both my RTX 4080 Super and AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D — and both max out at 65 degrees Celsius.

That's easily achievable, without building a room-sized gaming PC, but again, it is a perfect themed environment for any gamer.

Offering speed, flexibility, and the ability to scale without heavy upfront investment, the public cloud has for years been the model of efficiency. But as AI becomes embedded across every function of organizations, what once seemed like convenience now looks a lot more like a permanent cost burden.

That’s why many businesses are shifting from a cloud-first mindset toward a more balanced, hybrid approach, one that sees AI workloads brought back on-premise

Cloud used to be a major cost saver, but in 2026, the economics are changing quickly. Ingress and egress fees, combined with the premium charged for GPU compute cycles, have ballooned as more AI models run.

When 10% of top-line revenue goes to a cloud provider just to keep the lights on, organizations feel like they’re not simply renting infrastructure but paying a recurring tax on their own growth.

This is the state of play with the always-on nature of today’s AI models.

Frequent, high-volume tasks are driving cost increases. Enterprises are now using large language models (LLMs) to summarize internal meetings, scan customer support tickets, and run continuous retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines.

Individually, these API calls seem inexpensive. But at scale, they are a massive recurring expense. AI agents bring more complexity. These systems function more like digital employees, planning tasks, verifying outputs and retrying workflows.

From renting to owning

With public cloud pricing models, the more a team relies on AI, the more an organization pays. In other words, there’s a tax on realizing AI’s full potential.

On-prem infrastructure turns that upside-down. A one-time investment in high-performance hardware converts unpredictable monthly expenses into fixed, depreciable assets. Companies own the computing capability outright rather than paying exorbitant rent.

The cost of local hardware is often recouped quickly when compared to ongoing API usage or GPU rental fees, particularly for predictable, always-on workloads.

But cost is just part of the equation. Performance is the other.

In the cloud, workloads typically run on shared infrastructure. Organizations often operate on a “slice” of a server alongside other tenants, introducing latency, resource contention, and performance variability.

By contrast, local AI runs on dedicated hardware. There is no network lag, no shared queues, and no “noisy neighbor” interference. For end users, that translates into immediate responsiveness.

The governance imperative

Data sovereignty is another driver of the on-prem trend.

In a public cloud environment, sensitive data resides on third-party infrastructure, creating challenges for compliance, auditing, and intellectual property protection.

On-prem AI changes that dynamic. Prompts, proprietary training data, and outputs remain within the organization’s physical and logical boundaries. Compliance with frameworks like GDPR or HIPAA becomes more straightforward because data residency is guaranteed by design.

This also addresses growing concerns around “prompt leaks.” When employees input sensitive information into external AI systems, there is a risk of unintended persistence or exposure. Localized AI environments create a controlled, secure environment for experimentation and deployment.

Smaller, more efficient models are making this possible. Businesses do not need hyperscale infrastructure for every use case.

That’s why we are beginning to see the “rightsizing” of AI. Capable assistants can now run on systems with 64GB or 128GB of high-speed memory. What once required a large, expensive server can now be done with a compact, cost-effective workstation.

Hybrid model

This transition to on-prem AI does not mean abandoning the cloud.

For most forward-looking businesses, the right solution is a hybrid model. Cloud can be used more strategically, reserved for large-scale training jobs and burst workloads that require massive, synchronized GPU resources.

At the same time, local infrastructure handles agentic AI programs, internal copilots, and sensitive data analysis.

As a strategic hub rather than a peripheral, companies can build environments that are faster, more secure, and more cost-efficient than a cloud-only approach.

They can attain full control over their data, eliminate hidden costs such as egress fees, and offer their teams a better experience.

In the future, we will see one person directing a team of agents, and in an enterprise, hundreds or even thousands of agents may continuously plan, call tools, share context, verify results, and retry tasks — all of which drive token usage sharply higher. This is a fundamental shift in how AI is used.

Collectively, these trends point to the emergence of a “private AI” model.

The shift from cloud-first to hybrid and on-prem AI is being driven by a convergence of forces: economics, governance, and performance. In 2026, the question is no longer whether to use the cloud, but how to use it strategically while keeping control over the workflows that matter most.

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• Fakes are now reaching a very high standard
• An Asus ROG Strix RTX 4090 proved to be indistinguishable from a genuine Nvidia GPU on first inspection by a repair expert
• There's a worrying level of sophistication here, and we've also seen this in recent times with fake SSDs

A fake Asus ROG Strix RTX 4090 is an example of just how authentic scam hardware can seem, and it's a worrying reminder given that this kind of fraud is very much on the rise of late.

VideoCardz reports that Northwest Repair (a Kentucky-based repair shop in the US) highlighted the incident with a YouTube video (which you can see below).

As Northwest Repair (NR) points out, the color of the board didn't look at all faked, and overall, it appeared to be a factory-made, genuine Nvidia graphics card. Typical clues like missing thermal compound around the corners of the GPU chip — which would indicate the chip had been removed (and then switched out) — were not present.

On first inspection, the only discernible clue was the thermal compound being somewhat darker than normal (or more "baked"), which NR picked up on, but noted that this could be due to the RTX 4090 being used for some serious overclocking, perhaps — it's not necessarily a telltale sign of a fake.

Even the laser-engraving of the model number on the chip looked authentic, and the same was true for the video memory.

In short, this was a carefully crafted fake GPU which, as NR makes clear, is made to a standard that the repair expert hasn't witnessed before. "This is the best scam I've ever seen," he observed, noting, "We've reached a point where the scam has gotten so good that even the trained eye cannot detect it."

Only examining the board under a microscope, in fine detail, revealed the small clues (related to soldering mostly) that gave away that this was a fake.

Analysis: a reminder that we need to be ever more vigilant

The advice NR gives is clear: don't buy an expensive flagship GPU second-hand, as these days, there's too much of a risk that someone could be trying to con you out of a lot of money. The only exception is if you're buying the graphics card from a friend you can trust.

Fakes also cast doubt on the practice of buying 'open box' returns, because the buyer who returned that hardware could have switched it out for a fake — one that stands up to inspection (but not to testing, though the retailer won't necessarily check that).

The sad reality of inflated prices for all PC components is that we're seeing a rise in hardware scams targeting this market. That includes graphics card scams, and incidents where a third-party marketplace seller doesn't even bother to include a fake GPU, but just a weighty 'dummy' item instead (a packet of laundry detergent, for example, or more commonly a rock or lump of metal).

What you should be careful of most right now, though, is scams relating to RAM and SSDs, where prices have spiked to ridiculous levels, tempting fraudsters to try their hand more with these components. As well as this highly sophisticated fake of an RTX 4090, we've seen some very convincing counterfeit SSDs of late — here's what you need to know in terms of watching out for them.

The level of scamming that's been seen this year has even prompted action from RAM manufacturers — Corsair has introduced new packaging in an attempt to make life more difficult for criminals who are trying to rip off consumers.

• Reuters has leaked details of SpaceX's plans ahead of its IPO
• They include "manufacturing our own GPUs"
• Whether that means chips in the current line of Tesla AI processors, or a new category of GPU or AI accelerator is unclear

SpaceX is apparently set to make its own GPUs, based on insights gleaned from its S-1 form ahead of the company's IPO, although these won't be products you'll be installing in your PC.

Tom's Hardware picked up the report by Reuters, with the news site claiming to have seen the S-1 form, which is filed by companies going public. SpaceX is expected to be worth in excess of $1 trillion – and probably closer to $2 trillion – when its shares are available on the stock market (next month, in theory).

Part of the form explains major spending plans to develop AI, which includes a mention of "manufacturing our own GPUs" in the listed 'substantial' capital expenditures.

As noted, these wouldn't be a rival for the likes of Nvidia's GeForce GPUs, but rather graphics boards built for AI tasks, commonly known as AI accelerators.

Nvidia makes those solutions, as well, of course – as does AMD – but SpaceX would seemingly rather have its own homegrown AI accelerators, because as noted in the S-1 filing, it does not have "long-term contracts ​with many of our direct chip ​suppliers". And clearly, that's going to be problematic given the current RAM crisis and its knock-on effects.

What isn't clear is whether SpaceX's mention of 'GPUs' in the filing could more broadly refer to Tesla's AI processors, which are currently on the AI4 generation, with the next-gen AI5 set to provide a big leap in performance (of a factor of 40x, it's claimed). It's possible that the company may be referring to this series of AI chips, rather than an entirely separate line of GPUs for AI tasks.

When it comes to making these chips, presumably the 'Terafab' project – a huge chip manufacturing center in Texas which involves SpaceX, xAI and Tesla – is going to be involved, even though GPUs haven't been mentioned directly in connection with this facility.

Analysis: AI5 or something else entirely, it won't be in your PC

At least to me, this does read more like a play for a new product, as opposed to a mention of existing AI chips and calling them 'GPUs' informally. That said, looking at the bigger picture, as Tom's points out, Elon Musk has referred to Tesla's AI5 chips as GPUs, and even noted that it "basically is a GPU" – and so you can see where the confusion comes in. All this could simply boil down to a liberal use of the term GPU, and mean precisely nothing.

At any rate, for the average consumer, the point to bear in mind is that whatever SpaceX is up to on the GPU front, if anything, it won't be relevant to the everyday computer user. This is all about silicon designed to drive AI performance specifically, and whether it's technically an AI chip in the existing line, or something different in terms of a new GPU accelerator designed for AI tasks, is all semantics – it won't be a graphics card as such (as in one designed to process 3D graphics).

Any confusion aside, the overall aim for Musk is clear enough, and that's to ensure AI chip supply by producing them himself, given the mentioned lack of 'long-term contracts' with chip makers.

How comforting this leak will be to would-be investors in SpaceX remains to be seen, but Musk appears to have some grand plans here, and not for the first time.

• Most AI GPUs run at shockingly low utilization across production systems
• Companies are paying for twenty times more GPU capacity than needed
• Overprovisioning is rising sharply instead of improving year after year

Companies across the tech industry are racing to buy massive amounts of AI infrastructure, but most of it does barely any useful work at all.

A report from Cast AI, based on tens of thousands of Kubernetes clusters across AWS, Azure, and GCP, found that average GPU utilization sits at just 5%.

Many teams deploy sophisticated AI tools to manage their applications, yet those same tools are not used to optimize the underlying infrastructure.

The numbers are getting worse, not better

Organizations pay for roughly 20x more GPU capacity than their workloads actually use at any given moment.

The numbers come from direct measurements of production clusters and millions of compute resources before any optimization was applied.

"This is the third year we've published this report. The numbers are worse," said Laurent Gil, co-founder and President of Cast AI. "CPU utilization fell to 8%, down from 10%. Memory dropped from 23% to 20%."

The report also measured something called overprovisioning, which is the gap between what workloads actually need and what teams allocate to them.

CPU overprovisioning rose from 40% to 69% year over year, while memory overprovisioning now stands at 79%.

This means organizations reserve nearly twice as many CPU resources and four times as much memory as their workloads actually consume.

In short, organizations pay for infrastructure that their workloads do not even request, and the trend is accelerating instead of improving.

The situation gets even more expensive when comparing CPU and GPU costs directly. A CPU core sitting idle costs only cents per hour, but a GPU sitting idle costs dollars per hour.

For the first time since EC2 launched in 2006, GPU prices are rising instead of falling.

In January 2026, AWS raised H200 Capacity Block prices by 15%, citing supply and demand, which broke a two-decade precedent.

"At 5% utilization, the math doesn't work," the report states. The hoarding instinct makes sense because lead times are long, yet that same hoarding feeds the scarcity loop that drives prices even higher.

Not every cluster performs this badly, and one organization hit 49% utilization on H200s and 30% on H100s, well above the 5% average.

The difference comes down to automation rather than luck or better hardware. The tools to fix this already exist, including automated rightsizing, GPU sharing or time slicing, and Spot management.

However, most teams never get there because overprovisioning feels safer than running out of capacity, but that safety comes at a steep price.

The teams that closed the gap stopped treating resource efficiency as a manual, one-time task and started treating it as an automated, continuous process.

But Cast AI data reveals that most companies seem willing to keep paying large fees rather than change their habits.

I’ll be honest: despite many tech companies trying to convince me otherwise, artificial intelligence has left me cold (if not downright outraged when Google’s AI overviews steal my content) — but there’s one AI feature that I use almost every day: Nvidia’s DLSS, which uses artificial intelligence to upscale video game graphics, reducing the stress on compatible graphics cards, and essentially allowing for more impressive graphical effects and results without the hardware holding them back.

When it comes to flagship GPUs like the RTX 5090, it means achieving the kind of results (such as 8K resolutions at 60fps) that would have once been impossible, but it also means more affordable mid-range and budget GPUs can offer the kind of performance that used to demand more expensive GPUs.

Since its inception in 2019, Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) has continued to improve, with its latest version, DLSS 4.5, focusing primarily on frame rate improvements that aim to match the frames per second (fps) your GPU can achieve with the native refresh rate of your monitor.

Having a monitor with a refresh rate of 120hz, for example, and a frame rate of 120fps, will give you a fast and responsive gaming experience with (hopefully) no instances of screen tearing or stuttering, two big visual problems that can occur when the frame rate and refresh rates don’t match exactly.

DLSS 4.5 attempts to rectify that by bringing up to six times frame generation, as well as a new Dynamic Multi Frame Generation feature.

The pros and cons of Multi Frame Generation

Frame Generation, which was introduced in 2022 as part of DLSS 3.0, was — before DLSS 5’s announcement — arguably the most controversial part of DLSS. It uses AI to generate additional frames between rendered frames, helping to improve or stabilize frame rates. Essentially, if a GPU was hitting 20fps, Frame Generation could boost this to 40fps by inserting a generated frame after each rendered one.

To be honest, I wasn’t too impressed when Frame Generation first debuted. While the generated frames were supposed to be indistinguishable from the rendered frames (as they were generating frames based on the rendered frames, and you’re likely seeing lots of frames every second), I found that it made the overall look of certain games (I tried it with Cyberpunk 2077) feel rather soft and blurry.

The introduction of Multi Frame Generation (MFG) with DLSS 4.0 allowed for up to three frames to be generated per rendered frame, potentially increasing the frame rate by up to four times, while minimizing the impact on the GPU (as generating a frame is less intensive than rendering a new one). I was initially worried about this due to my experience with the first generation of Frame Generation, as generating more frames per second would make any issues more noticeable.

However, I was pleasantly surprised by the improvements Nvidia had made to Multi Frame Generation, as I found the impact on graphical fidelity to be much less noticeable (if at all), while frame rates drastically increased. Of course, this does depend on the game, level of Multi Frame Generation support, and your own subjective experience, but what I liked most of all about Multi Frame Generation was that it allowed you to determine how many frames (if any) were generated compared to rendered.

So, while I got my RTX 5090 to hit ridiculous 200+ fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K with path tracing on, because my TV has a refresh rate of 120Hz, I could tweak Multi Frame Generation, lowering the number of generated frames until I hit a rock-solid 120fps.

Combined with improvements to upscaling quality, DLSS was fast becoming an impressive bit of tech, especially for people who couldn’t afford flagship GPUs.

However, controversy was brewing amongst PC gamers, mainly focused on the idea of ‘fake frames’, with some naysayers dismissing the generated frames and arguing that relying on DLSS and MFG could lead to game developers not bothering to optimize their games for PC.

I didn’t really buy that argument — for me, personally, I was finding it increasingly difficult to differentiate between rendered and generated frames, though there were still times when visual glitches and artifacts gave the game away.

Also, because DLSS is exclusive to Nvidia GPUs (and the most recent RTX models), game developers would still need to optimize their games for Intel and AMD hardware, not to mention consoles.

In fact, DLSS’ success saw AMD and Intel (plus others) come up with their own alternatives (AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and Intel XeSS) — and in my view, any technology that inspires or forces competitors to innovate and up their games is broadly positive.

Courting controversy

Aside from some, in my mind, easily dismissed complaints in some quarters about ‘fake frames’, over the past few years, DLSS has quietly been impressing me, and has become an AI tool that this AI sceptic uses almost daily.

I’m not the only one, either. According to numbers Nvidia shared early last year, 80% of PC gamers who have an Nvidia RTX graphics card (which, let’s face it, is a large majority of PC gamers due to Nvidia’s market lead) play with DLSS turned on, and as the technology develops, and an increasing number of games support it, I assume that number has only grown.

Still, the launch of DLSS 4.5 wasn’t without its risks, especially as one of the key selling points is that MFG can now generate five additional frames per rendered frame (which Nvidia terms 6X). If you had concerns about ‘fake frames’, or found the generated frames particularly noticeable and distracting, then you might not be overjoyed by the thought that with 6X MFG, the vast majority of frames you’re seeing will be AI-generated, rather than rendered by your GPU.

However, DLSS 4.5 also introduces Dynamic Multi Frame Generation (DMFG), which automatically changes the number of frames generated to ensure games reliably hit your target frame rate. So, by setting the target at 120fps, for example, DMFG will generate more frames when a scene in a game gets particularly intense, then it will lower the number of generated frames when things calm down, which should give you a solid frame rate without sacrificing image quality too much. It’s kind of what I’ve been doing manually, but with DMFG, it can change the settings on the fly as you play, and it means you don’t have to mess around with settings if you’re one of those weird PC gamers who prefer actually playing games, rather than tweaking.

With extremely high refresh rate gaming monitors, capable of 240Hz, 360Hz and beyond, becoming more common, 6X MFG also aims to take the burden of producing similarly high frame rates off the GPU, and combined with Nvidia’s Reflex tech, which lowers latency, DLSS 4.5 shouldn’t just allow compatible GPUs to punch well above their weight when it comes to performance, but should make games feel faster and more responsive, and allow gamers to make the most out of high refresh rate monitors without having to spend a fortune on a high-end GPU.

Testing out DLSS 4.5

For the past few weeks, I’ve been having a play with DLSS 4.5 to see if it can deliver on its lofty promises. To do this, I installed a PNY RTX 5070 graphics card in one of my PCs. The RTX 5070, with 12GB of GDDR7, is a mid-range (though at the upper end of the market) GPU that’s more affordable than the more powerful RTX 5080 and 5090 GPUs, but with hardware that will struggle with gaming at 4K and super-high frame rates, and that means it’s going to be one of the GPUs that most benefits from DLSS 4.5.

To help with my tests, MSI kindly sent me over its MPG 322UR QD-OLED X24 gaming monitor, which is a 31.5-inch 4K OLED (which uses MSI’s fourth generation QD-OLED technology) that’s capable of refresh rates of up to 240Hz. This is a screen that offers exceptional image quality alongside super-fast refresh rates.

Ordinarily, the relatively modest RTX 5070 graphics card would struggle to get anywhere near 200fps at 4K resolution in modern, graphically intensive, games, so pairing it up with the MSI MPG 322UR QD-OLED X24 could be considered a bit of a waste of money.

Not so with DLSS 4.5. At native resolution, with DLSS and MFG turned off, Cyberpunk 2077 at ‘High’ textures hit around 51fps on average. This is the kind of performance I’d expect from the 5070 — not mind-blowing, but with a bit of tweaking and lowering some settings, you could get a playable 60fps at 4K. Turning on extremely intensive Path Tracing lighting saw the average frame rate plummet to below 4fps.

Enabling both DLSS upscaling and 6X frame generation (which, for the moment, needs to be done via an override in the Nvidia app, rather than within the game’s settings) saw the frame rate jump to a very impressive 140fps on average. Not only is this taking advantage of the MSI monitor’s high refresh rate, but it also means RTX 5070 owners can experience Cyberpunk 2077, an already great-looking game, with immersive and realistic path-traced lighting — something they’d have missed out on in the past.

Turning off path tracing saw frame rates hit 270fps — well above the 240Hz of the MSI MPG 322UR QD-OLED X24. All of a sudden, the RTX 5070 becomes a great GPU to pair with the MPG 322UR, and while I did notice some minor visual issues (mainly around reflections sometimes looking pixellated, and some ghosting around moving objects — especially when driving), on the whole it looked, and felt, amazing to play, and the OLED monitor really made the neon-lit metropolis of Night City, where the game is set, look incredible. The visual issues weren’t too distracting, and I’m aware that at 6X frame generation, 4K resolution, and high graphical settings, I really was pushing the RTX 5070 to its limits.

Setting Dynamic Multi Frame Gen to match the 240Hz maximum refresh rate of the monitor made for more consistent frame rates, while also slightly reducing ghosting, as fewer frames are generated.

I also set Dynamic Multi Frame Gen to target 120fps, as my OLED TV (which I usually play on) offers, like a lot of TVs, 120Hz refresh rates at 4K. This gave me headroom to increase DLSS from ‘Performance’ to ‘Quality’, which means less upscaling is involved, while also turning on path tracing. This again improved image quality, and I was getting around 130fps on average.

It wasn’t perfect, as there were still some glitches (especially with some of the user interface (UI) elements, which DLSS 4.5 is supposed to address), but the fact that the RTX 5070 was managing 4K at 120fps with ray tracing on was very impressive.

I also played Avowed, which looked fantastic, and was hitting around 255fps on average, and Hogwarts Legacy. That last game was less impressive, with very noticeable and distracting visual artifacts and ghosting around characters. I fiddled around with the settings in both the game itself and via the Nvidia app, but I couldn’t seem to fix it, though this seems to be an issue with the game, rather than DLSS 4.5.

With the high refresh rates, I didn’t experience noticeable latency (a pause between issuing a command, such as firing a gun, when gaming, and when that command is shown on the display), though people who play competitive esports, where latency has to be kept to an absolute minimum, might find it more noticeable. However, in those cases, you’d be better off lowering the resolution to 1080p and turning down graphical effects so you can play the game natively, rather than introducing DLSS features, which, no matter how well optimized, will increase latency slightly.

Don’t let DLSS 5 overshadow DLSS 4.5’s good work

Overall, I was impressed with how DLSS 4.5 boosted my RTX 5070’s performance enough to take advantage of a 240Hz 4K screen. While there are some visual issues when really pushing MFG, the benefits far outweigh these, in my opinion, if you’re using a mid-range or budget GPU, and it continues to make high-end effects and features like path tracing more accessible for people who can’t afford high-end GPUs.

Bearing in mind my disappointing first impression of the original DLSS, I’m also reasonably confident that DLSS 4.5 will continue to be improved both by Nvidia and game developers as the technology matures and they become more familiar with it.

As I’m lucky enough to also own an RTX 5090, and mainly play on a TV that is capable of 4K and 120Hz, I’m going to stick with playing games natively where possible (so no upscaling or frame generation is used), but as games continue to become more graphically demanding, I could definitely see Dynamic Multi Frame Gen helping out, kicking in only when needed.

What does concern me, however, is that DLSS 4.5’s solid release seems to have been eclipsed already by its successor. This is due to Nvidia showing off a preview of DLSS 5… which didn’t get a positive response, to put it lightly.

Rather than concentrating on improving frame rates, image quality, and general performance, DLSS 5 instead looks to focus purely on aesthetics. The issue is, while the likes of DLSS 4.5 would upscale or generate images based on existing rendered frames, while preserving the original artistic intent, DLSS 5 appears to fundamentally change certain aspects of the image, including lighting and, most controversially, character designs, with many critics unflatteringly comparing DLSS 5 to cheap AI filters you find in mobile apps. The backlash was vocal enough to prompt Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang into responding, though his initial reaction, calling naysayers “completely wrong”, didn’t help matters.

While I have reservations myself (the DLSS 5 examples shown did feel like too many liberties were taken with the artists’ original intent, and it could lead to gamers having very different experiences depending on whether they have a GPU capable of DLSS 5 or not), DLSS 5’s biggest crime will be if the furor surrounding it makes people dismiss DLSS 4.5, and the positive steps it’s taken to make advanced graphical effects achievable to more people (though as long as you have an Nvidia GPU, of course).

I’ll reserve my judgement until DLSS 5 officially comes out — until then, I hope Nvidia continues down the DLSS 4.5 route, rather than turning future DLSS releases into just another generative AI slop tool I’d rather avoid using.

• Asus has announced the ROG Equalizer 12V-2x6 power cable
• The cable aims to solve melting issues with high-powered GPUs like the RTX 5090
• It's compatible with all PCIe 5.0 power supplies from other manufacturers

It's no secret that high-powered GPUs, notably Nvidia's RTX 5090, are still suffering from reports of connector melting issues, even with upgraded cables that have improved power connectors — but fortunately, Asus has seemingly introduced a solution.

As reported by TweakTown, Asus has announced the ROG Equalizer, a 12V-2x6 power cable for GPUs utilizing up to 600W, one that's designed to further help protect them from melting issues.

Of course, as a rule, RTX 5090s using 12VHPWR and 12V-2x6 cables aren't experiencing melting issues, but there have been enough cases to cause concern for consumers. Both cables are effectively the same, and the only major difference for the revamped 12V-2x6 design is that it has shorter sensing pins and longer power pins, which help to ensure the cable is properly seated. It's a poor connection which theoretically causes the melting problem.

That's why Asus has opted for a 12V-2x6 power connector, but with a tweaked design that has been specifically refined for a bigger load capacity within each wire, now at 17 amps (it's usually 9.2 amps with regular 12V-2x6 cables). These are also 'premium etched cables' that are flexible to help with cable management.

Comment from r/pcmasterrace

Comment from r/pcmasterrace

Combined with the GPU Tweak III software and its Power Detector+ feature, the ROG Equalizer should effectively keep hardware safe from melting, or that's the theory. In an extreme test case from Asus, the company observed that even if the connector wasn't seated in the GPU correctly, the ROG Equalizer would still maintain a temperature of 73.4C.

Meanwhile, a standard 12V-2x6 cable would reach 146C in the same scenario, which is a very high temperature that would likely result in the connector melting.

It's a big claim from Asus, and if this can be reproduced in other independent tests once the ROG Equalizer is available, it may just be the perfect tool to eliminate any melting issues with RTX 5090 GPUs.

The ROG Equalizer is compatible with power supplies from "all leading manufacturers", which is a massive bonus for all PC owners who have ATX 3.1 (PCIe 5.0) power supplies. It will also come bundled with ROG Thor III and ROG Strix Platinum series power supplies, but there's currently no release date for those.

Despite the marketing pitch here, Asus has not done enough to convince some gamers, and there are those who suggest that graphics cards linked to connector problems are simply best avoided.

These connector melting issues have been problematic for years, ever since the RTX 4090's launch in 2022. If the ROG Equalizer can finally put an end to all this, it should make high-powered GPUs like the RTX 5090 more approachable — well, aside from the obvious stumbling block of the pricing, anyway.

• Someone bought an MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z, which is a $5,000 GPU
• They then practiced their soldering skills on the board, and broke the graphics card
• Why? It's surely because they wanted to implement a hardware mod that allows for an extreme BIOS to be run on the GPU

MSI's RTX 5090 Lightning Z is a rare limited-edition graphics card that costs $5,000 (or thereabouts) in the US, so what better way to practice your soldering than to test out your skills with the iron on said board?

Reckless? Well, that doesn't even begin to cover it really, but VideoCardz spotted this improbable-sounding tale of GPU foolishness, which was posted on YouTube by NorthridgeFix, a California-based hardware repair shop.

The broken card was sent into the repair outlet with an issue description which revealed the owner wanted to "learn how to solder tiny 0402 resistors" and that they were "practicing" on their pricey GPU.

"He tried to 'learn soldering' on an extremely rare MSI 5090 Lightning Z GPU of which only 1,300 units were ever made worldwide," NorthridgeFix observes in its YouTube blurb, adding: "I'm speechless."

Me too.

Predictably enough, the soldering lesson went badly wrong and ended up ripping one of the resistor pads, rendering the RTX 5090 non-functional, and requiring a delicate repair.

The repair isn't actually fully completed in the video clip, as it still needed further testing, but it seems like NorthridgeFix was successful in rescuing the expensive graphics card.

Analysis: solder to cry on

Why was the RTX 5090 owner even thinking about playing around with soldering resistors in this way with such a pricey piece of hardware? It's presumably because they were trying to get the MSI XOC ('extreme performance') BIOS to work so they could engage in some extreme overclocking.

That BIOS was seemingly limited in distribution and only given to pro overclockers, and MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z graphics cards bought at retail can't be flashed with it. However, the BIOS was leaked, and what's happened is that some folks have found a way around this restriction, with adding an extra resistor seemingly allowing the XOC BIOS to be used. And apparently this is what the owner of the GPU was trying to do.

There is a reason, of course, why MSI hasn't freely released the XOC BIOS: namely, because if it did, there'd likely be a fair few destroyed RTX 5090 GPUs (and warranty claims). Remember, this extreme take on the BIOS is designed to allow for 2500W of power, a truly ridiculous amount (intended for the likes of liquid nitrogen-driven world record overclocking attempts).

At any rate, extreme BIOS aside, and to state the obvious: if you're a newcomer to soldering, don't start your journey on any functional graphics card, let alone a cutting-edge flagship model – and a limited-edition effort at that. The mind boggles with this case, frankly.

• Crimson Desert is now playable on Intel Arc GPUs, seemingly after Intel's latest driver update
• The game previously wouldn't launch on any Intel GPU, due to Pearl Abyss omitting compatibility
• Visual glitches are evident, but an official future update from Pearl Abyss or Intel should fix them

Pearl Abyss' Crimson Desert has provided a joyful experience to a variety of gamers on PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles, including those with gaming PCs powered by an Nvidia or AMD GPU. The same couldn't be said for Intel GPU users at launch, but the tide has suddenly turned.

As reported by Wccftech, Crimson Desert is now playable on Intel Arc GPUs, thanks to the latest GPU driver, noted by several users on Reddit. They're now able to boot into the game, which hasn't been possible since launch, with an error message previously stating 'the graphics device is currently not supported'.

This all comes after Pearl Abyss urged Intel Arc GPU users to request a refund for the game via its FAQ page, leaving both users and Intel itself bewildered by the decision to omit compatibility.

Well, thanks to backlash from Arc GPU users and Intel stating its "huge disappointment" at the lack of support, despite reaching out over the game's seven-year development period, Pearl Abyss recently promised future updates to provide compatibility; however, the latter is not exactly what we're seeing at this stage.

Crimson Desert screenshots after latest driver from r/IntelArc

Comment from r/IntelArc

While Crimson Desert is playable on Intel Arc GPUs, it's still far from being fully supported, as numerous screenshots (available above) show multiple visual glitches. Some of them look like they've been pulled from a book of nightmares, with the main character, Kliff, and other NPCs missing parts of their faces or bodies.

However, this should be expected, as this isn't an update from Pearl Abyss on the game's end, and Intel's driver patch notes don't reference Crimson Desert. Once updates arrive from both Pearl Abyss and Intel, performance and visual glitches should no longer be a concern.

Fortunately, the game being in a playable state is a step in the right direction, even if it wasn't intentional on Intel's end, and hopefully, we'll be able to move past the matter of full compatibility for Arc GPUs sooner rather than later.

• Asus RX 9070 XT GPUs have been hit with a sudden price hike in the US
• Framework has warned that while memory costs have stabilized in some areas, this is likely just a temporary reprieve
• The laptop maker predicts that "We'll continue to see volatility and cost increases through the rest of 2026."

There's been a fresh round of price rises for PC components, and that includes price hikes for certain Radeon GPUs, as well as more RAM and storage-related unpleasantness.

We'll start with the graphics cards. VideoCardz noticed that Asus RX 9070 XT models have become more expensive at the firm's US store.

For example, the Asus Prime 9070 XT OC was previously $799.99 and has now been jacked up to $939.99, which represents a hefty increase of 17.5%. The newer white model of this graphics card has gone up by 7% and will now set you back $959.99.

The Asus TUF overclocked take on the 9070 XT is up by 16.5%, meaning the GPU now tips the scales at $989.99, very nearly a grand.

There's been no official announcement from Asus regarding any rising prices, and these hikes have been applied overnight, worryingly.

On top of that, modular laptop and PC manufacturer Framework has announced more RAM and SSD price increases (hat tip to Tom's Hardware), albeit these are not as painful as we've previously witnessed.

The Framework Laptop has seen a price increase for the prebuilt model with 64GB of DDR5 RAM, although there is some more positive news with lower CPU pricing (this is down to its original level for some configurations).

With the Framework Desktop PC, the company notes that it has absorbed RAM cost increases save for the 128GB model, which has had a price hike.

On the storage front, it says new SSDs the company is buying have "substantially higher costs" and to begin with, this means the 4TB version of the WD SN850X is more expensive – and other drives are likely to be soon.

Framework adds: "Our advice here is still that if you need high capacity storage, you should configure a system with it now while we still have inventory at the older, lower cost basis."

Analysis: a temporary reprieve?

Despite the fact that some cost increases have been absorbed, and the latest round of hikes is relatively limited, Framework cautions against getting comfortable with any notion that things might be calming down with regard to the memory crisis. The manufacturer warns: "We have seen costs stabilize in some areas, but all indications are that this is a temporary reprieve and that we'll continue to see volatility and cost increases through the rest of 2026."

There have been glimmers of hope regarding a RAM reprieve elsewhere of late, too — albeit mainly based on the cost of memory getting so high that consumer demand is seriously flagging — but those hints have been weighed down with similar caveats.

The Asus GPU price hikes are more alarming here, though, as they represent some swiftly applied increases, pushing the Radeon 9070 XT graphics card up over the $900 mark for a basic model. That said, this isn't representative of the overall market for AMD's 9070 XT in the US, as you can still get this GPU (at the entry level) for not much more than $700 (at least for some models).

However, is this an early signal that we might see other board makers also increase their 9070 XT asking prices? Possibly — that is very much the worry here, and we shouldn't forget that a few months ago, back at the start of the year in the US, you could still get these AMD GPUs for around the $600 mark, which certainly isn't the case now.

Data centers are entering the most aggressive expansion cycle in their history. Artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and GPU-accelerated workloads are transforming data centers from traditional IT facilities into power-intensive “AI factories.”

This shift is structural, not incremental and forces a fundamental rethinking of power delivery inside the data center.

This transition hinges on a simple question: Can traditional AC power architectures scale to meet the density, efficiency, and economics required in the AI era? According to industry research, the answer is no. High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC), specifically 800VDC distribution is emerging as a practical and economical alternative.

The scale of the AI buildout

Global data center capacity will expand from sub-100 GW today to as much as 300 GW by 2030. Approximately 70% of that capacity will support AI workloads, making high-density infrastructure the dominant growth segment.

This expansion requires 200 GW of new capacity over the next five years, equivalent to roughly 2,000 new large data center campuses worldwide. The defining characteristic of these new facilities is power density.

Traditional enterprise racks operating at 5–10 kW are giving way to 30-60 kW GPU clusters, 80-150 kW AI training racks, with industry roadmaps targeting loads as high as 500 kW per rack.

At these densities, electrical distribution emerges as a primary constraint on cost, efficiency, reliability, and scalability.

Traditional AC architecture is reaching its limits

Most data centers today rely on a multi-stage AC power chain that introduces losses, equipment cost and operational complexity at every step. A typical conversion sequence starts when utility power enters the facility and gets stepped down by a transformer.

The UPS system converts the current from AC to DC and back to AC again, then passes it through a power distribution unit. At that point, it interfaces with the server’s power supply for another AC-to-DC conversion before a final DC conversion at the board level.

Each of these handoffs leaks efficiency. While manageable at moderate densities, these inefficiencies become economically unforgiving at AI-scale. In high-density environments, the complexity of AC distribution becomes the limiting factor for operators—not compute power, not cooling, not even real estate.

Higher currents demand larger copper conductors, adding material costs and compounding heat buildup throughout the system.

Facilities operating legacy equipment may also have a variety of voltages running simultaneously, each with its own set of breakers, fuses and relays that prevent a fault in one part of the system from cascading into a wider outage.

The sheer complexity shrinks the margin of error for operating high-density AI data centers and places a real upper limit on the ability to scale, both physically and financially.

Perhaps most importantly, every watt lost in conversion becomes heat to be removed, driving the need for additional cooling infrastructure and raising operating costs.

Working with physics, not against It

Given the challenges of traditional AC distribution, the industry is increasingly looking for a different approach that simplifies the power chain. Servers at the end of the chain are running on DC. With an 800VDC architecture, there’s an opportunity to align facility power distribution with the native requirements of modern servers.

Rather than stepping utility AC through multiple voltage environments, an 800VDC architecture uses a central rectifier to convert incoming utility power once, distributing it as a stable DC current directly to rack-level converters. Changing the power distribution architecture eliminates conversion losses.

Technical research indicates this can improve end-to-end electrical efficiency by 8-12%. By replacing multiple AC voltage levels with a single high-voltage DC bus, facilities can eliminate much of the switchgear and transformer infrastructure that drives distribution complexity and the risk of failure.

This simplicity also makes it easier to integrate with battery systems and solar generation.

Ultimately, the physics are straightforward. Higher voltage means lower current for the same power. Data centers looking to scale beyond 100 kW racks can’t do it with an architecture that fights physics at each step.

Leaving $10 billion on the table

Efficiency gains extend beyond technical discussions and translate directly into costs that industry can’t afford to ignore. On both sides of the Atlantic, governments are grappling with skyrocketing electricity demand and rising utility prices, with some U.S. states now proposing laws requiring data centers to pay a higher price for electricity.

A High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) distribution system that delivers 8-12% improvement in energy efficiency over traditional AC distribution, translates directly into millions in savings. A continuously operating 100 MW IT load can save $8.5 million (£6.4 million) per year at a conservative energy cost ($0.12/kWh).

With estimated data center growth of 200GW by 2030, those savings easily reach $10 billion (£7.52 billion) annually.

The cost savings also apply to new builds. Between simplified installation, less equipment (PDUs, transformers, distribution panels, copper conductors) and reduced cooling capacity throughout the system, a 100 MW campus can save up to $80 million (£69 million) capital costs.

Power architecture as a competitive advantage

The scale of the AI buildout is unprecedented, and industry forecasts are continuously increasing. Currently, they stand at $6–7 trillion (£4.5 to 5.2 trillion) in total global data center investment by 2030, with the majority directed toward AI infrastructure.

At these investment levels, even modest efficiency improvements translate into billions in savings.

The shift toward higher-density computing is not temporary. Roadmaps from major hardware vendors indicate continued increases in rack power over the next decade. Facilities designed around legacy electrical assumptions risk becoming constrained or obsolete.

In this context, power architecture pivots from an engineering selection to a strategic decision that affects capital efficiency, operating cost, deployment speed, and long-term scalability.

The transition to AI-centric infrastructure is redefining the economics and engineering of data centers. As capacity expands toward hundreds of gigawatts globally and rack densities climb well beyond 100 kW, traditional AC distribution reaches its practical limits.

Compute capacity alone won’t determine the winners in the AI era, but rather, compute delivery with the greatest efficiency, speed, scaling potential, and economic discipline.

Power architecture plays a strategic role. Simplifying the power chain, improving efficiency, reducing capital requirements and enabling scalable high-density deployments are the foundation for the next generation of AI and GPU data centers.

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The boom in AI tools is frequently framed as a race to secure GPUs before someone else does. The contestant’s position is typically measured in hyperscaler CapEx, chip partnerships, and the number of Nvidia units deployed.

Yet when two thirds of organizations struggle to centralize their data, and less than a quarter (23%) report robust GPU capacity, the race changes course. It no longer resembles a sprint for sparse silicon, but looks more like a rush-hour gridlock of poorly connected clusters.

This bottleneck comes at a time of growing anxiety over digital sovereignty. European ministers now describe digital infrastructure as a ‘matter of national survival’, warning that reliance on closed, foreign-controlled systems creates strategic vulnerabilities.

With US cloud providers commanding roughly 85% of the European market – and sovereign cloud spending forecast to more than triple by $23 billion by 2027 – the pressure to secure control is well and truly on.

GPU scarcity is real. But much of today’s constraints are the result of fragmented Kubernetes environments, duplicated clusters, and IT infrastructure that was simply never designed for secure, efficient scaling at the scale required by AI. For many organizations, Kubernetes has become the default system for running modern applications.

It acts as an orchestration platform, managing containers, allocating compute resources, and keeping everything ticking along reliably across servers. These are grouped into clusters: pools of computing power that teams use to run workloads.

The problem is that Kubernetes was designed in a pre-AI era, when workloads were significantly lighter. It is far less optimized for sharing scarce, high-value GPU resources, and it’s for this reason that the cracks are starting to show.

The hidden (and growing) cost of cluster sprawl

In the rush to deploy AI safely, many organizations have defaulted to isolation by duplication. That means spinning up entirely separate clusters and environments for each team or workload, rather than securely sharing the same underlying infrastructure.

In practice, should one team needs autonomy, they get their own cluster. Should another team’s workload be sensitive, it is separated physically rather than logically. If governance is complex, the easiest answer is to ringfence infrastructure instead of rethinking how it’s shared. The result is cluster sprawl on a huge scale.

While each cluster may feel like a sensible risk-reduction decision, the reality is that it becomes an economic liability. GPU-backed environments are expensive to stand up, but even more expensive to leave underutilized. Left fragmented between teams, visibility of clusters drops while idle capacity increases.

This is so much more than an operational headache. Structural inefficiencies such as these erode return on investment. GPUs should be seen as capital assets, not experimental hardware tucked away in research and development budgets. Leaving them stranded behind siloes is the equivalent to building a power plant and running it at half capacity simply because the grid cannot distribute electricity efficiently.

Kubernetes may have transformed how infrastructure is built and operated, but it was never designed with multi-tenant GPU sharing in mind. In simple terms, this allows multiple teams or workloads to share the same underlying infrastructure safely, all with clear boundaries, isolation and governance without duplicating the hardware itself.

Without true multi-tenancy, shared environments creak under AI workloads. It leaves a choice between compromising on isolation or retreating to dedicated clusters. Neither scales, and the model is untenable. It’s for this reason that the narrative of GPU shortage is obscuring a much deeper flaw.

Sovereignty heightens the tenancy debate

Moving workloads either on-prem or into sovereign environments does not magically solve inefficiency. In fact, it can amplify it. When organizations bring AI infrastructure closer to home to meet regulatory, security or geopolitical concerns, they assume full responsibility for its utilization. This ownership, without orchestration, cannot be considered sovereignty, however. It is simply overhead.

As AI workloads continue to accelerate, the race won’t be towards hardware acquisition but secure deployment and efficient monetization. That requires a control layer purpose-built for the economics of AI, such as software that sits above the raw infrastructure and governs how compute is allocated, shared and isolated.

This enables isolation without duplication, governance without friction, and autonomy without sprawl. True multi-tenancy will emerge as the missing layer of AI compute, preserving both compliance and performance while unlocking higher utilization.

With sovereignty so high on the agenda, multi-tenancy will reposition resilience as a built-in process. Rather than respond to capacity constraints by spending evermore eye-watering sums, organizations can optimize what they already own. New workloads shouldn’t justify new clusters when it can be a shared asset that’s governed intelligently.

In any race, raw speed is only part of the equation. Control, coordination and the ability to navigate complexity often determine whether momentum is sustained. AI infrastructure is no different. Until it is designed for secure, shared scale, no amount of raw speed will deliver its true potential.

Read our list of the best IT management tools.

• A Redditor reports that their RTX 5070 (which they were gifted) died
• PNY replaced the faulty graphics card with an RTX 5070 Ti
• These kinds of upgrades can happen with returns if you get very lucky, and others on Reddit have similar tales to share

If your graphics card goes kaput, that's obviously regarded as bad news — as even if it's still within warranty coverage, you must go through the hassle of returning it for a replacement — but such a failure could turn out to be a good thing.

The recent experience of a Redditor (as highlighted by VideoCardz) who had a PNY GPU go wrong makes this clear. They reportedly received an unexpected upgrade after their RTX 5070 went to silicon heaven.

The Reddit post states: "5070 died completely, PNY sent me a 5070 Ti to replace it. RMA process was fast, too. Basically, a free $400 upgrade."

The Redditor further explains: "To make things even better, it wasn't even my GPU originally. It was in my brother's work computer. But since he had already replaced it, he gave it to me and said if I wanted to deal with the potential hassle of the RMA [return merchandise authorization], I could keep it. So he basically gifted me a $500 GPU, which turned into a $1000 GPU, all for an hour's work and $30 shipping."

As another poster succinctly puts it: "Unlimited GPU upgrade glitch unlocked."

Obviously, we must add some seasoning, but as other posters indicate, this can happen, and there are other reported incidents of replacement GPUs happily turning into upgrades.

Such as Gigabyte replacing an RTX 4070 Ti with a 4070 Ti Super, or Sapphire switching out a dead RX 6650 XT for an RX 6700 (albeit that took a month and a half, according to the poster).

Analysis: winning the RMA lottery

It's a breath of fresh air to hear a positive tale around PC components these days, as with the price of RAM, storage, GPUs (and now CPUs) all increasing — by wild amounts in some cases — we're hearing a lot more about sometimes sophisticated scams trying to con people out of the large sums of money asking prices have now turned into.

Don't believe that a graphics card manufacturer would replace a broken GPU with a higher-tier model? Well, I get where your skepticism is coming from, but this can happen, and the mentioned Sapphire example above is a clue to why — mainly because the return took so long to action. In these cases, the problem is likely finding stock of the GPU in question.

It might be the case that PNY didn't have RTX 5070 inventory in the warehouse at the time, and wanted to get the return completed in good time (there was a quick turnaround on this RMA, as the Redditor noted) — so the firm sent an RTX 5070 Ti instead. Obviously, this is a good way to keep the customer happy, and it serves as a positive piece of word-of-mouth when aired on social media, as is the case here.

So, if you have to return a GPU in the future, you might just get lucky yourself. However, note that these instances of apparent on-the-spot upgrades as part of a return aren't the rule, but very much the exception. They certainly happen, though.

The one potential wrinkle in this scenario — as one poster pointed out — is that if you're already at the limit of the wattage that your power supply is capable of coping with in your current PC, a more power-hungry GPU won't work in your system. Although you could, of course, just upgrade the PSU in this case (or just sell the GPU, and buy the lesser model again, pocketing the profit).

Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC Ice: Two-minute review

If you’re after an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT with a mild factory overclock, a clean white finish and a useful set of extra features, the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC Ice 16GB is well worth considering. At $1,099, it sits at the premium end of the price spectrum, but it does offer enough to still make it compelling compared to more affordable options.

If you want a slightly cheaper option, the non-Ice version (the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC 16GB) has the same spec and performance as the Ice variant we tested.

The Gigabyte card comes with a factory overclock to give a little extra performance from the get-go, with a game clock of 2520 MHz and a boost clock reaching up to 3060 MHz under peak loads. That’s a 120 MHz uplift to game clock and a 110 MHz increase to boost clock compared to AMD’s stock RX 9070 XT.

In real-world terms, that translated to roughly 5% better frame rates than a standard RX 9070 XT, and keeps it competitive against other factory overclocked cards. This means the RX 9070 XT is perfect for high-end 1440p gaming but also very capable at 4K in many games.

So it will come as no surprise that (at the time of writing this review), the RX 9070 XT is the number one pick in our best graphics card buyer’s guide.

To keep temps under control, Gigabyte has used its Windforce cooling setup, which has three ‘Hawk’ fans that spin in alternating directions to reduce turbulence and improve airflow.

Underneath the cooler, there’s a large vapor chamber, chunky composite copper heat pipes and the Gigabyte ‘Screen Cooling’ extended heatsink design with rear cutouts for airflow.

Gigabyte also uses server-grade thermally conductive gel on components like the VRAM and MOSFETs.

Like most GPUs these days, the Gigabyte card includes a dual BIOS switch, which lets you swap between Performance and Silent modes depending on whether you want the best cooling or a little less noise.

As expected, the cooling setup easily proved itself in testing with temperatures slightly lower than many of its competitors — in performance mode, the card idled at 33°C and peaked at 59 °C, with fan noise staying under 32dB. Switching to Silent mode dropped noise to under 30dB and resulted in peak temperatures rising slightly to 65°C.

Visually, the Gaming OC Ice goes for a clean white and silver look that is meant to be shown off in a windowed build, and includes subtle customizable RGB lighting with a sliding cover.

While it’s a large triple-fan card, the 288 x 132 x 56 mm dimensions are pretty reasonable compared to some of the chunkier RX 9070 XT models. That said, smaller mid-tower builds should double-check clearances before purchase. The card does have a reinforced metal backplate to add rigidity, but there’s no support bracket in the box.

Connectivity is very good, with two HDMI 2.1b ports and two DisplayPort 2.1a outputs — more than enough to support both high FPS gaming and a multi-monitor productivity setup. Power comes from three standard 8-pin PCIe connectors, and Gigabyte recommends an 850W PSU.

One handy feature — there are little power indicator lights that will let you know if there is an issue with one of the PCIe connections. Gigabyte also backs the card with a standard but appreciated three-year warranty.

Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC Ice: Price & availability

• How much is it? It retails for about $750 / £700 / AU$1,099
• When can you get it? The Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC Ice is available now
• Where is it available? You can buy it in the US, UK, and Australia

The Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC Ice is available now, retailing for about $750 / £700 / AU$1,099 depending on the region and retailer. That puts it comfortably above entry-level RX 9070 XT cards, but that premium does at least get you a mild factory overclock, a larger cooler, a clean white finish, plus a few useful extras like dual BIOS support and power indicator lights.

At this price, the Gigabyte card lands well below the roughly $999 / £800 / AU$1,399 that RTX 5070 Ti cards tend to sell for, but slightly above the cheaper end for an RTX 5070. That gives it a solid position for gaming performance if you are happy with AMD over Nvidia.

While I'll dig into performance below, given current street pricing the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC Ice still makes a pretty good case for itself if you want a more premium RX 9070 XT. It's not the cheapest RX 9070 XT available, but compared to the RTX 5070 Ti in particular, it’s quite competitive for what you're getting.

The non-Ice version (the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC 16GB) has the same spec and performance as the Ice variant we tested and is often up to 10% cheaper.

Of course, prices have been shifting rapidly of late, up and down, so make sure you do your own comparison before shelling out.

• Value: 4.5 / 5

Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC Ice: Specs

• Useful factory overclock and board-level extras
• Not a huge boost over the stock 9070 XT

• Specs: 4 / 5

Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC Ice: Design

• Clean white finish with useful extra touches
• Large, but still fairly sensible by RX 9070 XT standards

Since there isn't a reference RX 9070 XT design from AMD, what matters here is how well Gigabyte's own board and cooler come together, and on that front the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC Ice makes a pretty good first impression.

The headline feature is obviously the white and silver finish, which gives the card a cleaner, more premium look than the usual black slab. It is clearly aimed at windowed builds, but Gigabyte has kept things fairly restrained, with just a little customizable RGB lighting rather than going overboard.

Cooling duties are handled by Gigabyte's Windforce setup, with three Hawk fans, a large vapor chamber, composite copper heat pipes and a sizable heatsink with rear cutouts to improve airflow. It is still a triple-fan card and still a fairly chunky one, but at 288 x 132 x 56 mm (11.34 x 5.20 x 2.20 in) it doesn't feel absurd by RX 9070 XT standards.

There are a few little extras too — like a dual BIOS switch for Performance and Silent modes, a reinforced metal backplate and power indicator lights that can help spot PCIe connection issues.

The only real downside is that there is no support bracket in the box, so smaller cases and heavier builds will need a quick clearance check before you buy. There is an attachment point though, so you can add your own support if needed.

Like most cards in this class, it still takes up a fair bit of space and needs three 8-pin PCIe power connectors, so cable management isn’t especially fun. Still, if you want an RX 9070 XT that looks the part without getting too flashy, Gigabyte has done a bang-up job here.

• Design: 4 / 5

Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC Ice: Performance

• About 5% faster than a reference RX 9070 XT in my testing
• Very close to the RTX 5070 Ti in gaming, and comfortably ahead of the RTX 5070
• Cool-running for a premium factory-overclocked card, peaking at just 59°C

Simply put, the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC Ice does exactly what you want a mild factory-overclocked card to do — take the already very capable RX 9070 XT and squeeze a little more out of it.

In testing the factory overclock resulted in about a 5% uplift over my reference RX 9070 XT results averaged from cards running at stock speeds. Keep in mind that my RTX 5070 Ti comparison results are from when the card was first released and a non-OC version. I also had quite a few stability issues with the 5070 Ti early on. So with updated drivers and a comparable factory overclock, the 5070 Ti will be ahead in most gaming scenarios — especially when ray tracing is involved where the difference can be significant. If you are a fan of DLSS, then team green can often give much higher frame rates in certain games.

In synthetic benchmarks, the Gigabyte card turns in an excellent 3DMark Steel Nomad score of 6,624, which is very slightly ahead of both the reference RX 9070 XT and even the RTX 5070 Ti. In more ray-tracing-focused tests like Speed Way and Port Royal, Nvidia still has a slight edge, but the gap is nowhere near as dramatic as it once was, as AMD's ray tracing hardware is markedly improved over previous generations.

Gaming performance is what we all care about, though, and here the Gigabyte card excels. Across my 1440p gaming results, it was about 5.9% faster than the reference RX 9070 XT, about on par with the RTX 5070 Ti on average, and roughly 50% faster than the RTX 5070.

At 4K, it stayed about 3.6% ahead of the reference card, finished effectively level with the RTX 5070 Ti overall, and remained about 50% faster than the RTX 5070.

That makes this a very capable high-end 1440p card and a genuinely solid 4K option in a lot of modern games, particularly if you're happy to lean on upscaling where needed. Cyberpunk 2077 and Black Myth: Wukong both ran well at demanding settings, while Shadow of the Tomb Raider showed just how much fps headroom there is in lighter games.

Outside gaming, the picture is a bit more straightforward. Blender and Geekbench 6 Compute scores were a little higher than the reference RX 9070 XT results, but still behind the RTX 5070 Ti.

Thermals are an area where the Gigabyte card stands out, though, with the card peaking at 59°C and idling at 33°C in my testing, which is an excellent result and shows that the Gigabyte triple-fan setup handles the RX 9070 XT well.

Cyberpunk 2077: Ultra Ray Tracing, balanced scaling

Black Myth: Wukong: Ray Tracing: Cinematic, 50% upscaling

• Performance: 4.5 / 5

Should you buy the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC Ice?

Buy the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC Ice if...

Don't buy it if...

How I tested the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC Ice

• I spent about a week testing the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC Ice
• I used my complete GPU testing suite to analyze the card's performance
• I compared it against competing graphics cards using a mix of synthetic and real-world gaming benchmarks

I spent about a week with the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC Ice, testing it and comparing its performance against competing graphics cards.

I used industry-standard benchmark tools like 3DMark alongside games including Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth: Wukong and Shadow of the Tomb Raider to get comparable results across the cards I have recently reviewed.

• Originally reviewed March 2026

• The buyer of an RTX 5090 in India got a nasty surprise
• They paid over $3,000 for a GPU box that contained laundry detergent
• This was from a third-party seller on Amazon, and it's a timely reminder to avoid the temptation to buy expensive goods from such sources

Someone who reportedly bought an RTX 5090 GPU from Amazon in India found a pack of laundry detergent inside the box instead of the flagship graphics card, serving as a clear warning about trusting third-party marketplace sellers.

VideoCardz spotted this tale of woe on Reddit, and of course, as with all such reports, we have to take it with some seasoning – though it appears to be authentic (it's a very detailed fabrication if it's made up).

The Redditor explains how they purchased a Gigabyte RTX 5090 on Amazon in India from a third-party seller, via an order that was 'fulfilled by Amazon', a GPU that cost around $3,200 in the local currency.

As you can see from the photo provided on Reddit (check it out below), what was actually in the battered box of the graphics card was a 1kg packet of Ghadi detergent.

The buyer has an unboxing video — though unfortunately for them, it's not continuously shot, and has been the cause of some skepticism from other Redditors — but it's clear the weight of the package (at 1.56kg on the official shipping label) is way too light for a boxed RTX 5090.

Hopefully, the latter point will prove key to getting a refund processed, but at the moment we're told Amazon has refused to issue a refund.

Seemingly this person is not the only one to have been sent laundry detergent in place of an expensive graphics card, as they have uncovered other similar complaints about the same third-party seller.

Analysis: scammers are more active in these days of pricey GPUs

Regardless of whether this is true (and as noted, that seems to be the case, although of course we can't know for sure), it serves as a timely reminder that, as GPU prices spiral, don't be tempted by deals from obscure third-party marketplace sellers on Amazon or any other retailer for that matter.

If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. And it just isn't worth the risk of spending thousands on a pretend product, whether that's a box with a rock or a lump of metal in it (as we've seen in the past with GPUs), or detergent (a new spin on this kind of scam). You're simply flirting with the possibility of getting burned.

Taking a punt on a cheap product isn't such a big deal, of course, but I really wouldn't consider a high-value purchase from a third-party seller, as it just isn't worth the potential grief. Yes, you should always be able to get your money back, but that process could be a stressful one.

And with expensive items, it really is sensible these days to record a full unboxing video as a matter of course (showing the whole package clearly unopened to begin with — or ideally, film from the moment of delivery).

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has defended DLSS 5 yet again
• Huang says he can understand where gamers are coming from, and doesn't 'love AI slop' himself
• However, Huang clarifies that DLSS 5 'doesn't change anything', rather it enhances every frame in games

Nvidia has been on the receiving end of a major backlash from gamers since its DLSS 5 reveal, and its CEO has only added further fuel to the fire with additional comments regarding the controversy around its generative AI 'misunderstanding'.

On Lex Fridman's podcast, Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang addressed the bad feeling surrounding DLSS 5 once again, acknowledging the flak that's been fired at the "content-controlled generative AI" tool.

If you recall, Huang's initial response to the backlash was to tell gamers "they're completely wrong" regarding how DLSS 5 works, but that tone has now mellowed – albeit a similar vibe persists.

Huang clarified: "I think their [gamers] perspective makes sense, and I could see where they're coming from, because I don't love AI slop myself. I'm emphatic towards what they're thinking. That's just not what DLSS 5 is trying to do.

"It's conditioned by the textures and the artistry of the artist. It enhances every single frame, but doesn't change anything."

Worries remain

The problem is, however, that Huang's statements may fall on deaf ears, as numerous examples show DLSS 5 changing the appearance of character models considerably. Notably Grace Ashcroft in Resident Evil Requiem (as shown above), who almost looks like a completely different character when DLSS 5 is enabled.

Nvidia has until later in 2026 to refine DLSS 5 and ensure it's working optimally for developers, but it seems to have glossed over the fact that many gamers aren't convinced about how much 'better' DLSS 5 looks. The main concern stems from generative AI's presence in games to begin with – in whatever form – and how it changes art styles or specific character details in the imagery shared so far.

DLSS 5 raises many more concerns besides, and one of those is the potential for game developers to rely on generative AI to 'enhance' visuals or characters to be more lifelike, rather than carrying out handcrafted work (as seen in multiple highly detailed modern games).

It doesn't seem like Team Green will backtrack on DLSS 5, especially since it has months to weather the storm of the backlash from gamers. Of course, DLSS 5 will be optional for developers to use – and for gamers to enable – but the fear is that this is about the only positive that gamers can take away from this controversy right now.

You're unlikely to have missed Nvidia's big reveal of DLSS 5 at GTC 2026 this week, as it caused quite some waves. Indeed, it's not an understatement to say that a tidal wave of bad feeling swept across the internet – from Bluesky to Reddit to X – after Nvidia showcased its plans for a new "real-time neural rendering model" that polishes up lighting effects to an eye-opening degree.

Such was the graphical reckoning aimed at Nvidia that CEO Jensen Huang felt compelled to take gamers to task over their attitude. I'm not sure about the wisdom of the head-on way Huang tackled the many DLSS 5 skeptics and detractors. But nonetheless, we've seen these kinds of clashes between Nvidia and gamers with DLSS before — more than once, in fact. And history suggests that Team Green will win over the naysayers eventually.

Let's look at the key complaints gamers have about DLSS 5 – I've picked out three critical stumbling blocks – and the ins-and-outs of how valid those concerns are, while turning to said history lesson.

'Thanks, I hate it' reason 1: gamers just don't like how DLSS 5 makes games look

Much of the hatred that's been spilling forth on internet forums is due to the look DLSS 5 gives games in the sample screenshots shared by Nvidia (and video footage from Digital Foundry). Many gamers simply prefer the original graphics in those before-and-after comparative screenshots, and hate the effects applied by DLSS 5.

A central problem here is the faces of characters looking unreal and, well, AI-generated (or to put it less subtly, as many did: "yassified, looks-maxed freaks"). It should be noted that DLSS 5 does not leverage generative AI from scratch, because as Nvidia has gone to great pains to point out, the game assets aren't changed by AI — only the lighting. It's about polishing what's already there in the game (although there's some skepticism about that, which I'll return to later).

It's not just the 'uncanny valley' effect that's an issue here, though, as some people feel that the overall look of games with DLSS 5 applied is just too sharp, overly bright, and the colors are oversaturated, all of which adds up to an unnatural image — even though the aim is to produce photorealistic graphics, of course.

In short, the end result looks like it's AI generated, as it's all 'too much' in these respects. Or that's the feeling of many, summarized into two words we all knew were coming in a lot of the reaction here: AI slop. (Or indeed: 'Deep Learning Super Slop').

There are further concerns about glitches and artifacts introduced by DLSS 5, too, as evidenced by some of the (very limited) footage of games actually in motion.

'Thanks, I hate it' reason 2: this is messing with the art direction and ambience of games

This piece of flak follows on directly from the above point, but is more about DLSS 5 warping the very feel and fabric of a game.

Resident Evil Requiem was certainly seized on as a case in point here — it's supposed to feel gritty and bleak, but that vibe is markedly altered by Nvidia's AI makeover, so it loses some of the dark atmosphere.

This goes beyond the application of lipstick to Grace, and alters the background lighting and its effect and relation to the whole horror theme. There are many criticisms along these lines, and I can absolutely see where they're coming from.

'Thanks, I hate it' reason 3: Nvidia's just trying to force gamers to upgrade their GPUs

Another element of bad feeling I've seen is that DLSS 5 is also about Nvidia selling more graphics cards. Granted, this isn't nearly as prevalent a beef as the previous two issues, but it's still a sticking point for some.

The broad assertion stems from this early demo work with DLSS 5 being run on a pair of RTX 5090 GPUs. Yes, not one, but two Blackwell flagships, with one of those graphics cards running the game itself, and the other applying DLSS 5 on top.

This has led to some leaps to conclusions about how demanding DLSS 5 will end up being when the tech is released later this year, and how it's going to make lesser RTX 5000 GPUs sweat. So, the accusation is that this is a way Nvidia can push gamers to buy a new graphics card — assuming they want to use DLSS 5 at all, mind.

Cutting Nvidia some slack — and a history lesson

A lot of these criticisms are fair enough, I feel, although some more than others. I think the last point regarding the necessary GPU power is a misjudgement, though — Nvidia has made it clear that the final implementation of DLSS 5 will run on a single graphics card. Well, of course it will. Team Green could hardly bring this out if it didn't work okay on a single GPU (and presumably away from 4K resolution, it'll be less demanding, too).

How it might work on Nvidia graphics cards below the RTX 5080, though, or whether DLSS 5 is more designed looking towards the RTX 6000 range in terms of more mainstream usage is another matter — granted, those kinds of doubts remain about where this tech will land. Overall, we've got to assume that Nvidia knows what it's doing scheduling this launch for later in 2026.

More broadly, we must remember that DLSS 5 is still in 'early preview', which suggests a lot more honing is still to come. This is why two flagship GPUs are needed at this point, and doubtless why we're seeing some glitching — or overly heavy-handed implementations of the AI-powered lighting effects. The launch incarnation of DLSS 5 is likely to take a lighter-touch approach, I'd guess, especially given the reaction to this sneak peek at the tech. Nvidia has time to adjust and calibrate here, and I'd expect this to happen.

What's more of a worry for me is the whole nest of issues around changing the art direction or vibe of a game — although Nvidia has stressed very much that developers will have control over the end result with DLSS 5. CEO Jensen Huang defended the tech as 'content-control' using AI, meaning that DLSS 5 just polishes existing assets without changing them (as opposed to it being AI generation from scratch).

There are arguments about that too, as looking at the example screenshots shared, some people just don't believe the feature isn't messing with the graphics beyond merely applying fresh lighting. However, as Wccftech reports, a veteran game artist has made it clear how changing lighting radically can alter the look of a character more than you'd imagine. The same artist observed that 'most' of those raining down flames on DLSS 5 really don't know what they're talking about in terms of how the technology works.

That said, others in the industry, particularly certain devs, have come down hard on what Nvidia's doing here — and pointed to a disconnect between Team Green and some developers.

As we stand here, right now, we have to hope that Nvidia's promises about the level of control that developers should be able to exercise over DLSS 5 will come good — and that the final implementation of the tech will be quite different to the early sampling we had at GTC 2026. And here's where the history lesson comes in.

Remember when DLSS was first introduced? It was roundly pilloried for the blurriness and glitches which were the baggage that came with the initial incarnation, and many gamers rebelled and felt that the frame rate increase was not worth this graphical trade-off. DLSS 1 took a lot of serious flak on this front, but by DLSS 2 – when Nvidia brought in temporal (not spatial) upscaling – Team Green fixed those issues, and gamers flocked to the tech.

Still rewinding the DLSS tape, just not as far, remember when frame generation was first tabled with DLSS 3? That particular motion from Nvidia was largely rejected and the whole 'fake frames' controversy erupted — and while that's still a catchphrase floating around online forums today, the overall view of frame gen has changed radically. Nvidia improved frame generation considerably with DLSS 3.5, and today, it's regarded as a good thing (TM), albeit with caveats (naturally) about how far you can push this AI trickery.

The likelihood, then, is that even if DLSS 5 is shot down upon its initial release, Nvidia will forge on with the feature and get it right. That might take until the next incarnation – DLSS 5.5, or DLSS 6, perhaps on RTX 6000 GPUs – but odds are it'll happen. I think people tend to forget that plenty of gamers were sure the original DLSS was a 'dumpster fire' that wasn't going anywhere, and they turned out to be very wrong. I most certainly wouldn't write off DLSS 5 yet.

Getting photoreal

All that said, I'm aware that DLSS 5 is a very different angle to what Nvidia has previously done. The technology is not about faster frame rates and smoother gaming – whether via upscaling, or artificially generated frames – the premise of this latest take on Nvidia's tech is making games photorealistic. And there's another question that keeps popping up therein: do we actually want photo-realism for our gaming?

Maybe not. Certainly some folks are vehemently opposed to the drive for photorealistic graphics. They want style and character in their gaming visuals, not hyper-realism. This is where we get into very subjective territory, mind.

Of course, ultimately developers don't have to use DLSS 5. And even if they do, gamers don't have to enable it. Although even those who swear off the tech totally, and will never use DLSS 5, will still feel irritation at the path Nvidia is taking here. Mainly because they'll doubtless wonder what the resources being 'squandered' on traveling down this road could have achieved if turned towards what could be perceived as more productive ends.

Nvidia has a tough battle ahead to gain acceptance for DLSS 5, that's clear enough, but I wouldn't underestimate Team Green given what's happened in the past.

Over the next decade, the energy demands of data centers will continue to grow worldwide as AI workloads scale, placing new pressure on power grids, water resources and operating costs.

This is forcing operators to rethink how digital infrastructure is planned, built and operated – but data center operators cannot optimize for a single constraint without creating knock-on effects elsewhere.

Decisions about cooling, location and hardware procurement all carry consequences for water availability, grid stability and global supply chains. Data centers are tightly coupled to the systems around them.

They interact with power grids, requiring careful thought about where power supplies come from, and, importantly, with water supplies. Large hyperscale data centers can consume up to 2.5 billion liters of water annually, equivalent to the needs of approximately 80,000 people, according to UK Government estimates.

Data centers also have an impact on supply chains, driving demand for specialized equipment, skilled labor and chips.

Addressing these pressures requires data center operators to look beyond any single metric and manage sustainability as a set of connected trade-offs.

There are three key areas data center operators can focus on to make rapid and measurable gains in sustainability: the efficiency of cooling systems, increased circularity around reuse and recycling, and workload management.

Improving cooling efficiency

Energy constraints are becoming a limiting factor for data center growth. GPU-dense AI workloads are driving up power density and overall energy demand.

Today, much of the energy used by data centers is not used for computing at all, but for cooling components, with 43% of energy used in U.S. data centers going to cooling, rather than computing.

Data center efficiency is commonly measured using power usage effectiveness (PUE). PUE is the power required to run the whole data center, divided by the power demands of the IT equipment within. In simple terms, the lower we can get the PUE ratio, the better.

Liquid cooling has an important role to play here. Liquid cooling uses water to remove heat from components and remove heat more effectively than traditional air-based systems.

Water cooling can reduce power consumption by up to 40%, and some liquid-optimized data centers have already hit PUE levels of 1.1, meaning far less energy is lost to cooling and other non-computing overheads.

As a result, a smaller proportion of total energy is diverted away from computing, enabling data centers to be far more sustainable.

Designing for circularity

Today, only a small proportion of data center infrastructure is actually recycled or reused at end of life. For data center operators, designing hardware for reuse and longer lifecycles can yield rapid results in terms of curbing waste and emissions.

Asset recovery services for data centers are designed to handle environmentally responsible disposal and recycling of IT hardware, including servers, storage, and networking equipment. Adopting circular economy approaches can be a practical first step on the sustainability journey for many organizations.

Improving reuse and recycling delivers clear, practical benefits, including the recovery of valuable materials and reduced pressure on new manufacturing across the electronics industry. Everything from how components are designed to how they are shipped and how they are disposed of at end of life has a measurable impact.

‘As a service’ models can also reduce overprovisioning by aligning capacity more closely with actual demand. In cooling systems, circularity can also have an impact. Hot water from today’s warm-water cooling systems could be used to heat offices or nearby homes to help curb the environmental impact of data centers.

Closed-loop, ‘circular’ cooling systems also have a role in reducing water use. Older evaporative cooling systems tend to be more water-intensive, particularly in warmer or water-stressed regions. Moving to closed-loop systems which use liquid-to-air heat exchangers can curb the water demands of data centers.

Reducing wasted compute

Workload management is another key factor, and one that is all too often overlooked. The most effective energy savings often come from eliminating wasted compute rather than improving hardware alone. Every watt that is ‘spent’ in the data center should be translated into meaningful computing output.

Virtualization can help to minimize idle capacity and maximize usage, by allowing multiple applications to run on the same server.

By ensuring that every workload makes effective use of the hardware it runs on, workload efficiency helps align sustainability goals with performance by increasing utilization and reducing idle capacity.

Updating older systems can also have important sustainability benefits. Newer architectures tend to deliver more performance at lower energy costs.

Switching to an ‘as a service’ model for infrastructure means that data center operators can provide up-to-date hardware without the up-front capital expenditure usually associated with technology refreshes.

Warm-water cooling systems can also help, allowing components such as GPUs to operate more consistently at higher utilization without thermal throttling. Data center operators should take a gradual ‘one workload at a time’ approach to build momentum incrementally towards wider systemic change.

Making sustainability operational

The increasing demands placed on data centers by AI workloads mean that operators will have to focus more on sustainability in the coming years. Physical infrastructure and workloads need to be planned together, connecting physical efficiency, such as cooling and power delivery, with how workloads are designed and run.

Circularity will also grow in importance, as will the measurable gains of as-a-service models. By dealing with each facet of digital infrastructure and how it interacts with wider society, data center operators can make sustainability a practical, operational part of how data centers are planned and operated.

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Update, March 20: A Pearl Abyss spokesperson confirmed to us: “At the moment, we do not support Intel Arc.” However, it didn't add any further comment on whether this might change in the future.

Original story as follows...

• Crimson Desert won't boot on systems using Intel Arc GPUs, according to multiple users
• Pearl Abyss states Intel Arc GPUs are unsupported and suggests referring to the refund policy
• The game currently has mixed reviews on Steam, with some negative ones from Intel Arc users

Pearl Abyss' long-awaited Crimson Desert has finally arrived after almost a decade of development. While it's received mixed reviews from users, many of the quality-of-life issues (and controls) are the culprit — but there's another major issue Intel hardware users should be aware of.

Crimson Desert is currently unsupported on Intel Arc GPUs, according to Pearl Abyss' Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page, including multiple Reddit and Steam users.

This means handheld, laptop, or desktop systems using either integrated or discrete Arc GPUs won't boot Crimson Desert, often displaying a message of 'the graphics device is currently not supported'.

Pearl Abyss' answer on its FAQ page raises a bigger concern for Intel Arc users, as it states: "If you purchased the game expecting Intel Arc support, please refer to the refund policy of the platform where the game was purchased for available options."

While that doesn't completely rule out any chance of eventual Intel Arc support, it's a slight worry that there may not be any urgent push for support in the near future. We've reached out to Pearl Abyss on the matter, but haven't received a response yet.

Crimson Desert doesn't run if it detects an Intel ARC GPU. Like straight up, the devs just deliberately chose not to support ARC cards. No previous announcement about it too until they added in the info to their FAQ. Might be the first time I've seen a dev deliberately block a GPU brand. from r/pcmasterrace

Crimson Desert already has a lot riding against it in terms of some gamers not taking well to the onboarding experience. The control scheme and user interface aren't popular, no options for custom controls (for controllers), and now, no Intel Arc GPU support, might drive some gamers away.

Fortunately, Pearl Abyss has shown its commitment to implementing changes based on feedback, both in the review period and post-launch, so there's a good chance Intel Arc users won't have to wait long to finally dive in.

However, as it stands, it might be best if Intel Arc users completely steer clear of purchasing Crimson Desert until Pearl Abyss adds further clarity to the situation, and when (or even if) we should expect support. After all, it's a great game, and one that runs well on most hardware, but there's no use in owning a game that you can't play.

• Intel has released a new Arc graphics driver
• It introduces a Precompiled Shaders feature to help supported games load faster
• This is a situational benefit, but it'll apply more often than you think

Intel has introduced a new trick for some of its Arc GPUs, which helps supported games load a lot more swiftly (albeit in certain situations only, and I'll come back to that point).

Wccftech reports (via Tech PowerUp) that Intel's Precompiled Shaders feature is available with the latest Arc driver, and can be used by Intel Battlemage desktop GPUs, as well as Xe2 and Xe3 integrated graphics (in Core Ultra Series 3 and 200V chips for thin-and-light laptops, or handhelds).

How it works is this: normally, when you load a game for the first time, compiling shaders can take a long time and really slow things down. So what Intel does is precompile these shaders, and it has these stored in the cloud — then when its graphics app examines your installed games, and sees one it has shaders for, they're automatically downloaded and put in place.

Effectively, all that compiling work is being done beforehand, so when you launch the game, it loads far more snappily. We're talking about loading times that are typically twice or three times as fast, but some games can receive massive boosts — like God of War Ragnarok, which is 21x faster on an Arc B580 (or a mind-boggling 37x faster with the B390 integrated graphics on the new Panther Lake flagship).

As mentioned earlier, the game must be supported by Intel to allow for Precompiled Shaders, and only 13 titles are right now, but more are coming in the future. Further note that the games must be installed on Steam, and the current list of supported titles is:

• Black Myth: Wukong
• Borderlands 4
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
• Cyberpunk 2077
• God of War Ragnarok
• Gotham Knights
• Hogwarts Legacy
• NBA 2K26
• Starfield
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
• The Outer Worlds 2

Note that this is Intel's implementation of a broader tech coming from Microsoft known as Advanced Shader Delivery, which has been promised to Windows 11 gamers for later in 2026.

Intel clarified the situation for Tech PowerUp: "Intel Precompiled Shaders is custom-built and run by Intel. We are also working with Microsoft on launching Advanced Shader Delivery later this year. Together, both services will provide users of supported Arc GPUs with more game and game store coverage of technologies that reduce waiting times and in-game stutters due to shader compilation."

So this won't be limited to Steam in the future, as you might expect.

Analysis: a notable caveat

If you're thinking that Precompiled Shaders — which is still labelled as a beta feature at this point — is just going to speed up things in a once-and-done kind of way, that's not strictly true. Yes, the game goes through this sometimes seriously demanding shader compilation process when you first run it, and that's all done and dusted thereafter — well, sort of.

The trouble is that the game may need to recompile the shaders in certain scenarios, such as after a new GPU driver update or game update. And when a game has a particularly lengthy compilation process, this can be a major annoyance. On top of that, compiling shaders can happen on-the-fly in the game, which can lead to stuttering, something that the Precompiled Shaders feature avoids entirely.

You can see why this is a very useful advance, then, even if it only applies in certain scenarios (and with supported games). And it's really useful for some handhelds, too — like the MSI Claw 8 AI+, which has an Intel Lunar Lake processor — where shader compilation can be a draining task that hits the battery hard if you're away from a power socket.

• Jensen Huang has called gamers who are hating on DLSS 5 'completely wrong'
• The CEO noted: "This is very different than generative AI; it's content-control generative AI."
• He further observed that game developers have direct control over the tech and that they can fine-tune the generative AI to match their artistic intent

Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang has returned fire at gamers who have been critical of DLSS 5, the freshly unveiled tech that aims to pep up the graphics of games to make them look more realistic with its RTX 5000 GPUs.

Or at least that's the idea – using AI that "infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials" to polish up existing game assets – but many gamers feel the results look worse than the original graphics (for a variety of reasons).

The criticism has been fierce from some quarters, but over at GTC 2026, Jensen Huang fired back at the detractors of DLSS 5 when questioned by Tom's Hardware.

Huang pulled no punches out of the gate, saying: "Well, first of all, they're completely wrong. The reason for that is because, as I have explained very carefully, DLSS 5 fuses controllability of the geometry and textures and everything about the game with generative AI."

The CEO elaborated on how developers can fine-tune the generative AI used here to match the game's style – and how it won't interfere with the artistic control or art direction of a game.

Huang stressed how it's up to developers to use DLSS 5 as they want to, and that: "All of that is in the control – direct control – of the game developer. This is very different than generative AI; it's content-control generative AI. That's why we call it neural rendering."

Analysis: not the right approach

I'm not sure that doubling down on DLSS 5 and hitting back in this way is the right strategy here, and it feels a bit too much like grabbing for a can of gasoline when dealing with an inflamed crowd of disgruntled gamers.

Also, Huang's words feel too much like playing not just with fire, but semantics for my liking. It's 'content-control generative AI' which is very different to 'generative AI', of course, as we're all aware. Tsk, it's worlds apart, even if it, erm, doesn't sound all that different on the face of it.

What exactly is Huang talking about here? It's the difference between getting AI to generate graphics from scratch, and using AI to hone existing game assets – polishing what's already there (or 'content-control'). In addition to that, the CEO is also stressing that game developers will set the boundaries of how DLSS 5 is applied and maintain artistic control in that respect.

That all sounds good in theory, but when we look at the results that Nvidia shared at GTC, with a number of screenshots showing DLSS 5 off versus DLSS 5 on in a variety of games, there are some startling differences. That's particularly true with the ambience and art style – you only need look at the Resident Evil Requiem screenshot (of Grace, see above) to see that. It's also understandable that based on the material shared, there are concerns of the tech making games look overly generic – too sharply rendered, and/or leaning towards a brightness overload or oversaturated colors.

Given that these are fair observations, I don't think it's helpful for Huang to flat out call gamers 'wrong' in the way he does. I'm happy to accept that this is still very early work on DLSS 5, and the end game may look very different to what we're seeing in these glimpses of the tech at GTC – but this isn't what Huang is saying here.

It feels to me like he's irritated at gamers for lashing out at DLSS 5 without fully considering what it is – or might be eventually, given that it's still in early preview – but that he's getting equally irritated himself and lashing back, which ultimately doesn't feel very constructive. It also reminds me (and many others) of the classic Simpsons meme, where Principal Skinner worries that he might be out of touch before blaming the kids for being wrong.

• Nvidia has announced DLSS 5 at GTC 2026
• This is a "real-time neural rendering model" (AI) to revamp lighting and improve graphics in PC games
• The reaction has been broadly negative across social media, with plenty of concerns about the direction Nvidia is now heading in

Nvidia has revealed DLSS 5 at GTC 2026, and is calling the next-gen tech the "most significant breakthrough" for computer graphics since real-time ray tracing.

Nvidia announced in a press release that DLSS 5 brings in a "real-time neural rendering model that infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials", comparing the end result to Hollywood visual effects.

So, this is essentially about taking a game's graphics and sprucing them up with AI to improve the lighting and overall look to be more realistic. This is not about frame rate boosting or upscaling (as with DLSS 4.5), but polishing up the visuals to be photorealistic — the same game assets are used, we're told, just with very different AI-powered lighting.

The best way to get a handle on what DLSS 5 actually does, of course, is to look at some of the early images Nvidia has shared showing the 'before and after' — check out the above pic surfaced by our own Lance Ulanoff on X (from GTC), or the below example from Resident Evil Requiem shared by Nvidia (accompanying its DLSS 5 press release).

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, commented that: "DLSS 5 is the GPT moment for graphics – blending handcrafted rendering with generative AI to deliver a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression."

DLSS 5 is set to launch later this year, in "the fall" — so perhaps as early as September — and it'll be for RTX 5000 graphics cards only as you might expect.

To say there's been a groundswell of negative reaction to DLSS 5 would be an understatement — on Reddit and Bluesky in particular — so let's dive into why that's the case.

Analysis: AI slop accusations

Now, DLSS 5 does look like powerful tech, and Digital Foundry had a hands-on with the feature in a bunch of games over at GTC, coming away impressed. And indeed if you watch that YouTube video, some of the footage does look rather smart. I'd highlight Oblivion Remastered, where the lighting breathes fresh life into the stone walls and buildings — though not everyone agrees on that.

The problem comes with preserving artistic intent here. Huang specifically mentions that this might be AI overhauling a game's graphics, but that Nvidia intends to preserve the "control artists need for creative expression" — and remember, the game assets aren't being altered here, just the lighting, Team Green assures us.

Still, the Resident Evil Requiem screenshot in particular is causing a lot of controversy, most obviously because it's changing Grace's looks radically in terms of adding lipstick for example (and altering her hair color markedly). It ends up with a whole different — and unwanted — vibe for many.

The overall look of game characters given a DLSS 5 makeover feels rather unreal, too, in an uncanny valley way. Yes, everything's a lot sharper and more like a photo, but that isn't always good if it looks overbearing in that respect, or it messes with the ambience and atmosphere of the original visuals. This holds true for background elements as well as foreground characters, and there's plenty of hate for both on Reddit.

As one Redditor commented: "Surely this will result in a look that the artist/developer didn't intend? It's like putting an ugly AI filter over the artist's work. This seems dumb as hell to me."

I also worry about the lighting looking too intense and overblown, and colors too saturated — a bit like when you take a photo on your phone and stick a filter over it to jazz things up, and it's just too much.

Clearly, this has stirred up a hornet's nest of reaction, with some of the most common refrains being that 'we don't want an AI slop filter'. Gamers are worried that this points in a dangerous direction for the future of games — one where developers don't have as much control over the art direction of their products.

There's another concern which hasn't been as widely picked up, too, namely that the tech demo for DLSS 5 is actually running on two RTX 5090 graphics cards, as per Nvidia's FAQ. Yes, a single RTX 5090 is not enough to cope with the overhauled lighting effects here — Nvidia needed to use a pair of them, with one of the GPUs dedicated to running DLSS 5 (and the other actually rendering the game).

That clearly suggests that whatever DLSS 5 is doing behind the scenes is seriously intensive work. Of course, this is still early days, and DLSS 5 is still in 'early preview' — when it's finished, the tech will be optimized to run on a single GPU (so Team Green isn't ushering in a return to SLI setups).

Similarly, there will be a lot of fine-tuning and other honing done to DLSS 5 in terms of the image produced, too, so we need to wait before passing a final judgment here. This is unlikely to dissuade AI skeptics, mind you, who have very much made up their minds already.

Time will tell, but meanwhile, I expect heavily liked comments such as "your RAM died for this" (a comment from @canestrini808 on Digital Foundry's YouTube video) or "I thought this video was an April Fool's joke, but it's still March" (from @lukas0999) will continue to hold sway.

We've reached out to Nvidia to see if the company had any comment on the negative reactions flying around, and will update this article if we hear back.

Nvidia's appearance at CES 2026 included the announcement of DLSS 4.5 and its availability to all RTX GPU owners, along with a new Dynamic Multi-Frame Generation (MFG) feature planned for a later date.

Fortunately, the latter has now been confirmed as inbound with a March 31 launch, as Nvidia revealed at GDC 2026. Dynamic MFG will be exclusive to RTX 5000 GPUs, and it automatically adjusts the number of artificially generated frames – with 2x, 3x, 4x, and now a 6x mode available – to ensure the gamer's target frame rate is met.

The number of additional generated frames will change based on factors such as the graphics settings and the GPU workload. So, if you're using more demanding visual settings like high details and ray tracing in a game, you can expect Dynamic MFG to use more generated frames to prevent performance dips. (Of course, that's also dependent on how powerful your GPU is).

The option to use DLSS 4.5 MFG in 6x mode will also be available for RTX 5000 GPUs, generating five additional frames for every native frame, a new high for Nvidia's tech.

This all sounds great in theory, especially Dynamic MFG which should be a set-and-forget solution for keeping frame rate performance consistent in an entirely automated way, no effort required. However, we'll need to see how stable the image quality is, and how responsive the gaming experience feels with this feature and the 6x mode.

The downside is that these new features are exclusive to RTX 5000 graphics cards, and while DLSS 4.5's base Frame Generation model will receive improvements for RTX 4000 GPUs as well, all older RTX generations will be left out – and that's exactly where a certain rival has an advantage over Nvidia.

Intel's Multi Frame Generation is more flexible than Nvidia's

Just to be clear, I don't believe Intel's Frame Generation technology or Intel's XeSS 3 as an upscaling method holds a candle to what DLSS 4.5 can offer as a complete package. However, Intel XeSS 3 Frame Generation and Multi Frame Generation are available for all Arc-based GPUs (including integrated GPUs).

This means handheld users (notably those with the MSI Claw) and desktop Arc GPU owners will massively benefit from XeSS 3 MFG. Unlike Nvidia, which leaves RTX 3000 and older GPU generations out in the cold for Frame Generation — and without modding (or other unofficial Frame Generation models), there's not much that can be done.

It's also worth remembering that Nvidia isn't just choosing to ignore older GPU generations. There are reasons, specifically hardware limitations with those older graphics cards, as to why Frame Generation is only available for RTX 4000 or 5000 models. However, this could change in the future.

In the here and now, though, Intel's MFG and its greater flexibility and wider support is arguably a better proposition for Arc GPU owners than Nvidia's Frame Generation and MFG are for RTX GPU users. Especially as MFG, and its new trappings coming later this month, are only available to those with the very latest RTX 5000 graphics cards.

What also doesn't help Team Green's GPUs is the pricing for RTX 5000 models, particularly the higher-tier graphics cards such as the RTX 5070 and above, which are now more costly than their original MSRPs.

Intel's Arc GPUs are more comparable to options like the RTX 4060 Ti or RTX 5060, at very similar prices, but with higher VRAM capacities for better performance in certain games.

Once Nvidia does manage to provide DLSS Frame Generation functionality for older RTX GPUs (which I think it will), Intel will lose the main advantage it has over Nvidia (unless it somehow surpasses DLSS in image quality and performance by then).

However, as of now, Team Blue's flexible XeSS 3 beats its rival in terms of accessibility for its own Arc GPUs, and it's great to see that XeSS 3 MFG can now be implemented in games easily for developers via its SDK release. Can XeSS ever beat DLSS in terms of image quality, latency, and performance, though? I don't think so.

• Meta commits to six gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPU hardware
• Initial one-gigawatt deployment scheduled for the second half of 2026
• Custom MI450 silicon engineered specifically for Meta AI workloads

AMD and Meta have agreed to deploy up to 6GW of AMD Instinct GPUs over several generations, marking one of the largest disclosed infrastructure commitments in the AI sector.

The scale of the plan suggests a major expansion of Meta’s internal computing capacity as demand for training and running advanced AI models continues to grow.

The first phase of shipments is expected to begin in the second half of 2026 and will support an initial 1GW deployment.

First deployment timeline takes shape

That rollout will rely on a custom GPU derived from AMD’s MI450 architecture and integrated within the company’s Helios rack-scale platform.

The systems will also use sixth-generation EPYC processors, code-named Venice, alongside ROCm software.

The agreement builds on an existing relationship in which Meta has already deployed large numbers of EPYC CPUs and earlier Instinct GPUs across its global data center footprint.

As AI workloads increase in complexity, the balance between CPUs and GPUs has become more critical, particularly for orchestration, scheduling, and efficiency across massive clusters.

Beyond the hardware supply deal, the companies are co-engineering a custom GPU optimized for Meta’s AI workloads.

The custom MI450-based design is expected to support large-scale AI training and inference tasks across Meta’s services.

Meta says AI infrastructure is central to delivering services to billions of users, including recommendation systems, generative tools, and future applications that rely on intensive computation.

“We’re excited to form a long-term partnership with AMD to deploy efficient inference compute and deliver personal superintelligence,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO of Meta.

“This is an important step for Meta as we diversify our compute. I expect AMD to be an important partner for many years to come.”

For AMD, the agreement deepens its presence in hyperscale data centers at a time when competition in AI accelerators remains intense.

“We are proud to expand our strategic partnership with Meta as it pushes the boundaries of AI at unprecedented scale,” said Dr. Lisa Su, chair and CEO, AMD.

“This multi-year, multi-generation collaboration across Instinct GPUs, EPYC CPUs, and rack-scale AI systems aligns our roadmaps to deliver high-performance, energy-efficient infrastructure optimized for Meta’s workloads, accelerating one of the industry’s largest AI deployments and placing AMD at the center of the global AI buildout.”

The partnership also includes a performance-based warrant allowing Meta to acquire up to 160 million AMD shares, with vesting tied to shipment and stock milestones.

The first portion vests after the initial gigawatt of GPU shipments, while additional tranches depend on scaling purchases toward the full 6GW commitment.

Such structures link commercial success directly to equity participation, aligning incentives as infrastructure expands.

“We expect this partnership to drive substantial multi-year revenue growth and be accretive to our non-GAAP earnings per share,” said Jean Hu, EVP, CFO, and treasurer, AMD.

“The performance-based structure also tightly aligns AMD and Meta around execution and long-term value creation.”

• Micron has unveiled faster new GDDR7 video memory
• It runs at 36Gbps compared to 32Gbps for the initial incarnation of GDDR7
• This memory also comes in 3GB modules rather than 2GB, which is an important step forward for graphics card VRAM capacity

Micron has released a new type of GDDR7 memory for graphics cards, which is the firm's fastest such RAM yet.

Tom's Hardware reports that Micron issued a press release detailing the new GGDR7 memory, which offers a speed of 36Gbps. For perspective, the first GDDR7 modules that hit the market — and arrived on consumer GPUs with the RTX 5000 series from Nvidia — were 32Gbps modules. (Although they were run slower than that, at 28Gbps in most cases, for better thermals and stability).

Another key step forward with Micron's new GDDR7 is that it uses 3GB modules rather than 2GB (and a 24Gb density). You can only fit so many memory chips on any given graphics card — based on the bus width of the board, the lanes that link the memory to the GPU chip itself — so going from 2GB to 3GB modules allows for loading up more video RAM and a higher overall capacity.

As Micron notes: "Modern games are pushing GPU architectures harder than ever."

The firm expands on that: "As game environments expand and visual assets grow, memory capacity becomes critical to maintaining seamless, artifact-free experiences. Micron's new 24Gb density enables up to 96GB of graphics memory, giving GPUs significantly more space for high-resolution textures, expansive worlds, and advanced visual effects."

Essentially, the maximum video RAM loadout with these chips on a consumer graphics card with a 512-bit bus (as seen on the RTX 5090) is now 96GB, rather than 64GB with 2GB modules. (Note that this maximum involves using chips front and back of the board in a 'clamshell' configuration, a more complex and costlier endeavor, which is why Nvidia ran with a spec of 32GB with just modules on the front.)

Analysis: looking to the future

Right here and right now, this doesn't mean a whole lot to gamers, of course. Currently we're all more worried about the scarcity of existing forms of video RAM pushing up the prices of graphics cards slowly but surely.

And while it may seem odd to see 96GB of VRAM mentioned in relation to gaming – and to be fair, it is odd — Micron is really just promoting the benefits of 3GB modules more broadly. It's a boast of 'up to' 96GB, and the effects will be felt across whole GPU product stacks, including the likes of 128-bit affordable GPUs that have 8GB now, but could be configured with 12GB using 3GB modules. That's an important upgrade which avoids the aforementioned complications of a 'clamshell' design to increase video RAM capacity.

Micron should have angled its press release better in this respect, but instead wanted to go with an eye-catching 96GB figure, I guess — marketing is often a 'numbers game' in that respect.

At any rate, for the mentioned reasons, it's good news to see a bolstered form of GDDR7 from another memory chip maker. And I say another, because there are two other big forces in this arena, Samsung and SK Hynix, and both already have faster takes on GDDR7 that run at up to 42.5Gbps and 40Gbps respectively.

However, 36Gbps is still a more than respectable speed boost, and as I already mentioned, Nvidia hasn't even pushed to get the top speed out of the initial GDDR7 incarnation, which offered 32Gbps. As noted, all the initial Blackwell GPUs that used GDDR7 ran at 28Gbps, and just the RTX 5080 differs – and even that graphics card only pushed to 30Gbps. (A move that was implemented to make up for its much leaner memory bus compared to the RTX 5090.)

It is also noteworthy that Micron spends some time considering gaming angles in its press release, and this new GDDR7 could well be what we see in Nvidia's next-gen graphics cards. That could be true not just for RTX 6000 GPUs, but also for AMD's next-gen graphics cards. (Team Red stuck with GDDR6 in RDNA 4 this time around).

There is another possibility, though, and that's the rumored RTX 5000 Super refreshes employing this Micron VRAM. I wouldn't rule that out, as these GPUs are supposedly really beefing up memory loadouts. On the subject of these cards, the latest speculation insists that Nvidia's Blackwell Super revamps won't arrive this year (as previously hoped). So, whatever the case, it's likely we're quite a long way out from seeing this faster GDDR7 memory in consumer graphics cards.

Mind you, in the current climate, with the RAM crisis making matters difficult for graphics card makers, talk of scope for expanding VRAM loadouts feels rather pointless at best. Hopefully this isn't a situation that'll persist for too long, but the general indicators right now aren't good – certainly not for this year.

• A couple of new job adverts from Nvidia have been spotted
• They are for software engineers to work on Nvidia GPU drivers in Linux
• It's a hint that Nvidia is getting more serious about making Linux a better alternative for PC gamers — though there's speculation it could be about something else, too

There are some exciting hints that Nvidia is working on making its graphics drivers better for Linux, as well as beefing up support for Proton, the translation layer that facilities playing Windows games on Linux (and handhelds like the Steam Deck).

VideoCardz highlighted a couple of job adverts that were flagged up by a hawk-eyed Redditor.

The first position is for a senior software engineer to work on optimizing Vulkan driver performance for Nvidia, and working on Proton games is mentioned specifically in this ad.

Another advert is for a Linux graphics senior software engineer to work on developing and testing professional and consumer Linux GPU drivers for Nvidia's graphics cards.

While two jobs aren't exactly what you might call the start of a big drive to make Linux better for gamers, they're nonetheless a telling sign that this is the way Nvidia might be heading in the future. As one Redditor commented in the above thread: "Linux is going to prime time for PCs. This is just a clue."

Analysis: driven by ulterior motives?

Should Microsoft now be quaking in its boots, then? Well, arguably that's already happening anyway, after the broad groundswell of negative reaction that emerged last year, as 2025 rolled on and Windows 11 became increasingly about AI. But more specifically on the gaming front, this latest apparent Nvidia move could be regarded as an additional worry for Microsoft in terms of defending any challenge to the dominance of Windows for PC gamers.

Nvidia long neglected its graphics drivers with Linux in the past, and this was famously a weak spot for those with a GeForce GPU who were thinking about migrating away from Windows to a Linux distro. However, the official driver situation has improved a lot in recent times — and this is a sign that Nvidia is going to embark on even more serious work to knock its Linux graphics drivers into better shape.

That would, of course, be a big win for Linux, as would any additional work on the gaming front for the likes of Proton. Valve has already been pushing hard in that direction after the launch of the Steam Deck, and we've seen some big leaps with Proton game compatibility in recent times, too.

However, as some of the commenters on Reddit point out, this potential move may not necessarily be about improving Linux for PC gamers with Nvidia GPUs. Rather, it could be about Team Green working for its own benefit to switch over to Linux servers with GeForce Now game streaming. Moving away from Windows to Linux in this respect could have some big advantages for Nvidia — in terms of not paying fees to Microsoft for starters – but it also poses problems too (support for anti-cheat games on Linux is the obvious one).

At any rate, even if there is a financial ulterior motive in terms of cloud gaming behind Nvidia improving Linux, gamers running one of the various flavors of Linux will still benefit from these changes — and that's the important part.

Must be nice, having the kind of money to throw around that you can afford an RTX 5090. Personally, I'm content with my 5060 – but there's no denying that even the most affordable of Nvidia's latest slate of desktop GPUs is still out of reach for many PC gamers, and rising component prices due to the AI boom aren't helping matters.

So I'm always on the lookout for good ways to boost performance that don't involve spending a load of your hard-earned cash, and I've just learned about one of the best solutions in ages: a nifty little piece of software called Lossless Scaling.

This utility tool rolls both AI-powered upscaling and frame-generation features (as seen in existing tools like Nvidia's DLSS or AMD's FSR) into one straightforward and greatly customizable app that enables performance boosts in games that don't even natively support those options, as well as unofficial content, like emulators, and video content, like older 720p TV shows and films.

The best part? It doesn't even need specific hardware. A frequent criticism of DLSS is that it needs an Nvidia RTX GPU to run, as well as newer iterations like the recent DLSS 4.5 locking some functionality behind newer cards.

Lossless Scaling can run on virtually any GPU, meaning that users with older hardware can effectively get a significant performance boost – reviewers have claimed that it "turns any 20/30fps game into a buttery smooth 60fps" and called it "the only app that will actually give your PC a little more life" – all for the low, low price of $6.99 / £5.89 / AU$10.25 on Steam.

Old dog, meet new tricks

Here comes the clever bit, though. Lossless Scaling obviously needs your graphics card to function, which means it's diverting some of your GPU resources towards powering its capabilities. This means that while you'll probably still see an overall performance boost on an older GPU like an RTX 2000-series card, your frame rate before upscaling and frame-gen are applied might actually be a bit lower.

However, the tool supports dual GPU functionality, which means that you can slot in a second graphics card (assuming your motherboard has two PCIe slots, but the majority do) and offload the entire upscaling and frame-gen process to the second GPU without any performance impact on your 'main' graphics card.

The two GPUs don't even need to be identical, either — unlike the now-obsolete option of SLI-linking two cards to boost performance, you can have a more powerful card focus on simply rendering frames with no AI-powered cleverness happening, while the second card takes care of the upscaling and nothing else.

Although Lossless Scaling uses its own signature frame-gen tool (called LSFG), it enables the use of a range of different upscalers with their own customization options, so users who are willing to put in a bit of extra time experimenting and tweaking with their upscaling settings will see the best results.

No big loss

In other words, if you've got an old spare GPU kicking about, like the ever-dependable GeForce GTX 1060 or Radeon RX 580, you can essentially transform it into a frame-gen machine that boosts the gaming performance of your rig by making the two GPUs focus on entirely different workloads.

According to the Steam Hardware Survey, many PC gamers are currently running cards like the RTX 3050, 3060, and 4060 — and I have to imagine many of you upgraded from one of the older cards I mentioned above, and probably still have it sitting in a box somewhere.

Hell, even if you don't have a spare GPU kicking about, you can pick up a 1060 for cheap these days since it ostensibly doesn't support all the fancy new features offered by DLSS. If you're on a gaming laptop, this unfortunately isn't an option — but you could always try installing SteamOS and using the Linux-based plugin version of Lossless Scaling, which is totally free.

Getting it up and running is actually a pretty simple process, and Lossless Scaling had a nice, clean UI with multiple profiles that you can easily swap between — useful if you want to build different profiles for specific use cases. The official Steam page and Discord server have advice on which upscaler to use depending on the content you're displaying, too.

It's worth noting, of course, that as a third-party tool for upscaling and frame-gen, Lossless Scaling isn't perfect. While it does boast a 'Very Positive' user rating on Steam with 14,000+ reviews, it's not going to make a huge impact on systems that are already very low-powered (like older laptops running on integrated graphics), and some users have reported that using the modes above 2x frame-gen (so producing three or four times as many frames, rather than just doubling the target frame rate via standard frame-for-frame interpolation) does frequently lead to artifacting issues or noticeable input latency.

But you know what? I don't even think Nvidia's DLSS really works that well at 4x frame-gen in a lot of games, at least not in my personal experience on an RTX 5060. For anyone who's struggling with lackluster performance on older hardware, Lossless Scaling could be an effective — and more importantly, affordable — solution.

Oh, AI expansion, is there nothing you can't ruin? It seems like there's always some drama in the world of modern generative AI, whether it's ChatGPT 5.2 ruining some functionality of previous versions, or Elon Musk's Grok merrily producing explicit content, or Microsoft ruining Windows with Copilot, or Microsoft ruining Windows some more with Copilot, or Microsoft ruining Windows even more with Copilot, or... well, you get the idea (and yes, those are three separate stories).

The latest AI chicanery to grind my gears is, unsurprisingly, the RAM crisis. AI datacenters require a lot of hardware, and we've been seeing the impacts of this new industry's growth for a while now, with GPU and SSD prices slowly creeping up, but the price of memory in particular has spiked aggressively since December, with 64GB of DDR5 RAM now costing more than a MacBook.

If you're a seasoned PC-builder like me — or you've simply been considering some piecemeal upgrades to an aging desktop system — you're probably in panic mode right now. The usual upgrade advice has been thrown out of the window; where once I would have consistently recommended more RAM or a bigger, newer SSD as small, simple upgrades to your PC, I now find myself admitting that buying a pre-built system might be a better idea.

Don't lose hope, though. There are still options; not everything has been completely annihilated by the rising demand for AI hardware, at least not yet. So if you're contemplating an upgrade to your desktop, this is my refresh advice, presented in descending order of priority. Let's get started!

Get a better GPU

I can't believe I'm saying this, but the way to get the most bang for your buck right now is probably by upgrading your graphics card. Yes, this still has potential to be a pricey upgrade, but it's going to produce a much greater performance boost than swapping in some new memory or a fresh CPU.

Based on the video card section of the latest Steam Hardware Survey, a not-insignificant portion of y'all are still rocking older cards like the RTX 2060 and GTX 1650. Without wanting to sound like some sort of wealthy purist, if you're still trying to play the latest games on a 20-series card or older, it's probably time to get yourself one of the latest and best graphics cards.

You don't need to shell out for an RTX 5090 to see a significant step up in gaming performance from your rig, though. Any RTX 4000- or 5000-series GPU from Nvidia will provide a good step up in performance from older budget GPUs, with the RTX 5060 Ti ideal for gaming at 1080p and 1440p.

Of course, the higher you go, the more of a boost you'll see, but be wary of bottlenecks; leaping from a 2060 to a 5080 will almost certainly also require an upgrade to your CPU, PSU, and most likely your motherboard too.

If you're on a tighter budget, Intel's offerings are surprisingly great nowadays. We scored the Intel Arc B5080 a rare five stars in our review, citing its incredible 1440p performance and competitive pricing, and also praised the Intel Arc B570 as a fantastically affordable 1080p gaming GPU.

Replace your monitor

Okay, this isn't technically a direct improvement to your system (and I promise I won't start calling a new keyboard a 'PC upgrade'), but there's no denying that a better monitor can significantly improve your gaming experience. And right now, upgrading your display can be surprisingly affordable.

The best monitor for your specific needs will vary, but if you shop the sales it's a lot easier to snap up a cut-price display right now than some discount RAM. In terms of sheer cost-effectiveness, a new monitor is definitely an upgrade that PC-builders should consider — not least because it's a very 'future-proof' upgrade.

Unlike the components inside your rig, your monitor is wholly independent and should never have issues with compatibility; even if your existing system isn't pushing the limits of your display, it'll still work great, and upgrading effectively eliminates future display bottlenecks caused when you do upgrade the rest of your setup.

In terms of what to actually get, a good rule of thumb is to bump things up by one standard resolution level. So if you're currently using a 1080p monitor, look for a 1440p one; if you're at 1440p, spring for 4K. It's also worth keeping an eye on refresh rate (120Hz should be plenty for everyone except serious esports gamers) and, of course, size. Bigger is better, and getting a larger display can improve immersion (and productivity, if you use your PC for work) without requiring an actual performance increase. If you regularly do creative work like digital art or photo editing, it's worth paying close attention to the color gamut and contrast ratio, too.

Upgrade your CPU (and perhaps more)

They're a bit more expensive than they used to be, but desktop CPUs haven't been as badly hit by the shifts in the PC hardware industry as most other components. You can still snap up a solid midrange chip for a good price; at the time of writing, Newegg has the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X for just $199.99, and you get a free AIO liquid cooler too.

With that in mind, the correct CPU upgrade for you won't be as simple as picking one of the best processors. If you're upgrading from an older CPU, it'll likely also mean upgrading your motherboard because you'll need a different chip socket. Thankfully, mobos also haven't seen the same sharp price hikes, but there's another problem: many newer motherboards require DDR5 memory (and the DDR4 DIMM socket is different, so there's no backwards compatibility with older RAM), and we're trying to avoid spending an arm and a leg on new RAM.

Thankfully, AMD hasn't completely abandoned the AM4 chipset yet, so you can find motherboards that will accept AM4 chips and DDR4 memory. AM4 CPUs themselves ended with the Ryzen 5000 series, which is admittedly a few years old now, but they're still very solid chips for gaming; you can pick up a 5800X or XT for only a couple hundred dollars or pounds right now, and that represents a very solid upgrade over any older AM4 Ryzen chip. Meanwhile, an AM4 motherboard that'll be compatible with your existing DDR4 memory shouldn't cost you more than a hundred dollars or the equivalent.

If you're rocking an Intel build, then a CPU upgrade is unfortunately liable to cost you a lot more in terms of extra components. While Intel's latest chips are quite competitively priced on an individual basis, Team Blue shifts chipsets more frequently than AMD (five new mainstream CPU sockets in the past decade vs two from AMD), meaning that you'll almost certainly need a new motherboard — and probably new RAM too — if you choose to upgrade.

...and all the rest

There are more options out there for PC builders aiming for piecemeal upgrades, of course. A new PSU is a solid (and still reasonably affordable) upgrade that won't boost your everyday performance but will provide more headroom for future upgrades, especially if your current power supply isn't ATX 3.0-compatible or newer.

Another upgrade that won't actually make your games run better, but which could be good for your system's long-term health is a new case. You can get a perfectly good case for a pretty reasonable price (since they've been largely unaffected by the current component shortages), and if you're like me and routinely forget to clean the dust out of your rig, you might be dealing with years of accumulated wear and tear that a simple air-dusting won't fix.

There are other, less critical upgrades that can be done cheaply, but there's a question of whether or not they're worthwhile or wise. New fans won't hurt, but if your case is super-old, a whole new chassis is probably a better shout, and most of those will come with fans anyway. A better cooler can also be a good idea (especially if you see CPU temp spikes in your existing system), but be wary of future incompatibility issues; if you decide to buy a new one, get one that comes with multi-bracket compatibility so you won't have to pony up for another new cooler if you change motherboards.

Lastly, there's storage. Again, this isn't likely to provide much in terms of an actual performance boost, unless you're still playing games off a tired old HDD — in which case, please at least buy a SATA SSD. High-speed M.2 SSDs are also rising in price (and game install sizes are getting bigger, too!), so my advice here is this: if you're sitting on less than 1TB of storage, snap up a new drive ASAP before the cost spirals even further out of control.

• ComputerBase ran a comparison between DLSS, FSR and native 4K
• Readers watched videos of all three and voted for the best image quality
• Nvidia's DLSS came out top by far, with FSR falling behind it, and native rendering too — but we need to be careful about what conclusions we draw

Which is best for image quality: Nvidia's DLSS, AMD's FSR, or not using any upscaling at all, and running your games at native 4K resolution? If you thought native was the best choice, well, think again — because a vote held by a tech site has crowned Nvidia the clear winner here.

Tom's Hardware flagged up the intriguing test conducted by ComputerBase, with the readers of the German website being presented with three side-by-side videos.

These showed off DLSS 4.5, FSR 4 (Redstone), and native 4K, and viewers were asked to vote for the video that offered the best image quality. Both upscaling techs were running in 'quality' mode (rather than 'performance'), and native 4K had TAA applied (temporal anti-aliasing, which smooths out jagged edges).

Six games were involved here, with votes registered over two weeks. This was a blind test — meaning the videos were presented unlabelled, so biases towards AMD or Nvidia could be set aside — and readers had to choose which they thought looked best.

This was purely judged on image quality, and you could only pick a winner (no second places). However, if you couldn't tell any real difference between the choices, you could vote to say it was a tie and they were all equivalent.

The end result was a big victory for Nvidia, with DLSS snagging 48.2% of the total vote (6,700 opinions were registered, by the way). Native rendering was in second place with 24% of respondents preferring that, with FSR lagging considerably behind on 15%.

Around 12.8% of those who took the test effectively abstained, as they couldn't see any meaningful difference between the three.

The following games were tested: Anno 117, Arc Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon Forbidden West, Satisfactory, and The Last of Us Part II.

Breaking down the results for the individual games showed some clear wins for Nvidia, which notably secured 60.9% of the vote in Satisfactory, and 56.3% in Horizon Forbidden West.

Nvidia won with every single game, although the worst result for DLSS, which was in Cyberpunk 2077, still beat out native rendering (just). Here Nvidia picked up 34.4% of the vote versus 32.4% for native 4K, with AMD hitting its lowest percentage at just 10.6%.

Interestingly, Cyberpunk 2077 was something of an outlier in that it was the only game to have considerable doubt around respondents' assessments of the best quality, with 22.6% being unable to make a call, and voting them all equivalent. With all the other games, the abstainers were in the 8% to 12% ballpark, meaning roughly one in 10 — but in the case of Cyberpunk 2077 approaching one in four gamers were unable to tell.

AMD's best result was for The Last of Us Part II where FSR captured 25.3% of the vote, but it was still in last place here, falling just behind native rendering on 25.9%, with Nvidia winning with 40.9% of the vote (its weakest showing aside from Cyberpunk 2077).

Analysis: a measure of just how good upscaling has become

This is a really interesting set of stats, and it shows just how much upscaling has supercharged contemporary GPUs in terms of producing a better-looking image than native rendering at 4K — and of course a frame rate boost, too. (Although 'quality' obviously doesn't provide the same boost as 'performance' for DLSS or FSR).

It also reflects the broader sentiment you'll find online, which is that DLSS is the reigning monarch of the upscalers. However, AMD has received considerable acclaim for the strides it has taken forward with FSR 4, but that doesn't come across clearly here.

As ComputerBase points out, though, we need to be careful about concluding that AMD FSR is worse than native rendering based on these results, as only one pick was made — for the best quality — and second or third place weren't taken into account. Having a full picture of rankings in that respect could have changed the overall findings.

It's also worth noting that the videos weren't simply uploaded to YouTube, but ComputerBase readers had to download them from the site and watch them via Nvidia's ICAT player. This was to ensure a higher level of quality for the footage and avoid YouTube's various compression antics, which would have watered down the comparison here.

This is clearly a big win for Nvidia, then, and a healthy prod for AMD in terms of needing to catch up more than Team Red has managed so far with the release of Redstone.

From browsing various online forums, you'll see that there are already a lot of gamers sold on the benefits of Nvidia DLSS over and above native rendering — but this test underlines just how good Team Green's tech is in terms of providing a more detailed, superior image quality.

If you're wondering where Intel's XeSS got to in this comparison, it was likely ruled out due to running the tests at 4K — and the lack of an appropriate high-end Intel Arc GPU in that regard — plus the fact that a fourth solution would've complicated matters considerably for ComputerBase (and the viewers judging). Discrete Arc graphics cards are, of course, very much a niche proposition anyway.

• A new report estimates GPU prices are up by 15% globally over the past three months
• Higher-end Nvidia graphics cards have been hit the hardest by price hikes
• The US is suffering from some of the most eye-watering price increases

If you needed any confirmation that GPU prices are rising, a new report shows that graphics cards are definitely getting more expensive across the globe – particularly for some Nvidia models.

As VideoCardz highlighted, TechSpot compiled some statistics which involved tracking 14 GPUs (from AMD, Intel and Nvidia) across 10 regions globally, using local price comparison websites to find the cheapest products from retailers in those countries. Only prices for models in stock and available to buy were used, as you might imagine (sold-out cheap GPUs aren't any good to anyone).

TechSpot collected the initial data on pricing in November 2025, before graphics card pricing started to spike – a side-effect of RAM shortages, which hit video memory too, of course. The second set of data was gathered this month, providing a roughly three-month snapshot of the rising costs of GPUs across the globe.

Overall, there's been a 15% increase across all models and regions on average. To put that another way, a graphics card that was $300 a few months ago now costs $345.

Nvidia graphics cards are clearly the hardest hit by price inflation here. It probably comes as no surprise to you that the RTX 5090 is the worst offender, as we've already observed that the asking price for this flagship Blackwell GPU has gone through the roof since the start of 2026 (and it was already pricey).

TechSpot estimates the overall increase for the RTX 5090 globally to be 31%, although in the US it's particularly hefty at 40% (it's actually 50%, or just over, in India and Poland).

The situation with Nvidia's RTX 5080 is almost as bad, with a 25% increase, the same as the RTX 5070 Ti. Again, in the US, the inflation of those two GPUs is around 40%, a good deal heftier than in many other countries.

Lower-end Nvidia models aren't faring quite so badly with inflation. RTX 5060 models are only up 10 to 11%, which isn't so terrible (especially not when compared with the RAM price rises out there, of course). The RTX 5070 is up 14%, but there's a notable outlier: the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is up by 22% globally.

Away from Team Green, the increases with AMD GPUs are not nearly as bad. The worst offender on the Radeon side of the fence is the RX 9060 XT 16GB, which is up by 15% worldwide, certainly an unwelcome jump. RX 9070 models are only up by 7 or 8%, though, which is relatively palatable.

There are some more uncomfortable shifts in the US retail market, mind, with the 9070 XT up by 21% in the last three months, and the 9060 XT 8GB has jumped by 20%. So that's quite brutal in both cases.

As for Intel, the Arc B580 has seen its price rise by 11% globally, but the B570 has only witnessed inflation to the tune of 4%.

Analysis: a worrying future?

Theories have been floating around about Nvidia prioritizing AI GPUs over gaming (GeForce) models since the supply of VRAM got shakier, and this evidence appears to back up those notions. Obviously, we can't read too much into this, but whichever way you slice and dice these stats, Nvidia's graphics cards are very much hit by the worst of the increases, particularly at the higher-end of the GPU scale.

The RTX 5090 remains at a ludicrous price in the US, frankly, with the cheapest model at Newegg currently maintaining an asking price of $3,600. (Meaning that buying a whole prebuilt Alienware PC with an RTX 5090 inside is only about 25% more expensive, and you're getting a whole lot of matching high-end kit for the additional premium, including some seriously expensive RAM, naturally).

The rumor that supply is dwindling with the RTX 5070 Ti – which has 16GB of VRAM – and also the RTX 5060 Ti with that same video memory loadout, appears to be backed up by what TechSpot observes here. Those GPUs are up strongly in price (25% and 22% respectively), suggesting that stock could be getting leaner – which would cause prices to rise due to demand.

All of this is grist for the rumor mill theory that Nvidia's graphics cards with higher VRAM loadouts are suffering as AI GPUs (with whopping memory pools) need to take priority, as they make a lot more in the way of profit for Team Green.

The worry here is what the future holds, and whether this kind of rise is going to be sustained – or indeed spread more to AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs. With no signs of the RAM pricing crisis abating, the knock-on effects for graphics card makers are likely to continue to be felt perhaps even more keenly as this first half of 2026 progresses.

Building a PC has certainly become a miserable business, with the huge hike in the cost of system RAM, along with storage following a similar upwards pricing trajectory, and now GPUs are causing a bit of extra chaos in the mix.

• MSI's RTX 5090 Lightning can only be bought via a lottery system in the US
• Some buyers are therefore taking advantage of this and reselling the GPU for between $8,000 to $15,000 on eBay
• It's cheaper to buy the RTX 5090 Lightning from the UK and pay for shipping and import, but however you dice it, you'll be down a small fortune

Ever thought about dropping the best part of ten grand on a GPU? If you are mulling a purchase of MSI's latest Nvidia graphics card – which is a new premium spin on the Blackwell flagship – you better prepare for a wallet-destroying price.

VideoCardz spotted that MSI's RTX 5090 Lightning Z graphics card is priced at truly eye-watering levels for buyers in the US, who would be better off importing the GPU from the UK.

The catch with the RTX 5090 Lightning is that it's a limited-edition graphics card, with not many more than 1,000 units having been made for global distribution to the buying public. In the US, the extra tricky bit is that the Lightning can only be purchased via a lottery, meaning you must win the opportunity to buy this graphics card at its retail price, which is $5,090 (see what they did there?) in the US.

So, predictably, what has happened is that those who've won the chance to buy the RTX 5090 Lightning have done so, but with the aim of trying to resell the GPU on eBay (or other marketplaces) to those who really want this card, but failed to win the aforementioned lottery.

As you can imagine, the markup on the Lightning is a nasty one, with current eBay prices ranging from $8,000 to $15,000.

Now, as VideoCardz points out, for GPU enthusiasts in the US, there's a better approach here rather than buying one of those products listed on eBay, which is to look at UK retailers instead (where there isn't a lottery system).

At the time of writing, Overclockers UK – one of the big custom PC makers and component sellers in the country – has MSI's RTX 5090 Lightning in stock and ready to ship for £5,000. For a buyer in the US, that works out at around $6,800 currently, so even after shipping and import costs, it's still going to be a good deal cheaper than forking out $8,000 (or indeed a lot more).

Analysis: ride the lightning – or don't, and buy a whole RTX 5090 gaming PC instead

Granted, in the scenario presented, there are support issues if things go wrong with the GPU for a US buyer using a UK retailer. But then there'd be support issues with an eBay seller anyhow (some of which are abroad anyway, so for example, one of those RTX 5090 Lightning graphics cards is shipped from Germany).

Of course, there's a bigger issue here though, which is simply: why on earth would you want to pay so much for a GPU anyway, even a flash RTX 5090? True, the RTX 5090 Lightning is doubtless a sterling overclocker (it is "built to sustain 1000W loads with absolute stability"), and it's a stunning-looking creation (with a built-in 8-inch display, no less).

But the prices floating around are just ludicrous, as is the recommended retail price frankly, wherever you can manage to get the GPU at that level (not in the US, as noted). $5,090 is still over 40% more expensive than the most affordable RTX 5090 at Newegg currently (which is $3,600 – and yes, prices have shot up with the flagship in general). And unless you're a really hardcore overclocker – or just want supreme GPU bragging rights – that's a seriously painful premium for the Lightning even at MSRP.

More to the point, for five grand you can pick up an entire gaming PC with top-spec components including an RTX 5090. Again, at Newegg, you can buy a liquid-cooled gaming rig built around the MSI Ventus RTX 5090 and Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor with 32GB of DDR5 RAM (which is also seriously pricey these days) and a 2TB SSD.

Or a liquid-cooled Alienware Area-51 PC (as pictured above) can be configured with the same spec for the CPU (the Intel 285K), GPU (RTX 5090) and RAM (32GB), plus a 1TB SSD, priced at $4,650 at the time of writing, which is 10% under the cost of MSI's RTX 5090 Lightning. I know which purchase I'd be making – none of the above, but if I did have that kind of budget for my PC gaming, it'd be the Alienware machine, for sure.

We’ve all seen the news – massive data center-driven demand (mostly for AI) has sent prices for RAM and other microchips skyrocketing. That’s not hyperbole either – DDR5 is about 4x as expensive as it was in mid-2025, while many SSDs have doubled in price.

Some memory brands, such as Crucial, have exited the consumer market entirely. While the underlying tech has major upsides, clear signs of an AI investment bubble seem to only be fueling demand, as companies lock in purchases now, while the going is still good.

That leaves consumers in a tough spot – prices for loads of products are already on the rise, and every sign points to the trend continuing for the next few years. Many manufacturers are reducing base-level specs and using slower parts in premium machines.

So while we don’t want to come across as alarmist, if you do plan a major upgrade or tech purchase, in the key affected areas, there’s a strong argument for buying sooner rather than later.

To help out, I have put together a list of key areas that have already seen price rises, but where it’s expected to get worse. As well as the categories that are OK for now, but are worth keeping an eye on.

Even more so than ever before, it’s very important to make sure you are getting the best deal when buying new tech, so to help, I have included important buying advice, plus listed relevant guides from TechRadar experts.

Key tech with the largest expected price rises

The main products and tech categories with rising prices are those that use a large amount of RAM or storage. While that is more obvious when it comes to standalone hardware components, it also has impacts for all sorts of other gear.

Want to skip ahead? The links below will take you straight to each section.

• Laptops, desktops and other pre-built machines
• Consoles and handheld gaming machines
• Hardware components: RAM, SSDs, GPUs
• Phones, tablets and portable devices
• Storage: from SD cards to USB drives

Prebuilt computers

While prices are already up, you should expect continued rises in desktops, laptops, Mini PCs and even the humble Raspberry Pi. The key underlying price increases are for RAM and SSDs, and these are also the areas most likely to see stagnant or downgraded spec.

Budget and mid-range laptops and desktops typically have thin profit margins, so will tend to pass on cost increases sooner than higher-end machines.

Right now there’s still a decent amount of laptop stock built before the most recent price rises. These offer some of the best deals – especially as some are even discounted due to getting replaced by updated models.

Below are some great buyer's guides to the best pre-built machines:

• The best laptops
• The best laptop deals
• The best student laptops

• Best mini PCs
• The best desktop PC
• The best gaming PC
• The best budget gaming PC

Consoles

Storage and RAM price increases have impacted console pricing already as they already have high manufacturing costs and struggle to break even at the best of times. Not to mention, accessories like PS5 SSDs are only getting more expensive.

Sony has said that while their current inventory has helped soften the impact of increasing costs, they may be passed on to consumers in the future. Nintendo says they are monitoring the situation, but experts think a price rise for the Switch 2 is likely in 2026.

There’s also been leaks about potential Xbox cost increases. Even Valve’s highly anticipated Steam Machine has been delayed.

Higher profit console bundle deals will likely help buffer the impact at first, so will be worth looking out for offers with games or controllers included.

Looking at a console upgrade or just need more storage? We have you covered:

• The best SSD for PS5
• Best gaming console
• Best Xbox Series X hard drives and SSDs
• Best handheld games consoles

Component hardware

While RAM has been hit hardest (with more pain to come), GPUs, SSDs and even mechanical HDDs have all seen significant price rises, with no sign of leveling off in 2026.

Nvidia has warned it may not have new gaming GPUs in 2026, and the RTX 6000 series launch will likely slip from 2027 to 2028. Rumors also suggest AMD graphics cards are likely to see more price increases and maybe even memory reductions this year.

Most retailers price stock in batches, based on order cost, so expect to see sudden jumps as they restock, not gradual increases. Being flexible with your builds is key – even consider system builders, rather than DIY, as it can actually be cheaper in many cases.

We enthusiasts often snub big name brands like HP and Dell and their boring, lower spec builds, but thanks to larger volumes their system prices often lag behind the rises seen in stand-alone components or smaller builders, and they are worth double checking.

Looking to buy RAM, an SSD or a GPU? Our buyer's guides have everything you need:

• Best large SSDs and hard drives
• The best DDR5 RAM

• The best AMD graphics card
• The best mid-range graphics cards

• Best NAS hard drives
• Best external hard drive
• The fastest external SSDs

Phones, tablets and portable devices

While not yet having a major impact, rising RAM and storage costs are impacting portable devices. It’s more apparent on the affordable end, where the increases are a bigger part of the total cost, but we expect this to extend to more premium options through 2026.

Apple is likely in a better position to buffer the rises due to large scale and purchasing power when negotiating pricing and relatively high margins. In contrast, many affordable Android phone brands have little choice other than quickly passing on price increases to customers.

We also expect phone specs (especially RAM and storage) to stagnate through 2026, or even go backwards.

The takeaway here is that if you need an upgrade, then premium devices can offer better value for money – at least for now.

Need a new phone, tablet or other portable device? These guides cover what's best:

• The best phones
• The best cheap phones
• The best Android phones
• The best Samsung phones

• The best tablets
• The best cheap tablets
• The best iPad
• The best Android tablets

• The best smartwatch
• The best smartwatch for iPhone
• The best cheap smartwatch

All things storage

While SSDs have seen the biggest increase, with costs doubling in many cases, it’s also hitting other areas. Even traditional mechanical HDDs have seen price increases of up to 50% due to demand for data center bulk storage.

Where it will hit consumers hardest is in everyday storage like SD cards and USB drives. SD cards had been steadily dropping to bargain prices over the last few years, but now they are up by 50% (and often higher, for larger sizes) in the past 6 months. While still somewhat insulated from the hikes, some USB drives (especially larger capacities) are up to twice as expensive compared to the same time last year and brands like PNY scaled back Black Friday flash drive promos.

These increases also affect the pricing of devices that bundle in SD cards, from dash cameras to gaming consoles. Watch for shrinkflation too, as sellers switch to lower capacities to reduce costs. If in doubt, compare to reviews of the previous generation models and see how new bundles compare.

Need more storage and don't want to get priced out? Check out our guides for the best deals and buyer info:

• The best SSD for PS5
• Best external hard drive for Mac
• Best NAS hard drives
• Best external hard drive
• Fastest external SSD
• Best Xbox Series X hard drives and SSDs
• The best large SSDs and hard drives

Other tech categories we are watching closely

The situation is still developing, but there are a growing number of predictions for price increases beyond microchips.

For example, recent analysis from TrendForce (a market intelligence and consulting firm) suggests the cost of panels used for TVs and monitors is on the rise, and combined with increased demand, will likely result in increased prices through 2026. Many Smart TVs are also seeing price pressure due to the CPUs and RAM they use.

Audio gear isn’t immune either, and everything from soundbars to high-res audio DACs might be next to see prices go up.

Changes to chip production also mean that many of the little controller microchips in all manner of devices, from smart appliances to simple USB chargers, will also start to cost more.

Looking at a new TV or monitor? Here are some handy guides:

• The best TVs overall
• The best OLED TVs for all budgets
• The best gaming TV for all budgets
• The best 65-inch TV for every budget

• The best monitor
• Best portable monitor
• Best business monitor
• The best ultrawide monitors
• The best monitors for PS5 and PS5 Pro
• Best monitors for working from home

How to navigate the price increases

While price rises in components are easy to spot, many existing models of our favorite tech, like laptops, have managed to maintain prices. But as 2026 new models hit, we are seeing significant price increases compared to the last generation.

There’s also clear shrinkflation going on – mid-range and premium laptops and desktops that had a base spec of 32GB of RAM and 1TB SSDs now have models with 16GB and 512GB of storage but no reduction in price. We have even seen a resurgence of 8GB of memory on supposed mid-range machines.

Considering you want to make sure a purchase now will stay relevant for many years, it's more important than ever to consider your usage, and make sure you don’t end up buying a machine that won’t hold up long term.

Don’t skimp on RAM, and 16GB is the minimum we recommend. Storage is one area it’s ok to scale back if you don’t expressly need it – the cost of a larger SSD is often vastly more than years of cloud storage.

Watch for manufacturers reducing the spec of other unrelated components to try and make the cost more palatable. For example, there’s a rising trend of cheaper 1200p displays in laptops, which are a big downgrade from higher resolution screens.

Windows lovers might even do well to consider Apple machines – so far the brand has held fairly firm with prices and is better equipped to shelter its buyers from price fluctuations than smaller companies. There are even rumours that Apple is preparing to launch a new, cheaper MacBook in 2026 – albeit with reduced specs and RAM.

As always, it’s important to check out reviews for any products you are interested in, to find out if the manufacturer has skimped on any key components to keep the price down.

How long will the price increases last?

It’s not possible to say with any certainty, but it’s expected to last through to at least 2027, and even then potentially take years for increased supply to bring prices down to early 2025 levels.

That said, there are also plenty of unknowns that may make the situation much worse. For example, the majority of the world's chip manufacturing comes from Taiwan, and any disruptions to the Silicon Shield would have large global impacts.

The US government also continues to use tariffs in a way that can destabilize supply chains, resulting in price increases in unpredictable places.

On the flip side, China is rapidly ramping up its own microchip production, and leading PC manufacturers are looking to RAM made by ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT). The new memory is also likely already entering the consumer market under names like KingBank and Gloway which at least provides a little more competition, though not price relief.

So for now, don’t delay a tech purchase or upgrade if you need it, but make sure you do your research and shop smart.

What tech products or categories have you seen going up in price? Let me know in the comments!

Want to know more?

Here's a range of the latest TechRadar stories that further explore the latest tech price rises.

• RAM price crisis gets worse (again) as DDR5 hits a new painful high – and a worrying trend is creeping in
• DRAM prices set to almost double by March 2026, and yes, we all have our AI overlords to thank for that wonderful news
• Good news! RAM prices seem to have finally stabilized - bad news, it's probably because memory prices are so high, that it's forcing most of us to give up buying anything
• Is RAM the new Bitcoin? DDR4 memory prices are rising so fast, some tracker graphs are running out of space - and I fear 2026 could well see a 10x price rise
• The RAM crisis in a nutshell: Amazon reveals 'flash deal' for DDR5 RAM that's over twice the price it was four months ago

• Ayaneo announced the Next 2 handheld's specifications and price
• The new gaming handheld will cost up to $4,299, and its early bird price is $3,499
• The Next 2 will be available via Ayaneo's Indiegogo campaign this February

Gaming PC hardware is taking a huge hit thanks to the ongoing RAM crisis, with rising prices and even the delaying of the highly anticipated Steam Machine. Unfortunately, it appears as though things are only just getting started.

Handheld brand Ayaneo has revealed a wealth of new information about its upcoming Next 2 handheld gaming PC including the fact that it will cost $4,299 / around £3,160 / AU$6,130 for a 128GB RAM and 2TB storage model. That's more than an RTX 5090!

Its early bird price is set at $3,499 / around £2,570 / AU$4,990, for consumers who want to save a little by backing the Indiegogo campaign.

The Ayaneo Next 2 is a beefy handheld gaming PC, equipped with AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor, a 116WH battery, and a 9-inch OLED display. Those specifications are almost equivalent to those of a budget gaming laptop, as the Max+ 395's performance is similar to that of an RTX 4060.

While the Ayaneo Next 2 was always expected to be an expensive handheld – since all Ryzen AI Max+ 395-powered handhelds are – the $4,299 retail price tag could be a step too far, even for consumers willing to pay high prices for handheld devices, and it's largely due to the RAM crisis.

It's not just the 128GB model either, as the base model matches the RTX 5090's $1,999 MSRP, equipped with the less powerful Ryzen AI Max 385 processor and 32GB of RAM.

A model with the AI Max+ 395 has 64GB of RAM, which isn't needed for handheld gaming (and certainly not 128GB), but consumers will have to pay $2,699 to get their hands on it.

If RAM prices continue to skyrocket, there's a high chance Ayaneo's listed retail prices won't stick once it officially launches too.

Analysis: 128GB of RAM isn't necessary for handhelds

The RAM crisis isn't going anywhere any time soon, and Ayaneo hasn't made it any easier by using high RAM configurations. Most mainstream handhelds run perfectly fine with 32GB of RAM (some even with 16GB), which is why the push for 64GB and 128GB seems like complete overkill.

The AI Max+ 395 APU, 9-inch OLED display, and 116WH battery are already enough to make the Next 2 a niche device, with a high price, but the addition of 128GB of RAM makes it unattainable, even for consumers willing to spend big bucks for portable gaming.

Nvidia's RTX 5090 is hardly available at any retailer store, and the third-party options are all far above the $1,999 / £1,799 / AU$4,039 MSRP, with some almost costing $5,000 on Best Buy. That same amount can net a consumer a brand-new desktop gaming PC, which is a better option over both the Next 2 handheld and RTX 5090 GPU.

It wouldn't surprise me if new handhelds in 2026 end up creating 8GB RAM configurations, because the PC hardware market looks like it's only going to get worse at this rate.

• Rumor suggests Nvidia has a 'very high-end RTX 50' GPU in the works
• It could be an RTX 5090 Ti, or RTX Titan, arriving in Q3 of this year
• Nvidia producing a supercharged RTX 5090 seems very unlikely, though, for a number of reasons

A new rumor claims that Nvidia might have an RTX 5090 Ti in the pipeline, but I doubt that very much – if there is a new heavyweight GPU waiting in the wings, it's surely not one aimed at gamers.

VideoCardz noticed that French tech site Overclocking.com published this speculation, apparently after a lot of deliberation about whether to air it at all (understandably – and note that the site expresses its own disbelief about this purported plan of Nvidia's).

The rumor is that in Q3 of 2026 Nvidia is planning to launch a "very high-end RTX 50 series card", meaning either an RTX 5090 Ti, or maybe an RTX Titan to sit at the top of the GeForce range.

We're told that the design process and early work on manufacturing this graphics card is already underway.

According to Overclocking.com, five or six reliable sources – all from different companies (and indeed separate countries) – have insisted that this new RTX 5000 GPU is incoming. This follows similar chatter which the French site says it heard back at CES 2026, last month, but disregarded because it seemed too fanciful a notion given the RAM crisis.

Analysis: an RTX 5090 Ti seems very unlikely to say the least

Frankly, I find this rumor is still too much of a reach, certainly the contention that there's going to be an RTX 5090 Ti, which is one of the mentioned possibilities. This just doesn't make any sense.

For one thing, Nvidia has apparently canned any possible RTX 5000 Super refreshes for this year, and indeed any gaming graphics cards at all, if several reports elsewhere on the rumor mill are to be believed.

Why? Because video RAM is scarce – as is all memory these days – and therefore pricier, so consumer GPUs loaded up with VRAM like an RTX 5080 Super or 5070 Super would be a drain on Nvidia's RAM resources. That's memory which would be far better deployed with heavyweight AI GPUs, which are much more profitable – and an RTX 5090 Ti would surely be expected to load up with more VRAM than ever.

Also consider that the RTX 5090 itself is already stupidly pricey at retail, having suffered a painful bout of price inflation since 2026 began. So how much would an RTX 5090 Ti cost? And also bear in mind that the reason the 5090 is so pricey is because of supply limitations; so again, why would Nvidia bring out a Ti version in this climate?

On top of all these reasons is the simple truth that gamers don't really need an RTX 5090 Ti. Enabling the full loadout of cores on the GB202 chip (which powers the 5090) wouldn't be a huge jump in performance (around 10%), especially considering what cost that might come at (as already noted). Really, the RTX 5090 is plenty powerful for any PC gamer, anyway.

If this rumor is true, it will surely be an RTX Titan (which is floated as the other possibility here) or similar heavyweight model aimed at prosumers, not consumers or gamers. And given the VRAM situation, it seems unlikely that Nvidia would even bother taking this tack, as the French site admits – but seemingly, this is the current plan.

Even if we assume this is correct, and Nvidia is indeed exploring a design around such a top-end RTX 5000 board, there's no guarantee it will come to anything — these concepts can be toyed with and then abandoned relatively late in the day.

In summary, then, do not expect an RTX 5090 Ti for later this year – and I'm all too willing to believe the rumors that we won't get any new GeForce gaming GPUs from Nvidia at all in 2026.

• Intel is returning to GPUs to challenge Nvidia’s market leadership directly
• The company plans to produce GPUs internally for tighter manufacturing control
• Eric Demers joins Intel from Qualcomm as a key technical figure in GPU development

Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan has publicly confirmed internal work on graphics hardware remains active, directly addressing questions about whether the company intends to stay involved in that segment.

Speaking during the recent Cisco AI Summit, Tan said upcoming products will be built internally and that Intel’s manufacturing arm will also support production at scale.

When asked if Intel is going to build GPUs, Tan said, “I just hired the chief GPU architect, and he's very good. I'm very delighted he joined me, and it takes some persuasion.”

Hiring decisions point to renewed technical focus

Tan’s comments makes clear Intel is deliberately expanding beyond its traditional CPU focus to challenge Nvidia in the GPU market.

The company does not intend to rely solely on external suppliers for these chips, and it wants tighter control over development and manufacturing.

As part of its efforts to produce GPUs, Intel recently hired Eric Demers, recruited from Qualcomm after more than a decade there.

While Demers is a central technical figure in the renewed graphics effort, broader oversight reportedly lies with data center executive Kevork Kechichian, who joined during a restructuring.

The addition of experienced leadership signals Intel’s seriousness about entering high-performance GPU markets, where Nvidia currently dominates both consumer and AI-focused workloads.

These appointments suggest that the company is trying to rebuild internal capability rather than simply rebrand older designs.

Analysts note that Intel’s approach could influence Nvidia’s strategy, especially as AI tools and accelerators continue to drive demand for specialized graphics hardware.

Intel’s renewed GPU push highlights the stakes in the market for AI and gaming accelerators, areas where Nvidia has maintained a strong lead.

GPUs are now central to both gaming and AI workloads, and Intel’s in-house effort positions it to compete directly in this high-margin segment.

By combining GPU development with internal manufacturing and leveraging its CPU ecosystem, Intel could offer integrated platforms attractive to enterprise and AI-focused customers.

While results are uncertain, Tan’s hiring choices suggest a sustained, deliberate push rather than a short-term experiment.

Investors and competitors are watching closely, as Intel’s entry may pressure Nvidia on pricing, product cycles, and ecosystem dominance.

Although Intel intends to be a long-term player in the GPU market, execution and performance will determine whether these plans alter competitive dynamics or remain a technical demonstration.