In my last column, I described how to control two or more PCs with a single set of input devices using software. While these applications can work over wired Ethernet, they more typically use Wi-Fi and can get tripped up in environments with public Wi-Fi like many offices.

Fortunately, a number of USB-based devices can provide a reliable alternative. Some can also work on devices such as Chromebooks, which prevent installing low-level drivers, and allow you to control a computer before it has gotten past the login screen and the software has loaded. However, a few still require a software installation.

First off, many vendors offer simple keyboard-mouse switches that can instantly switch control among multiple PCs using USB connections. KVM switches can also work; just don’t attach other monitors to the switch if they are connected to other PCs.

The trade-off is that these baseline devices can’t do seamless mouse handoffs across computers. On most switches, you must either press a button on the device itself or a remote. (Some use wired remotes while others use infrared). Some higher-end KVM switches allow assigning a hotkey on a keyboard to switch among PCs being controlled.

Going through a wormhole

As for more specialized hardware, perhaps the company with the broadest range of products for traversing multiple PCs is J5Create, which has trademarked the function as Wormhole in nine products, including two docking stations and two hubs.

But the heart of the lineup are four simple cables with USB-A connectors on each end. They range from the $15 JUC100 to the $80 JUC700 which, like the Stardock’s Multiplicity software, can also press one of the PCs into service as a second display.

Curiously, the lowest-end and highest-end product work only with Windows, but the two middle-tier variants can work with MacOS. Regardless, both computers must be running the software that installs from a volume embedded within the cable. The software supports sharing Clipboard content.

The company’s newest and most novel Wormhole product is the Aero Drop CrossLink, a small USB-A device that comes packaged in a small astronaut figure. Once freed from its plastic space suit, it allows a PC-connected keyboard and mouse to control an iPhone, iPad, or Android device over a Bluetooth connection. Unlike the company’s wired products, though, connections to a Mac or even another PC aren’t supported.

Perfect pairings

The next two products came into the market via Kickstarter campaigns. Asuizo Crossys is a bit like the generic keyboard-mouse switching products, but with a few twists.

First, its cables to connect two computers are permanently attached. Second, like the J5Create products, the device includes software that must be installed on the Mac or PC being connected. The Mac version, though, is a faceless app that requires access to the Mac’s accessibility features.

Finally, the LoopMotion device is the only intelligent switch in the lot that requires no software installation, billing itself as the only “location-aware” KM switch. Simply connect a cable to each of its USB ports (labeled L and R) and start seamlessly controlling one with the keyboard of another.

The device is not without its options, though. Pressing a key combination mounts a drive with an HTML page listing more key combinations for modes optimized for gaming and other tasks as well as one that will keep the PC it’s activated awake.

LoopMotion is one of the few options in the class that works out of the box with Linux. However, Chrome OS is a no-go, leaving mechanical switches as about the only option. Another limitation is that, unlike products that use software, Loopsmart won’t allow integrated laptop touchpads to move the cursor between PCs. However, this isn’t all bad, at least as an option, as it can be helpful to keep the cursor contained for some tasks even when two laptops are bridged.

A controlling interest

If you’re looking for the simplest free option, Microsoft’s Mouse without Borders is still the best choice. Although its initial codes are cumbersome and it is limited to four Windows PCs, the software avoids having to enter IP addresses but still provides some extra useful features such as Clipboard sharing and file transfers. Plus, it comes along for the ride if you're into the PowerToys collection.

Stepping up from there, Synergy and its open-source cousin DeskFlow can also bridge Macs and Linux machines. Meanwhile, Multiplicity has the highest degree of customizability and a unique audio-sharing feature If a network-based solution doesn’t work in your environment.

Synergy and Multiplicity offer enterprise configuration and management support, which is particularly appealing for software that stretches across the network. If that’s not an option in your environment, it’s tough to beat the simplicity of Loopmotion. Go with a solution like Crossys, though, if the application demands Clipboard sharing or you’re bridging laptops and don’t want to attach a separate keyboard or mouse.

Read more: We found the best KVM switch deals you can get right now and the best monitors for a dual-screen setup

• A new report claims that Amazon is buying up more AI GPU racks than it can deploy in data centers
• An analyst links this report to Nvidia's GeForce GPU supply woes, theorizing that there's a connection
• The contention is that Nvidia is deliberately 'channel stuffing' or in other words, pushing an excess of AI GPUs to the detriment of gaming GPU chips

Nvidia's supply issues with its gaming GPUs are seemingly the result of a strategy to get AI giants to stock up on more graphics chips than they can handle, if fresh reports are to be believed.

You can't have failed to notice the stock issues around Nvidia's GeForce GPUs, and the spike in prices that has happened over the past few months, particularly for higher-end graphics cards.

Well, according to the musings of tech pundit and analyst Ed Zitron (via RespawnFirst) — who picked up on a report by Business Insider — the consumer GPU shortage is a direct result of Nvidia pushing AI graphics cards on the likes of Amazon.

Business Insider informs us that Amazon (or rather AWS) is buying more Nvidia GPUs than it can deploy. Apparently, racks of the AI graphics cards are being kept unused in holding warehouses until there's power available at the data centers where they'll be used (electricity capacity, not space, is the issue here).

Amazon is paying out huge sums for these GB300 racks from Nvidia, and according to an internal email that Business Insider got hold of, a new 'Early Rack Receipt' process (buying these GPUs upfront, before they're installed) saw some $5 billion worth of server racks paid for in August 2026. Seemingly $3 billion more are on order every month for the "foreseeable future" going by another email.

We're told one AWS team didn't have a "clear forecasted path" for getting the purchased racks installed — in other words, they're not even sure when these GPUs might be used.

Zitron's argument is based on a key phrase in the Business Insider report, where the author states that the reason for the switch in policy — Amazon only used to pay for racks when they were installed in a data center — is that "Amazon has to compete more for scarce resources as it jockeys with rivals for access to Nvidia GPUs and other AI components."

The conclusion Zitron draws is that this is basically indicating that Nvidia is making Amazon, and others buying up AI GPUs, compete with each other by agreeing to order a whole pile of them there and then — more than they possibly need — otherwise they won't get their allocation (presumably).

Analysis: GPU misery is clear enough to see

In short, these AI GPUs aren't actually needed as such — not by Amazon in this quantity, as per the Business Insider report — but Nvidia is effectively strong-arming the company into buying the chips, or as Zitron puts it, this is "deliberate channel stuffing." Meaning Nvidia is forcing this AI demand artificially to the seeming detriment of GeForce GPUs, with lesser chip supply for those gaming cards causing price inflation and general misery for gamers.

Obviously we need to take this with a good deal of caution — that goes for the initial report from Business Insider, and doubly so with the theorizing that Zitron applies on top of that article.

There's no denying, however, that we have witnessed a frustrating shortage of consumer GPUs, and in particular Nvidia's high-end gaming graphics cards have become painfully thin on the ground — and pricey. The RTX 5090 is either unobtainable, save through third-party marketplace sellers trying to gouge you out of the best part of 10 grand (in the US), or it's hideously expensive to the tune of over £6,000 in the UK, for example.

What's worse is the RTX 5080 is now getting ridiculously pricey too, reaching £1,400 in the UK. And in the US on Newegg, there's now only one model for sale (direct from the retailer) — and it'll set you back $2,000. It's all getting silly, frankly, and with rumors that the RTX 5090 is being discontinued doing the rounds — speculation Nvidia has denied, I should make clear — it's currently a disappointingly gloomy picture for GPUs.

The expectation is that matters are only going to get worse for RAM, SSDs, and GPUs, as next year rolls into town — and that makes all the above theorizing seem a bit more plausible. It's certainly clear that Nvidia's priority is AI GPUs rather than GeForce graphics cards because of the profits involved with AI, but of course, Team Green is a business — so what do we expect? Prioritization is one thing, though, and the levelled accusation of the practice of 'channel stuffing' is entirely another.

• Nvidia's RTX 6060 may not arrive until 2029 a leaker claims
• They note that when there are supply issues (the current RAM shortage), Nvidia tends to drag out the release of lower-end GPUs
• They also believe it's unlikely the RTX 6060 will match the PS6 for frame rates

Nvidia's budget GPU for its next-gen range may not be released for three years yet, if a new rumor about the RTX 6060 turns out to be correct.

Wccftech spotted a post from leaker Kepler on the NeoGAF forums, who chipped in with speculation on Nvidia's graphics cards in a thread about the cost of the PlayStation 6.

Kepler was responding to a comment observing that the PS6 is going to go up against the RTX 6060 when it launches in terms of comparisons to PC gaming, and the leaker said — add seasoning with this as ever — that the "6060 will launch much later (and based on recent trends I doubt it will match PS6)".

In a further post, the leaker added: "When there's a supply shortage Nvidia tends to really drag the release of lower end cards. There's a good chance RTX 6060 comes out in 2029."

This would mean we're looking at an early-to-mid 2028 launch for the RTX 6090, 6080 and 6070, which lines up with more recent rumors. Of course, that's not a foregone conclusion, and Kepler is clearly speculating here.

Recent reports from analysts indicate that the PS6 will likely launch in 2028, though some have argued that Sony's next-gen console could appear late in 2027 (alongside other devices, perhaps).

Analysis: late, as well as short on performance?

Of course, what Kepler contends here is what Nvidia is supposedly planning right now, and just as with the PS6, a lot of the direction that Team Green goes in with its next-gen GPUs will depend on the memory crisis. Graphics cards do, of course, use video RAM (VRAM), and the next generation of GeForce products will be expected to up the ante on that score. (Gamers are already unhappy with Nvidia's current-gen VRAM configurations).

The problem is that there's no shortage of predictions that RAM cost inflation is going to get even worse in 2027, after it has already spiked in a big way through the middle of this year. The theorizing then runs that 2028 is also going to be a difficult year, which lends weight to the argument that the RTX 6060 will indeed be late to the GPU party.

In short, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a 2029 arrival for the RTX 6060 as suggested, which obviously isn't great news for those hoping to score a more wallet-friendly next-gen Nvidia GPU.

It's also interesting to note that Kepler believes the RTX 6060 won't be as powerful as the PS6 for gaming frame rates, but I'd take that claim with even more salt than the rumors around timing.

Gauging hardware capabilities at this stage is obviously a trickier task, but Kepler's assertion isn't an impossibility of course. Note that the current RTX 5060 matches the PS5 Pro's gaming performance (roughly, for rasterization as opposed to ray tracing), so if the RTX 6060 couldn't equal the PS6, that would be a clear disappointment for PC gamers on a budget (particularly if the VRAM loadout again turns out lean).

Having been at Nvidia's RTX Spark event in San Francisco earlier this month, I was lucky enough to get a firsthand walk through of the many things the 'superchip' can do. Since then I've spent almost every waking moment putting the ARM-based RTX Spark through its paces and seeing what makes it so different from other chipsets that have come before.

The RTX Spark is Nvidia’s first System on a Chip (SoC). Combining an 18-core CPU and 5120 Cuda core Blackwell RTX GPU all in one, or a 20-core CPU and 6144-core GPU for its meatier version, it offers an integrated chipset in the vein of Apple’s M series chips. While Apple’s silicon is known for its oomph, that Blackwell RTX GPU means you’ll also get considerable gaming performance here to boot.

How does this translate in terms of raw numbers? It’s certainly got a lot going on under the hood, as the RTX Spark N1X chip I’ve been playing around with squeezes 20 cores into its CPU. While the 2,623 single-core performance I clocked on Geekbench 7.1 falls somewhat short of the 4,288 we got for Apple’s M5 chip, its 21,899 multi-core score massively outstripped the latter’s 17,926. That means that for tasks like content creation, software development and AI, you should be able to expect more oomph in your corner.

So given the potential it promises across agentic AI, creative workflows and gaming, let’s take a look at how it performs across each of those areas in turn.

Hybrid agentic AI

During the launch of Nvidia’s RTX Spark SoC, there was a huge focus on its potential for hybrid agentic AI. Now, cloud-based AI models are undoubtedly pretty powerful but I absolutely have security concerns about uploading my most private data to the cloud and I’m not entirely sure I want to blindly trust the companies behind some of these models.

Using local, open-source models that I can vet myself and that never transmit sensitive data outside of my network feels like a much safer alternative — but not everybody necessarily wants to cut themselves off from the power of frontier models. That’s why Nvidia has introduced a hybrid-system for the RTX Spark instead.

Instead, the hybrid-workflow that the RTX Spark supports allows you to select your choice of local models and ring-fence them for certain parts of an agentic workflow, while outsourcing specific, demanding tasks to cloud frontier models. As a result, users should be able to take a far more granular approach, deciding exactly how much they want to rely on public vs private models.

For people who like to vibe-code complex products or are generating demanding 3D scenes, not being forced to choose between binary security options of a lax, YOLO approach and a full-blown lockdown will likely be a valuable tool.

So now that I’ve spent some hands-on time with the RTX Spark, how has its agentic performance delivered on these promises? To get a broad picture of I ran the MLPerf Client benchmark to simulate data analyst and SWE agentic workflows using the Qwen 3 8B local model, with each run hitting an average duration of 63.7 and 50.8 seconds and processing up to 14,005 and 10,238 tokens respectively.

I also benchmarked some generative image and video workflows using ComfyUI. When testing workflows using Flux2.Dev (NVFP4 and Flux2.Klein 4B Base) NVFP4 models for image generation, it took 46.5 and 16.2 seconds to generate respectively, while the LTX 2.5 (Distilled) NVFP4 model took 88 seconds. That’s broadly in line with what Nvidia has been promising and shows how rapidly the RTX Spark can generate media using local models.

Raw data will only tell you so much though. That’s why I spent days training my own AI agent using Hermes and the Qwen3.8 27B open-source local model to see what the RTX Spark could do.

Certainly, it seems to have absolutely ripped through some tasks on its Extra High setting. Feeding it some analytics data in CSV form, I asked it to tidy up the spreadsheet, analyze the data and present its key findings and after 12 minutes of pondering and tweaking, it happily spat out a pivot table and some observations on the data. While I wasn’t hugely surprised by any of its conclusions, I’ve spent months poring through this data and the fact it could identify the most essential points without any of my secure information leaving the laptop was pretty impressive.

Some experiments I conducted involved a little more patience and tweaking of the agent’s workflow to get the best results though. The first time I asked my Hermes agent to connect to my online email client and provide a digest of the day’s emails, it spent 75 minutes trying various methods to exchange tokens with Outlook’s online client, before crashing unexpectedly. However, the second time I played a slightly more active role, providing it feedback when I felt it was drifting or had come up against hurdles and it successfully set up the brief in 70 minutes.

So with some patience and judicious prompting, you can definitely get some good results utilizing a local model. Additionally, you don’t have to go through this full process every time — ask Hermes to save something as a skill and it will automate this process in future or even schedule it as a recurring Cron Job. You can even ask it to work out ways to improve the efficiency of existing skills, meaning it should be easier to minimize the run time and resources they require in future.

Creative workflows

You’d be forgiven for thinking this means the RTX Spark laptops are predominantly focused on AI tools. But that couldn’t be further from the case: while a lot of the press surrounding the chip has been on its agentic AI tools, this really isn’t the sole string to its bow.

As you can tell from the fact that the RTX Spark is used in the latest Asus ProArt P16, creative work is a big focus for the new SoC. Even if you’re not interested in the power it offers for generative AI, the sheer number of RTX-compatible creative apps out there, whether that’s Blender, Adobe Creative Suite, Canva or Unity shows how many creative giants are throwing their weight behind the new SoC.

Eager to test how well the RTX Spark handles creative work, I used Puget Bench to automate a range of tasks in Photoshop and Premiere Pro. PugetBench’s standard Photoshop workflow took 10.83 minutes and netted a score of 11,801, while its standard Premiere Pro pipeline took 8.12 minutes and achieved a score of 76,234, putting it firmly in the range of a true creative workstation. That means it sits in the rough region of Apple’s M5 chip, which scored 13,755 and 69,887 respectively, besting it on complicated video work but not quite equaling it for still imagery.

For those who use generative AI in their work, I also benchmarked some generative image and video workflows using ComfyUI. When testing workflows using Flux2.Dev (NVFP4 and Flux2.Klein 4B Base) NVFP4 models for image generation, it took 46.5 and 16.2 seconds to generate respectively, while the LTX 2.5 (Distilled) NVFP4 model took 88 seconds. That’s broadly in line with what Nvidia has been promising and shows how rapidly the RTX Spark can generate media using local models.

While I’m neither an aspiring cinematographer or a budding Blender artist, I’ve spent decades tinkering with static images so I dug out an old 4K, 300dpi Photoshop file. It was already pretty huge as it featured lots of hi-res layers, clipping masks and adjustment layers but I tripled the number of layers for good measure and added a bunch of filters and effects. Processing time remained less than a second and even halving the image size only took about five, which is pretty impressive given the sheer number of layers and groups I was working with.

And the RTX Spark should even be able to speed up these applications’ built-in AI tools, thanks to the recently announced collaboration between Nvidia and Adobe. Optimizing the apps to take full advantage of the chip’s GPU, Adobe promises that RTX Spark laptops offer 2x AI processing, editing, color and effects. That’s a real advantage for anyone that uses these AI tools as part of their workflow.

Gaming performance

Given Nvidia’s history, gaming is naturally also a big focus for the RTX Spark chipset. As most games run on x86 architecture, SoCs haven’t been the most natural home for gaming in the past. However, Nvidia’s stature in this space means plenty of developers launched RTX Spark native versions of their games when the chip was launched on October 16, including Cyberpunk 2077, Doom: The Dark Ages, and 007 First Light — while the Call of Duty series is due to land in 2027. And for those that aren’t yet compatible, Prism emulation will mean you’ll be able to run many titles with only a slight impact on your CPU performance.

When it comes to gaming performance, the RTX Spark is certainly no slouch. It netted a 3DMark Port Royal score of 8,133, Steel Nomad score of 2,846 and a Speed Way score of 2,872. That’s a touch below Asus Zephyrus G14 with Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti’s respective 10,119, 3,488 and 4,031 scores. But it’s considerably better performance than you’d get out of most laptops with an integrated GPU such as the pre-RTX-Spark Dell XPS 16, which secured values of 3,888, 1,488, and 916.

But while these simulated benchmarks are helpful for getting a broad view of gaming performance, in-game benchmarks are the best way of gaining real insight into how actual titles perform. While testing the RTX Spark, Cyberpunk 2077 delivered a stable 30.16fps at 1080p on Raytracing: Ultra settings and Doom: The Dark Ages averaged out at 48.58fps at 1080p — very similar to the 32.33fps and 55.63fps we got out of the Asus TUF Gaming A14 with Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060.

Nothing compares to actually trying out games first hand though, so I fired up a few of my favorites and tried them out. Cyberpunk 2077 honestly felt pretty playable even using the above Raytracing Ultra setting and once I’d switched down to Ray-tracing Medium, it ran at a wonderfully fluid 60fps.

Meanwhile, running Gears of War: E-Day at Ultra settings felt as smooth as tahini drizzled over a marble countertop. As I crunched through waves of the Horde, there wasn’t any noticeable slowdown even at Ultra settings, with the action never dipping below a seriously fluid 115fps. So it might not match the RTX 5090 for sheer power but anyone barring elite gamers will find a lot to like here still.

So even though it’s naturally not at the level of dedicated gaming laptops like the MSI Vector A18 HX A9W, I’m still pretty impressed with gaming on the RTX Spark chip. And that only becomes more pronounced when you compare it to similar lightweight SoC systems. While the MacBook Pro M5 is similarly impressive in terms of creative performance, it was barely able to scrap 11.5fps in Cyberpunk 2077 on Raytracing: Ultra settings.

As a result, if you’re looking for a chipset that will give you not just great performance in one specific task but great performance across everything you do, the RTX Spark has proven it will be a solid choice.

• Chinese chipmaker CXMT is predicted to be ramping up RAM production
• It could double memory production by 2028, we're told
• This extra RAM is likely to service the domestic market, though, and meanwhile, Dell's CEO is warning that the memory crisis is likely to persist to 2030

A major Chinese chipmaker has plans to expand its DRAM production in a big way over the next couple of years, but this won't be a silver bullet for wider RAM problems, and Dell's CEO is warning on the memory crisis getting worse, too.

First, the news on the Chinese company CXMT, which was flagged by P Equity Research on X (via Wccftech) in a post that highlights forecasts from Counterpoint Research and TrendForce.

According to those research firms, CXMT is set to expand its DRAM wafer production from around 320,000 units this year, to 420,000 units over the course of 2027.

That translates to a growth of just over 30% in a year, and the further prediction is that in 2028, production capacity might hit 500,000 to 600,000, so given that most optimistic scenario, it would nearly double compared to this year.

There's some excitement on that point because while others are focusing on HBM, or high-end RAM for the AI industry, this is an expansion of traditional RAM production, meaning the kind that'll go in a PC as opposed to a data center server.

However, before we start mulling the prospect of RAM supply being shored up to some extent, there are obvious caveats to consider here – including a new warning from Dell's CEO as mentioned at the outset.

Analysis: domestic relief – and more pessimism from Dell

The problem with CXMT is that even if the predicted near-doubling of RAM production does happen in 2028 as these analysts are theorizing, where is this memory going to end up?

Most likely it'll serve the domestic market in China, and the chances of it making any kind of a meaningful difference to the balance of RAM supply outside of Asia are minimal. China's own memory requirements are substantial, and as we've discussed before, the government is likely to exert its influence in terms of keeping local demand fulfilled rather than selling abroad.

And yes, while it's true that CXMT's RAM is being used by some manufacturers in the west already, it's on a very limited basis currently – and it isn't like it's some kind of a bargain, either. Indeed, the cost of CXMT's memory is reportedly much the same as what you'll pay if buying from Samsung.

Meanwhile, as Wccftech also picked up, the CEO of Dell, Michael Dell, added his voice to the growing consensus that the memory shortage will get worse next year, and that these RAM woes are going to be prolonged for quite some time.

Dell told the Wall Street Journal that memory supply problems could keep on making us miserable for up to four years, meaning until 2030. Again, this echoes some of the many negative calls on the RAM crisis which have been heard in the past few months.

CXMT expanding its RAM production in a beefy way certainly won't hurt, but it's unlikely to help the average consumer outside of China.

Meanwhile, as RAM continues to get pricier (somehow, even though the cost was already through the roof), it's worth considering workarounds to get more from your gaming PC.

It's been a theory for quite some time now that Nvidia is — what's the polite way to put this? — let's say deprioritizing PC gamers, perhaps, or more specifically, its gaming graphics cards. But this week has added more evidence to the collective weight that GeForce GPUs are increasingly at risk of being sidelined further by Team Green.

I'm talking first about the story that emerged a few days ago, where a leaker claimed Nvidia is diverting all GB202 (Blackwell) chips to make AI (RTX Pro) graphics cards. That's the graphics processor used in the RTX 5090, but apparently not anymore; it's for AI boards only now, we're told.

That makes some sense as the RTX 5090 is already disappearing from shelves, certainly in the US, where you can't buy one for less than the best part of 10 grand (from gouging third-party sellers, with no major retailers actually having stock anymore). So arguably this effective discontinuation of the RTX 5090 is already happening.

On top of that, the latest developments are that Micro Center is reportedly listing the Blackwell flagship as 'not carried', and Nvidia itself has removed all mention of the RTX 5090 from its own GPU marketplace (though it is still mentioned elsewhere on the site). Search for the RTX 5090 on that marketplace, and you won't find it any longer — the highest-end graphics card listed is now the RTX 5080 (hat tip to Wccftech for spotting this being flagged up on Reddit).

Aside from an actual announcement from Nvidia (which probably wouldn't ever happen anyway), that seems like about as clear an indication you can get that the RTX 5090 has been shoved out of the exit door, never to return, because Nvidia needs those GB202 chips where they are most profitable. RTX Pro GPUs offer a much heftier premium that Team Green can heap on top.

A new Blackwell flagship?

So, what does this mean? For starters, if it is true that the RTX 5090 has been scrapped, the RTX 5080 becomes the flagship Nvidia GeForce GPU. Once the existing stock of RTX 5090s has been depleted, this could mean the price of the RTX 5080 is inflated. When I say inflated, I mean jacked up even more, because it has already seen some nasty price hikes. Currently, the RTX 5080 is at around $1,800 in the US on Newegg, or £1,450 on Overclockers in the UK – and those are the lowest prices; it goes up from there. It's a very similar story in many other regions.

This is clearly a concern for gamers as you can see from the Reddit thread I pointed out above, with comments such as: "If you want a 5080 better buy one while you can still afford one." Really, it's debatable if the card is anything like 'affordable' relative to its graphical frame rate muscle even now.

Here's where another rumor comes into play. Elsewhere on the grapevine, there's talk that Nvidia may actually release the RTX 5080 Super variant which has long been speculated about. This would be a 24GB graphics card, and it'd essentially replace the discontinued RTX 5090 – with the theory being that Nvidia would also ditch the vanilla RTX 5080 (16GB). This would leave the rumored RTX 5080 Super as the sole high-end GeForce graphics card, quite some distance above the RTX 5070 Ti.

If that happens, imagine the pricing concerns here – what MSRP would Nvidia attach to the RTX 5080 Super? And then consider the cost inflation that will be added when you take into account that this card will also be sought after for AI usage (as seen with the RTX 5090).

If an RTX 5080 Super is indeed inbound for early 2027, that would also suggest that the next-gen RTX 6000 family is further away than some rumors believe – as this Super version would be a stopgap GPU to keep the Blackwell range ticking over. The RAM crisis may have a fair bit to do with this strategy also, given that most predictions foresee it getting worse next year (and the misery continuing into 2028, and maybe beyond). Of course, launching a new GeForce range into such memory headwinds wouldn't be easy.

Software focus and streaming dreams

All in all, it feels to me like there's a stream of subtle – and not so subtle – hints and rumors that Nvidia is very much slowing down the development of gaming GPUs (while not wanting to give that impression, naturally). The other part of the equation here is the increased focus on the software side, of course, rather than the hardware. DLSS 5 is out and Nvidia is already pushing hard with honing and refining that neural rendering tech, and something else that happened earlier this week was that Team Green highlighted some big leaps in performance here. Pretty huge strides forward, in fact.

Of course, you could argue that all the development resources being ploughed into DLSS – including frame generation, which got a hefty boost alongside DLSS 5 – shows Nvidia isn't abandoning gaming GPUs for PC gamers. And I concede that's true to an extent, but there is very much a vibe of a major slowdown leading towards the feared deprioritization of GeForce GPUs – and there's another angle to consider here too: cloud gaming.

Don't forget that GeForce Now also benefits from DLSS. Just this week, Nvidia added DLSS 4.5 override controls to the streaming service to help push up frame rates – those on the RTX 5080 (Ultimate) plan can use Dynamic Multi Frame Generation of up to 4x now. Ray Reconstruction for bolstering ray-traced visuals is available, too, among other options.

Would Nvidia rather have you subscribed to its cloud gaming service, making monthly payments, than buying a GeForce GPU for a one-off sum? It seems an obvious direction for the company to be heading in, and with increasing warning signs around Team Green's gaming GPUs, I'm becoming more convinced that this is where Nvidia's priorities are shifting for the future of PC gaming.

This isn't to say GeForce graphics cards are definitely on their way out, or that an RTX 6000 line-up won't happen – it's already well underway after all – but beyond the next generation, I'm increasingly dubious about where GeForce GPUs might fit into the big PC gaming picture. Between AI demand and cloud gaming (plus increasingly faster internet connections), there's a squeeze underway that could prove painful for the GeForce line-up – and the ongoing RAM crisis is hardly helping, either.

• Biomemory has unveiled DNA Shield, designed to provide offline, airgapped, secure storage of critical digital assets in synthetic DNA
• The company foresees challenges to the resilience those assets (also known as “cold data”) and has hinted at the introduction of what it calls Molecular IT
• Biomemory is a co-chair of the DNA Data Storage Alliance

Commercial DNA data storage company Biomemory has unveiled DNA Shield, a purpose-built synthetic DNA repository service that ensures critical digital assets remain untouched by cyber criminals and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.

So-called cold data comprises 60% of all data in the world, and refers to information that cannot be altered. This might be passwords and biometrics or it could be incontrovertible data, facts, finances, and other material that serves as a record.

DNA Shield stores data in DNA, using an engineered encoding scheme that ensures it is biosecure – it’s a physical molecule that stores information long-term without power. Pilot slots have opened, ahead of a full service expected in 2027.

A shield of DNA

Biomemory has launched DNA Shield off the back of its acquisition of Boston-based DNA storage pioneer Catalog Technologies in March 2026, and aims to provide organizations with DNA storage of data.

Data could be biometric, it could be cryptographic keys, or it could be accounts. It might even be intellectual property, blueprints, unique or proprietary knowledge. Encrypting the data into synthetic DNA and storing as a medium that a million times denser than magnetic storage, offline and airgapped, is arguably the most secure storage available, potentially with a 150-year lifespan.

"DNA Shield is the moment Biomemory moves from proving a science to delivering a commercial product," notes Laurent Guengant, CEO of Biomemory. "Organizations need a way to hold their most critical digital assets, cryptographic keys, core intellectual property, regulated records, and long-term institutional memory, somewhere no single vendor, cloud, or system can reach, and to prove it still works over time.”

The molecular IT platform

Availability of the DNA Shield service is currently limited to a few pilots, running from October 15 2026 through to mid 2027. Biomemory tells us that a full service will proceed after that point, and its launch makes them the first company to launch a molecular IT product.

Vincent Franceschini, Vice President of Product Management at Biomemory and co-chair of the DNA Data Storage Alliance, said, "DNA Shield is built on the same molecular platform we have spent years industrializing, but it is the first time we are asking a customer to rely on it operationally rather than as a research demonstration. Getting that right, end to end, from encoding to authorized recovery, is what makes us the first company bringing Molecular IT to market."

Organizations interested in DNA Shield will be paying a subscription that starts at €10,000/month, and early access applications are open directly via Biomemory.

• Nvidia has considerably improved the AI model for DLSS 5
• This means the tech now offers up to 40% faster frame rates
• Team Green has also improved frame generation, and is bringing DLSS 5 to two new games: Hogwarts Legacy and Where Winds Meet

If you were wondering how soon Nvidia might start ramping up the performance of DLSS 5, well the answer is that it just happened.

Team Green's neural-rendering tech, which officially debuted in NBA 2K27, has only been out for just over a month, but Nvidia is claiming that it has doubled the performance of the AI that drives DLSS 5.

When it was first previewed in March 2026, DLSS 5 needed a pair of RTX 5090 GPUs to run, with the company improving the performance of the AI model by 5x for the release of the tech in NBA 2K27. With this latest update, it's now 10x more performant than that baseline.

Nvidia also made it clear that it has reduced the video memory (VRAM) usage of the tech considerably, noting that: "The DLSS 5 October update shrinks the [AI model] footprint by 24% to roughly 118 million parameters while reducing 4K VRAM usage by 20%. The result is half the GPU overhead of the September [launch] version while maintaining comparable visual fidelity."

Based on Nvidia's testing in NBA 2K27, that translates to boosts in frame rates in the order of 30% to 40%. Check out the video clip below to see the gains in the basketball game.

This new DLSS 5 model launches on October 16, with availability for RTX 5000 GPUs, RTX Spark laptops and the GeForce Now streaming service.

Nvidia also announced that DLSS 5 is being introduced for Hogwarts Legacy on November 5, and also Where Winds Meet in the "near future", although we aren't given a specific launch date in the latter case.

Finally, away from DLSS 5, Nvidia announced that it's bringing in a new performance mode for frame generation, speeding up the tech considerably. The company explains that this benefits from a "faster and lighter algorithm" that boosts frame rates even further, and that it'll offer up to 35% better frame rates with an RTX 5060.

This performance mode is called 'Preset C' in the Nvidia app's frame-generation override.

DLSS 5 is also coming to RTX Remix on October 23, meaning old games can get a graphical makeover with added neural-rendering goodness. That only makes sense. given that gamers have been fudging support (in various ways) with classic PC games anyway.

Analysis: a laudable step forward — but gamers want more

It's remarkable to see DLSS 5 performance being boosted so quickly, although Nvidia needed to act in this regard. One of the main criticisms of this tech has been that the performance hit is too hefty, and it requires a powerful RTX 5000 GPU to run smoothly enough — at a time when the prices of such graphics cards are getting rapidly more expensive.

That said, an increasing number of gamers seem to be accepting that DLSS 5 is worth the cost to the frame rate for the visual uplift. Those folks will doubtless be pleased with Nvidia's progress here, and likely wouldn't disagree with Team Green's assertion in its blog post that 2026 has been a "year of relentless DLSS innovation."

Of course, there are still skeptics who'd rather Nvidia didn't bring AI into play in this way with DLSS. And it's also true that these early optimizations are where the larger gains will be carved out, and as the AI model is further refined, performance improvements are likely to become a lot more modest.

There are also gamers out there who are asking whether, now that the AI model is much improved, this going to usher in wider support for Nvidia's older graphics cards? As this Redditor put it: "Great so could we get official support on the [RTX] 40 series now since the new model is so efficient?"

It's a good question, given that Nvidia has promised that after tuning RTX 5000 performance it's going to work on bringing support to the last-gen RTX 4000 range. I'm guessing this won't happen until early next year, though.

The other work on DLSS frame generation is obviously welcome, too, albeit the new 'Preset C' option has attracted some criticism for causing a bit more glitching and artifacts while boosting frame rates by a decent amount. Not everyone is seeing this, mind, and how obvious it is may be somewhat subjective going by reports (and it could obviously depend on the specific game, too).

At any rate, this preset should be useful for laptop gamers looking to further bolster frame rates with relatively modest Nvidia GPUs — and indeed, it's likely tied into the release of RTX Spark laptops to help their gaming chops.

• Intel's CEO has said that AI hardware will be in short supply for the next 2 to 3 years
• Of course, this refers to the ongoing memory crisis, and consumers will get shorter shrift than AI players
• A new report from Barclays also shows that contract pricing for RAM has risen 24% over the past quarter for DDR4 (and 20% for DDR5)

Need more fuel to stoke the idea that the RAM crisis is here to stay? Doubtless you don't, but sadly we've had a couple more indications that the memory shortage will last for a depressingly long time, with Intel's CEO the latest to weigh in.

Wccftech reports that Intel's Lip-Bu Tan was speaking in Singapore at the Asia Future Forward event, a conference organized by DBS Bank, where the CEO discussed his thoughts regarding trends with AI – including the amount of memory it's eating up.

As flagged by Theresa Perrin on X, Tan observed that "AI hardware will stay in short supply for the next 2 to 3 years" — primarily referring to memory — and that this was "driven by persistent constraints in the underlying tech supply chain."

While the CEO is talking directly about RAM (as well as GPUs, and to an extent CPUs) used in data centers for AI applications, the fact that the AI industry is going to be short on supply for perhaps the next three years means that consumer RAM is going to be even thinner on the ground. It's no secret that the greater profits to be had by catering to the AI industry mean that this memory is the priority for chip makers.

Wccftech also noticed another post on X, from 456X, highlighting a new report from Barclays that shows contract pricing (from chip makers) for DDR4 RAM has risen 24% over the last three months, and that DDR5 has gone up 20%.

Barclays further observed that one of the big memory chip makers, Micron, will see its supply levels of RAM remain constrained through 2028. In other words, we can expect that memory supply is going to keep on being a major problem for the next two years, with 'through' 2028 meaning that this year is included in the gloomy prediction.

Analysis: yet more doom nuggets — and then there's the rise of the robots

The reported rises in the contract price of RAM according to Barclays match what we've seen at retail over the past few months, with some notable jumps in the price of DDR5 memory (which in Germany has reached a ridiculous level of 544% up on the price it was before the RAM crisis began last July).

What Barclays, and Intel's CEO, are now telling us is that this kind of pain is likely to continue, and that RAM supply will continue to be frustratingly short until 2029. Unfortunately these kinds of forecasts are becoming more commonplace, with pretty much everyone's view appearing to align with the idea of the RAM crisis hanging around until the end of the decade.

At the very least, we can expect 2027 to be a repeat of this year — meaning more memory prices hikes, and other components besides, such as GPUs — with 2028 likely to follow in a similar vein. Indeed, Micron has said as much itself, while letting us know that robots (or 'physical AI') will be eating up a lot of RAM supply in the future.

• A PC maker in the US says 'retail GPU pricing is expected to climb significantly'
• A further rumor suggests AMD just put up the cost of VRAM, which will affect the prices of graphics cards
• Rounding off a trio of fresh rumors is a claim that Nvidia has discontinued the RTX 5090

There have been a few developments in the GPU world over the weekend — and none of them bode well for the prices of graphics cards down the line.

For starters, Wccftech reports that according to the Board Channels — a reliable enough forum for chatter from the supply chain over in China — AMD has increased the cost of the GDDR6 video RAM it sells to board-making partners. This means that those graphics card makers will inevitably pass that cost on to consumers — if this rumor is accurate of course.

Bench Life further observes that more expensive VRAM isn't the only upward pricing pressure here, and that the cost of other graphics card components — including the main circuit board itself — is also rising.

Secondly, as Wccftech also noticed, we have a custom PC maker in the US, StinceBuilt, informing us on X that it is "starting to see increasing supply constraints on graphics cards" and that, "Retail GPU pricing is expected to climb significantly, and these elevated prices could stick around for quite some time."

Finally, VideoCardz highlighted another post on X from regular leaker MegaSizeGPU, who claims Nvidia will not allocate any more GB202 (Blackwell) chips to make the RTX 5090, and that all this silicon is going to be used in RTX Pro (AI) graphics cards.

In theory, that means it's the end of the line for the flagship RTX 5090, with its replacement (the RTX 6090 in theory) still quite some way off in the distance (a more recent rumor indicates that it's probably due to land in 2028).

Analysis: a cacophony of warning bells

Of all those sentiments, the last one needs the most seasoning, although it's believable enough that Nvidia is essentially canning the RTX 5090. By that I mean that if this is true, I don't think this will be an official (announced) discontinuation, but the way it'll play out is that Nvidia will allocate so few chips for the GeForce flagship that stock will effectively dwindle to next to nothing.

Arguably we're already seeing some evidence of this, certainly in the US where at Newegg, for example, you can't buy an RTX 5090 directly from the retailer, but only from third-party sellers (often in Asia). And the cost of the graphics card is tipping up towards $9,000, such is its scarcity — and you'll pay from £6,000 upwards in the UK, although at least stock is available to buy directly from retailers in that country. Still, I wonder how long that will last; and the idea of Nvidia pulling the plug on the RTX 5090 in a stealthy behind-the-scenes manner certainly feels like it's possible.

Meanwhile, the suggestion of AMD's Radeon GPU price rises backs up similar recent rumors, and the warning from the PC maker in the US that price tags are set to 'climb significantly' is another ominous addition to the warning bells that have been sounded of late.

I'm still very much of the opinion that it's a good idea to buy sooner rather than later, even though GPUs are already overpriced, because I fear that the situation could get substantially worse in 2027, as the grapevine indicates.

The key question is how long a recovery from these pricing pressures might take in the case of GPUs. Again, I have a suspicion that it might take a lot longer than we might hope.

• IDC's latest figures show that PC shipments are down 20% year-on-year
• TrendForce predicts that next year is going to see further drops in PC sales and possible price hikes, which aligns with IDC's thinking
• If you're looking for a laptop, it might be a good idea to pull the trigger sooner rather than later – maybe during Black Friday

PC shipments have plunged dramatically, with analyst firms predicting that the sales of computers and laptops are set to slump next year as well.

PC Gamer noticed that IDC Research has a new report for Q3 of 2026 showing that global PC shipments are down 20.1% compared to the same quarter last year, dropping from 78.5 million units to 62.7 million.

The reason why is obvious: it's due to the RAM crisis and rising prices across a range of PC components (not just memory).

Another analyst firm, TrendForce, also produced a report (flagged by Wccftech) observing that the rising cost of those components threatens to weaken the demand for notebooks in 2027.

TrendForce claims that: "Global notebook shipments are currently projected to decline by a low-single-digit percentage in 2027."

However, the firm cautions that if RAM and CPU prices stay high (which seems almost inevitable), notebook makers "may be forced to pass more of these costs on to consumers", with high retail prices meaning fewer consumers buy new laptops – potentially pushing the drop in notebook sales to high single digits.

So, we could be looking at a near 10% drop in laptop sales next year, on top of an already gloomy picture and flagging sales for PCs as seen currently.

Analysis: act now or dig in for a lengthy wait

Both IDC and TrendForce observe that part of the problem for 2026 is that those looking at buying a new laptop purchased earlier in the year – due to the (very real) fear of price hikes coming in – meaning there are fewer sales now than there would normally have been. This is why there was a much sharper fall in Q3 compared to IDC's report for Q2 (although PC shipments were still down 3.8% year-on-year in that previous quarter).

Laptop makers are also running thin on components they purchased at lower prices (in anticipation of hikes, just like consumers), and so they are going to face worsening pressures on their profits margins due to rising RAM, storage and CPU costs. (TrendForce doesn't mention GPUs, but these will be a factor for some notebooks, notably gaming laptops, too). If they don't raise prices, laptop manufacturers will be forced to cut corners with specs.

TrendForce pulls out an interesting stat on the current state of play with the cost of building a laptop these days, namely that in a typical mid-to-upper-range ($900) notebook, 68% of the bill of materials (cost of the raw components) is taken up by the CPU, RAM and SSD. In other words, those core components now comprise two-thirds of the cost of the laptop.

IDC also predicts gloom for next year, or certainly the first half of 2027 anyway, noting that: "[PC] prices will remain elevated. With macro conditions worsening, the risk is that the outlook for the next few quarters gets worse before it gets better."

The only brighter spot here is that IDC says that with retailers worrying about "carrying too much inventory into a market where high prices are suppressing demand", we may see "promotions and some short-term relief for consumers" – meaning some possibly tempting Black Friday deals. Although the analyst firm makes it clear that pricing won't be "anywhere near what it was a year ago."

There will likely be some bargains to be had – we've seen some recently with Prime Day, and elsewhere for that matter – and if you are in the market for a laptop, it's looking like the smart move is to act on a decent deal if you see one for the type of notebook you're after.

Almost every prediction about the RAM crisis these days is negative, with a steadily growing weight of pessimistic sentiment, so unless a lot of analysts and industry pundits or insiders have got things very wrong, it's not a good idea to be waiting until next year to buy new hardware. Grab it now or hold out for the longer-term seems to be the right approach, certainly for laptops or PCs, and I'd say graphics cards, too.

Amazon Prime Day is in full swing and while there are plenty of tempting deals to be had for all sorts of tech in general, the computing component side of the big sale is a depressingly barren place.

• Browse the full Amazon Prime Day sale

When it comes to the core components of a PC which have been hit hardest by the memory crisis – RAM sticks, SSDs, and GPUs – the deals which Amazon is offering may look like sizeable discounts on the face of it, but they aren't when you consider the pricing which these products were available at last year.

A case in point: the Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB SSD is currently half price at $335 (down from $680) at Amazon US, but a year ago, it was $165 in the Prime Day sale. So, in fact, this year you are paying twice as much as in 2025, which doesn't feel great.

That said, in the overall SSD landscape, this is now a decent price, which just shows how bad the RAM crisis has made everything.

Of course, the pricing of RAM itself is particularly painful. For example, there's a 64GB RAM kit (2 x 32GB modules) from Crucial on sale with 7% off at Amazon UK, but it's £690 after that discount. A year ago, that same kit was £170. Ouch.

A more commonplace 32GB kit (2 x 16GB) from Crucial is now on offer at Amazon UK with a 22% discount, bringing it down to £400 – while a year ago it was £108.

Let that sink in for a moment: it's an effective quadrupling of the prices in both these RAM examples.

As for GPUs, the Asus Prime RX 9070 XT Gaming graphics card has a 23% discount on Amazon US, reducing it to $829. Yet in the Prime Day sale a year ago, this was at $690 (and it actually dropped to $649 for the holiday season on Amazon, so it's now close to 30% pricier than that when it's on sale).

What a difference a year makes, and sadly a very negative difference, but while it's undeniably bleak out there, thankfully there are a few deals worth considering for Prime Day components in the US and UK.

I'll list them below, and they include what might be the best deals you'll get on a mid-range and a higher-end GPU for possibly quite a long time (depending on how the RAM crisis continues to affect video memory, and the latest hints aren't good).

Today's best Prime Day PC component deals in the US

More Prime Day deals in the US

• Amazon Devices: Fire Sticks & Echo from $18
• Amazon Haul: viral gadgets, tech & appliances from $1.36
• Apple: MacBooks, AirPods & AirTags from $28
• Cheap TVs: smart TVs from $69.99
• Headphones: 50% off Beats, Bose & Samsung
• Laptops: Apple, HP & Dell from $199
• Mattresses: Sealy, Serta & more from $89
• Smartwatches: up to 36% off Garmin & Apple
• Vacuums: Dyson, Shark & Bissell from $49

Today's best Prime Day PC component deals in the UK

More Prime Day deals in the UK

• Amazon Prime: get a 30-day free trial
• Amazon Devices: up to 67% off Fire, Ring & Blink
• Amazon Haul: extra 15% off for Prime members
• Appliances: up to 40% off Ninja & De'Longhi
• Beauty: up to 60% off Philips & Oral-B
• Essentials: cleaning & groceries from £2
• Fashion: up to 50% off
• Gaming: record-low Nintendo Switch 2
• Headphones: up to 50% off Anker & Sony
• Laptops: up to £800 off Microsoft & Asus
• Tablets: up to 50% off Fire tablets
• TVs: from £129.99
• Vacuums: up to 50% off Shark & Dyson
• Wearables: Samsung & Oura from £31

• AMD's CEO said that the company plans to 'substantially increase' its chip supply in 2027
• Sadly this is chips for AI and data center usage, not consumer products
• If anything this is bad news for Radeon GPUs and Ryzen CPUs, as it's AMD underlining its commitment to the AI sphere

AMD's CEO has assured us that the company is going to increase chip production in 2027, but while that might sound great on the face of it, this isn't good news for consumers.

That's because CEO Lisa Su was talking about making chips for AI usage in data centers, not consumer processors or graphics cards.

Yahoo Finance reports that AMD has been expanding its chip production for AI and that Su said: "We've been able to increase our supply as we've gone through 2026, and we're going to substantially increase our supply in 2027."

This was a comment made to the press during a visit to Taiwan, and the chief executive made it clear that part of the reason for her trip – which included a visit to Foxconn and TSMC – was to make sure AMD's supply of CPU and GPU production could be increased to meet greater AI demand.

The next stop on the CEO's trip is South Korea, where Su will look to shore up memory chip supplies and is set to meet with Samsung and SK Hynix.

On the broader topic of how AI is impacting us all, Su said that it could be "incredibly good for the world" while at the same time cautioning on the risks and the need to cooperate on the safety of this technology.

Analysis: consumers in the cold

There's no mention of consumer products – Radeon GPUs and Ryzen CPUs – here, and the fact that AMD is clearly focused on beefing up AI supply is bad news for the typical PC owner. If anything it might mean that next year is an even leaner time for chip supply for consumer products, especially given all the negative chatter there's been of late talking about memory chip supply in particular looking like it'll considerably worsen next year.

Of course, none of this is surprising – there's a lot more profit in AI accelerators (graphics cards), of course, and as a business, Team Red can hardly afford to ignore that. But it does underline AMD's commitments, and PC owners on Reddit have voiced their displeasure in no uncertain terms.

As one Redditor put it: "Yeah I have a feeling the consumer market will end up being 'whatever the data centers consider obsolete' soon. We might have to contend with buying used data center CPUs and GPUs soon."

Okay, so that's going a bit far. And yes, others are quick to note that you can't just stick an old data center GPU in a PC and run it – there are issues around the implementation and cooling, display output (which isn't needed for a data center card), and the fact that many of these AI GPUs simply can't run games at all. But the point remains: consumers are indeed getting the short end of the stick due to the AI boom, and that's been the case since the invention of the likes of ChatGPT and other LLMs.

It doesn't sound like the situation is going to get any better next year, and that's just another worry to throw on the towering pile of memory price concerns that has been steadily growing in height as this year progresses.

• A source at a major Chinese chip maker says the firm "expects the global memory shortage will last for at least another three years"
• On top of that, analyst firm TrendForce is suggesting "meaningful price increases" are coming for RAM in the final quarter of 2026
• The cloud giants in the US are providing the increased demand that's pushing up Q4 pricing

A source at one of the big Chinese memory chip makers has warned that the firm anticipates the RAM shortage will last through until the end of the decade — and we've heard some gloomy nearer-term news from TrendForce, too.

TweakTown highlighted a post from Jukan on X (who works at analyst firm Citrini Research), which in turn pointed to a report from The Wire China.

This cites an employee at YMTC in China who said that the company "expects the global memory shortage will last for at least another three years". YMTC has just pushed up pricing for its chips, the source says — to no one's surprise — and is shifting its production towards chips with a higher profit margin.

Jukan ties this specifically to NAND production — for SSDs — but the quoted comment refers more broadly to the memory crisis (meaning RAM sticks as well). As TweakTown points out, though, the purported impact on SSDs is particularly relevant seeing as YMTC is now the third biggest global NAND chip supplier behind only Samsung and SK Hynix.

Other predictions, such as from analyst firm TrendForce, forecast NAND supply coming back into balance later in 2027, but that notion is very much being questioned here.

Speaking of TrendForce, Jukan also flagged a new report from the company that labels DRAM supply as 'very tight', noting that: "Suppliers' early-stage discussions on 4Q26 contract pricing point to meaningful price increases, suggesting strengthening demand momentum, particularly from US CSPs."

In other words, the big cloud service providers (CSPs) are the main force behind the increased demand that's pushing fourth-quarter RAM pricing to meaningful price hikes.

Analysis: negative chatter continues to align

'Meaningful' price rises for RAM sounds ominous, mainly because memory pricing has already risen painfully over the last few months. If you recall, going by the German market, DDR5 memory is a ridiculous 544% up on the price it was before the RAM crisis began — so the thought of further increases feels, well, even more ludicrous. But here we are.

We can seemingly expect SSDs to get more costly as well, going by the leak from YMTC, although it's worth noting that it's in the company's interest to talk up its future prospects and profits (as it heads into an IPO). That said, this isn't an official statement, but a leak (though it could have been intentionally leaked, cynics would doubtless argue).

The fact of the matter is that more memory-related misery is believable enough these days, as all predictions are very much slanted towards more price hikes for the remainder of 2026 and into 2027. The view that we have at least another three years of this crisis to weather — taking us all the way to 2030 — is one also shared by other analysts and industry figures, including Nvidia's CEO (and those in the world of SSDs).

The 1TB Samsung T9 SSD combines a compact design with modern connectivity and fast read and write speeds. If you're looking for a good price, it's on sale ahead of Amazon's Big Deal Days right now.

• Best for: Professionals, students, photographers, and creators who need very fast, compact external storage for transferring and working with large files.

• The deal: The 1TB Samsung T9 Portable SSD is now £192 (was £240) at Amazon.

• Why it matters: The T9 can reach sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,000MB/s over USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, making it particularly useful for large photo and video files.

Today's best Samsung portable SSD deal

Why we recommend it

The T9 SSD can deliver sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,000MB/s when connected to compatible hardware, which makes it a good choice for anyone transferring or working with large files.

It comes in a compact enclosure measuring approximately 8.8 x 6 x 1.4cm and Samsung provides a five-year manufacturer's guarantee, which is reassuring.

In his four-star review, our expert Mark said the "positive features of this drive are great read speeds and its ability to sustain write performance, especially on the larger capacities. It’s also capable of handling knocks, although Samsung doesn’t claim it is waterproof."

Price context & historical value

This isn't the lowest ever price, but it's as low as we've seen it this year - back in November 2025 it dropped to £86, but that was before the component crisis sent prices skyrocketing. For comparison, it's currently on sale at Argos for £205 and at Currys it's £209 so Amazon is the best place to grab it right now.

For more shopping options, take a look at our roundup of the best portable SSDs, and the fastest external SSDs.

Should you buy it?

✅ Buy the Samsung T9 Portable SSD if...

If you regularly transfer large files, edit high-resolution photos or video, or want fast portable storage for moving between computers. The T9 is particularly suited to demanding workloads.

❌ Skip the Samsung T9 Portable SSD if...

If you mainly want somewhere to keep documents and occasional backups. A slower portable SSD will usually cost less, and you won't benefit from the T9's full performance if your computer doesn't support USB 3.2 Gen 2x2.

• See all external SSD deals at Amazon

• Those buying an RTX 5090 at Micro Center now have to fill out a declaration form
• This includes having a government-issued photo ID scanned by the retailer
• Some approve of the policy as it's an anti-scalping measure, but others view it as an annoyance or a pointless move

If you're buying an Nvidia RTX 5090, or a PC with the graphics card inside, over in the US, you may have to fill out an official form to declare that you don't intend to export and resell the GPU – or at least you will at Micro Center.

PC Gamer spotted the 'advanced computing product purchaser declaration' which a Redditor was forced to complete and sign – including a scan of their driving license for ID – when buying a PowerSpec AI90 workstation PC with an RTX 5090.

The Micro Center store was in Tustin, California, but someone else posting on the Reddit thread claims that the same form has been introduced at the Columbus, Ohio store.

Apparently this is a new policy that only started this week at Micro Center (but seemingly other retailers already follow this practice in the US, including Central Computers).

In case you hadn't guessed, this move is about trying to prevent scalpers from buying up the RTX 5090, or PCs containing it – which can be around the same price as the standalone GPU these days, and are sometimes the only way of getting this graphics card at all – in order to sell it on to China and turn a profit.

Analysis: a pain in the neck, or a valid anti-scalper tactic?

As some of the commenters on Reddit are quick to point out, this form isn't legally binding, and there are question marks over how any of this might be enforced. Somebody breaking the terms of the agreement is likely to just shrug their shoulders about the consequences, perhaps.

However, as PC Gamer notes, the use of the ID check is certainly a deterrent of sorts for GPU exporters. And what this is doing is preventing people who are making a short trip to the US buying an RTX 5090 and selling it on when they get back home for a hefty mark-up. Those people won't be able to provide a US address and government photo ID that can be verified as belonging to them, of course.

The fact remains that it's a bit of a pain for Micro Center's customers to have to go through this form filling and ID check, although that said, some of the folks on the above Reddit thread don't have a problem with the process given that it's an anti-scalping measure. Others are concerned about having to give a retail store personal information for an unnecessary reason as they see it, or they're just annoyed and think it's a waste of time. As one Redditor put it: "This is ridiculous."

Going by the Reddit thread, another measure Micro Center enforces is that there's only one purchase of an RTX 5090 GPU per customer full-stop, forever. Once you've bought one, you can never buy another, we're told.

• Micron has warned that the RAM shortage will get much worse in 2027 and 2028
• Then coming to the end of the decade, robots are going to put more strain on memory supply
• So-called 'physical AI' could need 200GB+ of DRAM and multiple terabytes of storage per unit, Micron predicts

Micron just published its latest financial results, complete with some predictions for the future of the RAM crisis that aren't going to prove very comforting for consumers.

Wccftech reports that Micron, which is one of the three big memory chip makers, just revealed its results for fiscal Q4 2026 with predictably booming profits — and some not-so-obvious predictions about the RAM shortage.

As flagged on X by Eric Jhonsa, a portfolio manager for a Dutch asset corporation, in Micron's accompanying guidance the company observed: "We expect memory and storage supply-demand conditions to be much tighter in calendar 2027 and 2028 than they were in 2026."

Micron also said: "Even with additional industry DRAM cleanroom space plans, with robust demand trends including new upside requests from customers, we do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance."

Also highlighted on X by Shay Boloor, who is chief market strategist at Futurum Equities, Micron made the point that even if the current AI bubble deflates, lessening RAM demand for servers in data centers as a result, there could still be a high level of demand from 'physical AI' — meaning robots.

We're told that "humanoid robots could need 200GB+ of DRAM and multiple terabytes of storage per unit with several physical AI customers already sampling next gen products", and that this could become a "significant driver of memory and storage demand by the end of this decade."

Analysis: robot RAM drain

In short, Micron is saying that RAM supply is going to be tight not just in 2027 — which has been a widespread prediction — but also in 2028. Granted, 2028 has been forecast as a gloomy year in general, but from what Micron is saying here, the company is putting this year on a level with 2027 in terms of the memory shortage, and next year is set to be pretty dire by all accounts.

This is feeding more into the RAM crisis lasting until 2030 narrative (one of the earliest mentions of this came from Nvidia's CEO), and the comment about robots further reinforces this. Even if the demand to drive AI falls away somewhat so data centers aren't gobbling up so much memory, the overall strain on RAM supply may remain due to an uptake of robots, which will also need a lot of memory.

The one thing I would say is that Micron may be exaggerating somewhat in terms of talking up the timeframe on the usage of robots here. After all, in these kinds of forecasts, it's in the firm's interest to build up its future prospects and drive more investment.

Clearly, though, Micron is in a very strong position, and robots are something that's on the radar. And with there being a great deal of doubt as to whether the AI bubble is going to burst at all — depending on who you listen to — this is just another concern for consumers (alongside robots taking over jobs to boot).

It seems clear enough that RAM won't be reaching affordable pricing levels for a long time yet.

• Borderless Gaming is a tool that's sold on Steam
• It just got an add-on to easily fudge DLSS 5 to work with various PC games
• Reviews of the tool have turned rather colorful, as those who still hate DLSS 5 and all it stands for are chipping in

You can't have missed all the chatter about experimenting with Nvidia's DLSS 5 in all sorts of different PC games, and if you've felt the urge to join in but have been too intimidated by the idea of fudging the tech to work, a solution is now at hand.

VideoCardz noticed that Borderless Gaming, a tool that's sold via Steam – it's used to facilitate gaming in a borderless window, as the name indicates – now has DLSS 5 support. Or, as the developer put it: "DLSS 5 Neural Rendering for Everyone."

The dev notes that: "DLSS 5 Neural Rendering is now available in Borderless Gaming – without replacing game DLLs, modifying game files, or needing a game-specific mod. Install the effect, select the preset, and apply it to your game."

Borderless Gaming applies DLSS 5 directly through its own BGFX pipeline, the developer explains, rather than forwarding requests to Nvidia's DLLs.

In short, this is DLSS 5 being fudged in about as no-fuss a manner as can be, save for the fact that you have to buy and install the app, of course. This implementation shouldn't be confused with native DLSS 5 support, because it's simply a workaround to bring the neural rendering technique into play (with variable results as you might expect).

Note that the Borderless Gaming app doesn't actually come with this built-in, but after installing the tool itself, you need to also download the appropriate effect (DLSS5-NR v0.2.1 currently) from GitHub here (installation instructions are provided at that link).

Analysis: catching some of the DLSS 5 hate

According to the developer, this implementation can work on a wide range of GPUs – not just the officially supported RTX 5000 models – and an RTX 3090 can hit around 30fps typically with DLSS 5 turned on. Obviously the frame rate will vary massively depending on the game and graphics settings, but the gist is that you can get something playable on the RTX 3090.

It's a neat enough solution by the looks of it, although as ever, if you're curious, I have to issue my usual warning about third-party apps here: download and use them at your own risk.

Borderless Gaming is an app that's been around for a long time, but the Steam reviews have turned distinctly colorful of late – with some of that color revolving around this latest move with DLSS 5. As one reviewer puts it: "Added DLSS 5 for no reason but to make games look worse... Slop." (Hence the above clarification that DLSS 5 isn't actually added to the app itself at all).

Nvidia's DLSS 5 was controversial when it was first announced, although the reception to its neural rendering trickery has warmed up considerably since it went live in a game (NBA 2K27). There are still haters out there, though, as the Steam reviews for Borderless Gaming illustrate.

It's also a fair question whether Nvidia might take action against projects like this, which are going further in terms of tweaking and playing about with DLSS 5 tech. It's likely that for now, with DLSS 5 getting a greater level of positivity from many of the gaming experimenters out there, Team Green might let it slide – at least for the time being.

Nvidia made waves earlier this year when it announced the Nvidia RTX Spark, a new ARM-based SoC for small form factor PCs and laptops, and no one should be more concerned than Apple.

The Cupertino tech giant has enjoyed a very strong position when it comes to laptop sales for a while now thanks to its own ARM-based silicon, the Apple M-series.

With the refreshed Mac mini now on sale with the new Apple M6 chip, there’s going to be a lot of interest from creatives and developers around these two platforms, so I’m here to break down everything you need to know about the Nvidia RTX Spark vs Apple M6.

NVIDIA RTX SPARK VS APPLE M6: PRICE & AVAILABILITY

Neither SoC from either company is available on its own, so how much you pay will be entirely dependent on the PC or laptop it comes in, with things like memory and storage upgrades playing an outsized role in the final price.

The Apple M6 is only available in the new Mac mini (2026) for now, and it starts at $899/£899/AU$1,449 for the 16GB/256GB model. Adding more memory and storage will cost you extra, with the highest-spec M6 Mac mini featuring 24GB of unified memory for an extra $200/£200/AU$300, and an upgrade to 32GB for an extra $380/£400/AU$600.

Upgrading to 512GB SSD storage will add $200/£200/AU$300 to the price, while 1TB and 2TB will add $500/£500/AU$750 and $1,000/£1,000/AU$1,500 to the price, respectively.

Meanwhile, Nvidia is relying on its third-party partners to produce the PCs and laptops that will feature the Nvidia RTX Spark, so the prices will vary greatly among manufacturers, as well as which RTX Spark N1X core configuration is used (there will be an 18 CPU-core/5,120 CUDA-core entry configuration, and a more powerful 20 CPU-core/6,144 CUDA-core configuration).

While many units have been announced from Dell, Acer, and others, there's been no firm pricing yet, and much like the Mac mini, the amount of RAM the PC or laptop is configured with is going to have a major impact on its price. The first Nvidia RTX Spark devices are expected to go on sale in October, and some early indicators put the starting price of RTX Spark laptops and mini PCs at around $2,000/£2,000/AU$3,000.

• Advantage: Apple M6

NVIDIA RTX SPARK VS APPLE M6: SPECS

Fortunately, when it comes to specs, we know just about everything between these two SoCs, so we can do a proper side-by-side comparison of the Nvidia RTX Spark vs Apple M6.

As you can see above, Nvidia RTX Spark has a lot of hardware advantages versus the Apple M6. With nearly twice as many CPU cores on the premium configuration, almost four times the maximum memory headroom, and larger memory bandwidth, the Nvidia RTX Spark chips start out well ahead of the Apple M6 when it comes to specs—and that’s before we discuss the RTX Blackwell GPU.

Apple does have an advantage when it comes to maximum clock frequency, however, running nearly 800MHz faster than the best Nvidia chip. Will it be enough though? That remains to be seen.

• Advantage: Nvidia RTX Spark

NVIDIA RTX SPARK VS APPLE M6: PERFORMANCE

So far, I’ve only been able to benchmark the Apple M6 myself, as the new Mac mini went on sale on September 22, so there’s not a whole lot I can say definitively about the Nvidia RTX Spark vs Apple M6 when it comes to performance, but we’re not entirely in the dark here.

The RTX Spark N1X is essentially the Nvidia DGX Spark SoC, though it is running at a lower wattage for laptops (45W to 80W TDP, roughly, compared to the desktop DGX Spark’s 140W TDP). For RTX Spark desktops and mini PCs, I expect the TDP for the N1X to come close to or match the GDX’s 140W TDP.

Since we do know a lot about the performance of the GDX Spark across various workloads, we can expect the RTX Spark N1X to perform similarly, at least in small form factor PCs. What’s more, we also have some leaked benchmarks for the two RTX Spark N1X SKUs from Geekbench 7.

Note: RTX Spark N1X 3DMark scores estimated from RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti laptop GPU benchmark results

As you can see, the Nvidia RTX Spark chips handle themselves very well against the Apple M6 in terms of GPU performance, though I need to caveat those results since they are approximations based on the listed core counts for the two SoCs’ GPUs. We don’t have benchmarks for these chips yet in 3DMark, but the GPU is built on the same architecture as Nvidia RTX 50 series laptop GPUs, and so we can ballpark where the N1X’s GPU is likely to end up given the number of CUDA cores they have available.

It’s also worth noting that the Nvidia RTX Spark’s multi-core performance definitely benefits from the increased core count over the Apple M6. However, the Apple M6 has a substantially better single-core performance, clocking in about 56% faster than the premium 20-core Nvidia chip.

This is going to translate to substantially better in-app performance for things like Adobe Photoshop and will help with agentic AI when an agent is processing a prompt or reasoning out a response, as these are inherently single-core dependent.

However, agentic AIs rarely work alone without some assistance from sub-agents, sandboxes, and other concurrently operating tools, which is where the multi-core performance of the Nvidia RTX Spark will definitely come in handy.

Of course, it also goes without saying that Nvidia’s distinct advantage over Apple when it comes to AI hardware thanks to native CUDA processing can’t be understated. Apple’s M6 might perform very well, but it will not be able to keep up with an Nvidia GPU that has up to 128GB of available memory.

And for gaming, well, Apple has really struggled to break Window’s stranglehold on PC gaming, and the Apple M6 doesn’t change that in the slightest, giving the Nvidia RTX Spark the edge there almost by default.

• Advantage: Nvidia RTX Spark

NVIDIA RTX SPARK VS APPLE M6: EARLY VERDICT

It remains to be seen how well the two Nvidia RTX Spark chips fare in real world testing, but early signs are very promising for Nvidia’s first SoC for the consumer market.

Apple isn’t out for the count just yet, either, and it will still hold the edge on price since the Nvidia RTX Spark is going to need a lot of very expensive RAM to process those 170B parameter models.

If you’re a more mainstream user who is just looking for a great PC for productivity, school work, and the like, the Apple M6 is the platform to go for.

Nvidia’s RTX Spark appears to be far more of a professional product with some gaming bolted onto the side, and it will surely have a price to match, so you only really need to consider the Nvidia RTX Spark if you can tell the difference between inference and model training. If you have to look those terms up, the RTX Spark isn’t really for you, but if those two are exactly what you plan on doing with your next device, you really can’t do any better than the Nvidia RTX Spark - as long as devices that include it are reasonably priced.

Normally we get to this time of year and the typical advice is to hold fire on any potential tech purchases. This is because Black Friday is just a couple of months away, and so it always seems prudent to think about being patient, and the bargain you might just secure in the biggest tech sale of the year.

Not this year, though, when it comes to GPUs – at least in my opinion.

During Black Friday 2025, we did see some decent deals on graphics cards. Not many, mind, but there was a scattering of them. I've noticed on Reddit that there are some gamers who have found a GPU with a decent price tag, but they're wondering whether to hold off and wait for something better on Black Friday. They are perhaps remembering some of the discounts that happened last year (thin on the ground as they were).

For example, this US-based Redditor asks: "Buy an open box [Nvidia RTX] 5070 now or wait until Black Friday?" They add: "I see a few open box deals for $745. What do people think about snagging this now at such an inflated price, or waiting until Black Friday to try and snag under $700?"

If you're in a similar quandary, my advice is this: absolutely do not wait for Black Friday. Just buy that graphics card now.

Let's break down the reasons why this isn't a 'waiters' market (by which I mean those biding their time, not the lovely people who serve us food and drinks).

Reasons to be fearful

For starters, as a legion of cynical Redditors are quick to point out, Black Friday isn't the best for graphics card deals anyway – it has never been the strongest suit for this sale in terms of PC components.

As noted, there have been bargains in the past though. Despite those Redditors who insist that GPUs just have their prices quietly upped in October so they can be artificially 'discounted' for Black Friday, there are actually some genuinely decent deals – or there have been.

However, things have just gone crazy this year, and as the second half of 2026 has rolled around, the RAM crisis has reached another tiring peak of frenzied hiking.

There were more rumors of imminent GPU hikes just a couple of weeks ago (following last month's negative chatter), and at retailers in the US we've already seen graphics card prices rising considerably over the past month. Compounding this are even more negative predictions about the memory shortage in general – which inevitably affects video RAM as well as system memory – and DDR5 prices which are spiking in a ridiculous manner right now. So you've got a recipe for a tumultuous rest of the year.

In short, I can't see 2026 panning out any other way than seeing more GPU price increases – so why wouldn't you buy now? At least from the perspective of whether Black Friday might somehow bring some bargains around – it surely won't.

I'm pretty convinced of that, and there are nuances here in terms of what kind of graphics card you're looking to buy. I'm talking about mainstream GPUs, the mid-range or lower tiers of the market, and not the higher-end graphics cards.

The beefiest GPUs like Nvidia's RTX 5080 (don't even mention the RTX 5090) are already exceptionally pricey, and while I don't think they'll get any cheaper – and indeed I reckon they'll probably still creep up in price – the cost of those products is already a very bitter pill to swallow.

I don't blame you if you don't want to pay out that much cash for a graphics card, because over $1,500 for an RTX 5080 (in the US) is a pricing nightmare. But you'll have to accept that you'll likely be in for a long wait for better prices, maybe not until 2028. A compromise might be to buy a card like an RTX 5070 to tide you over, or maybe an AMD RX 9070 XT (it's a touch less expensive in the US at the time of writing), then sell that second-hand later on when the RTX 5080 comes down.

The trouble is, there are no good options here... not for the pricier GPUs anyway.

Red Friday

I think that this year, Black Friday should be renamed Red Friday for its Herring-like nature, at least when it comes to graphics cards. Don't be swayed by the temptation of waiting for a deal, and if you see a reasonable price on the GPU you're considering, grab it now.

A $750 (open box) deal on an RTX 5070, the dilemma of the aforementioned Redditor, seems a sound enough proposition, even though that's a depressing reality considering this GPU was still going for around $650 just two months ago – because you're now looking at $850 or so (going by Newegg US pricing).

You can pick up an RTX 5060 Ti 8GB for only 10% more than this GPU was priced at in June (again, going by Newegg US), and I think there's an even stronger case to snag something like this if you're looking at the more affordable end of the market.

Obviously, do your own research based on the regional pricing for the GPU you're thinking about, but whatever the case, I'd still urge you not to be fooled into waiting for Black Friday, as I really think that'd be a mistake.

• Nvidia Smooth Motion has been modded onto RTX 3000 series GPUs
• The experimental mod allows driver-level frame generation in unsupported games
• Nvidia hasn't officially implemented this and other features on older RTX hardware yet

Modders continue to find new ways to implement Nvidia's latest technologies on older hardware, and now it's been done with Team Green's driver-level frame generation.

As reported by Wccftech, Nvidia Smooth Motion has been unofficially made to work on RTX 3000 series GPUs, with a new NVSmooth30 mod available on GitHub, confirmed to work on an RTX 3050 laptop and an RTX 3080 desktop GPU.

Nvidia's Smooth Motion functionality is essentially identical to AMD's Fluid Motion Frames, meaning that it enables frame generation in games that don't have official support for it — a tool that is most useful for older games or games running in emulators.

The mod works by modifying Nvidia's driver-level frame generation DLL (Dynamic Link Library) file, labeled NvPresent64, bypassing the usual compatibility checks that would stop it from working on Ampere GPU hardware, aka RTX 3000 series GPUs. It also works by "conservative metadata retargeting" from Ada Lovelace (RTX 4000 series) and targets Ampere instead.

The creator says that all users need to do is place the DLL file into the relevant game's folder and use the Nvidia Profile Inspector app to enable Smooth Motion. The process is very simple, but this is an experimental project, so it runs the risk of game bugs and crashes, or potentially other issues — and must not be used in online games using anti-cheat (doing so could result in a ban).

Gamers want new features, but new GPUs are unaffordable

Nvidia has been quite impressive with its latest technologies, notably with DLSS 5 Neural Rendering (which I saw at Gamescom 2026), and Smooth Motion has been one of many over the last few years.

The GPU market is in complete disarray due to the RAM crisis, which means prices for GPUs for both AMD Radeon and Nvidia GeForce GPUs are way too high for most people to consider an upgrade. Features like Multi-Frame Generation, Dynamic Frame Generation, and Smooth Motion are those that PC users would love, but can't use on older hardware.

Modders have consistently proved that these features can be backported in some way, with some even going as far as porting DLSS 5 onto the RTX 4080 (despite the performance hit).

DLSS 5 Neural Rendering coming to older hardware in the immediate future is unrealistic — but Nvidia has previously told me that it does plan on adding backwards compatibility at some point, though it's likely to come to 4000-series models first, and then we'll have to hope for 3000-series later in the future, if it's even possible.

But it feels as though features such as Frame Generation, and specifically Smooth Motion, deserve backporting attention now more than ever, as users are stuck with older GPUs.

Doing so would put Team Green in the good books of many PC gamers, and keep players from relying on unofficial mods to achieve better performance and enjoy GeForce hardware to the fullest extent.

• XMG has announced price rises for its laptops due to the increased cost of components
• The laptop maker points out that DDR5 RAM for laptops is now close to 6x the price it was before the memory crisis
• We're also hearing that Micron has pulled the plug on its 2GB modules of GDDR7, and Nvidia's supply of VRAM could feel an impact from this

The RAM crisis sadly keeps rolling on and finding fresh pricing misery to heap on us, and that includes new laptop hikes and a hint that Nvidia GPUs could be in yet another spot of bother.

VideoCardz spotted the development with laptops, as manufacturer XMG announced on Reddit that its notebooks are subject to price hikes of either €100 or €150 for most models, or €300 in one case (that's for a Schenker portable, which is XMG's parent company, so it's all under the same umbrella).

Some laptop upgrades have got pricier, too, with a €120 premium on an RTX 5090 configuration, and as XMG observed: "The reason [for the price rises] is another increase in purchasing costs. This is no longer just about RAM and SSDs: PCBs, electronic components, CPUs, graphics cards and video memory are also contributing to the higher cost level."

In other words, everything is subject to price inflation, including the motherboard and associated chips, as well as the mentioned key components.

XMG highlighted data drawn from Geizhals (which tracks German retail prices) showing that DDR5 RAM for laptops is close to 6x the price it was before the memory shortage began (in mid-2025).

The laptop maker also made it clear that discrete GPUs and GDDR7 video memory have become more expensive, as have the prices of AMD and Intel laptop processors.

Also on the subject of GPUs, Wccftech reports that another slight worry is that Micron is no longer making 2GB modules of GDDR7 video RAM which are used in some Nvidia RTX 5000 GPUs.

Uniko's Hardware flagged up this news in a post on X, noting that these chips have "reached end of life" and that this is the case for all Micron 2GB modules, with only 3GB GDDR7 chips now listed on the memory maker's website.

With Micron apparently no longer supplying Nvidia with those 2GB modules, that means more of a squeeze on the availability of video memory for RTX 5000 graphics cards, at least in theory. This could hit stock levels and put a bit more pressure on pricing (which is already climbing fast).

Analysis: yet more pressure

We need to season the claims around Micron here, as this isn't a definitive statement from the company itself, and more to the point, it's only a minor supplier for Nvidia's gaming GPUs. Team Green gets the majority of its GDDR7 from Samsung and SK Hynix, and so the impact here should be relatively slight.

However, I'd argue that any impact is bad news given the current climate which is rapidly worsening for GPUs, particularly those from Nvidia which are heading upwards at a rate of knots for some models. The RTX 5090 has got completely ridiculous, the RTX 5080 is similarly out of hand, and even the RTX 5070 is now feeling the pricing heat, with a 30% price rise compared to two months ago in the US (and a similar picture elsewhere).

So, even small extra pressures are really not going to help Nvidia's GeForce GPUs here.

As for the laptop price hikes, this is a sign of the RAM supply times, and XMG is following other makers who have had to jack up prices (like Dell for example, which just bumped up the XPS 13 in a roundabout way).

It's a commendable level of transparency from XMG here, with the company making it clear that it isn't turning any extra profit from these laptop price increases. XMG also observed that other factors are in play with increased costs for notebook makers, and that includes rising air freight costs (due to conflicts in the Middle East) and difficulties with shipping by sea, too.

Corsair's line of desktop and laptop memory have been some of the top performers in our tests - and the Vengeance is easily one of our favorites. And right now there's a big sale on DDR4 and DDR5 RAM from the gaming company. Plenty of discounts to be had, but the white Corsair Vengeance 32GB DDR5 kit is the one that caught our eye.

• Best for: PC builders and creators looking for faster RAM for productivity, extensive multi-tasking, and creative workloads.

• The deal: The white Corsair Vengeance 32GB DDR5-5200 RAM kit is now $408 (was $508) at Corsair. In the UK, Corsair's memory kit is now £389 (was £485) on the site.

• Why it matters: Any discount on memory is welcome right now, since AI has sent prices skyrocketing. And we're fans of Corsair's Vengeance line, having tested several in our time. The white finish on this RAM kit is a decent attraction if you're building a color-coordinated desktop with a window in the case.

Today's Corsair DDR5 RAM kit deal

Why we recommend it

This Corsair Vengeance kit includes two 16GB DDR5 modules. Running at up to 5,200MT/s with CL40 latency, the modules feature aluminum heat spreaders to manage temperatures. Their compact, low-profile construction makes them suitable for desktop builds where larger memory modules could interfere with CPU coolers. Corsair has optimized the kit for Intel motherboards, with compatibility covering Intel 600, 700 and 800 series platforms.

Price context & historical value

The discount from $508 to $407.99 knocks just over $100 off the current price, equivalent to saving almost 20%. The wider memory market has experienced huge price increases during 2026, so any sizable discount is worth considering, even if it's still very expensive compared to last year.

Should you buy it?

✅ Buy the 32GB Corsair Vengeance White DDR5 kit if...

You accept that pricing is through the roof and modern deals don't compare with last year's costs. This is a good offer if want more control over your desktop's memory configuration and are comfortable tweaking performance settings. The kit supports Intel XMP profiles, allowing compatible systems to apply its rated memory settings without manually entering every timing and voltage parameter.

Built-in voltage regulation provide additional control for anyone looking to fine-tune their systems.

❌ Skip the 32GB Corsair Vengeance White DDR5 if...

You're assembling a budget desktop or upgrading an older system that doesn't support DDR5. Given current prices, it's worth checking whether your existing memory genuinely limits everyday performance before spending more than $400 on an upgrade.

More deals: Also consider

• US: Shop all memory on sale at Corsair
• UK: See all RAM deals at Corsair

• Apparently Nvidia's not launching RTX 6000 GPUs until 2028
• A leaker claims that these graphics cards have been delayed from the 2027 debut Nvidia originally planned
• Pushing back these GPUs makes sense given the RAM crisis, and some gamers are happy to wait anyway

Nvidia has pushed back its timeframe for launching next-generation graphics cards for gamers, and we're now hearing they won't arrive until 2028.

As ever, all this is theoretical – Nvidia hasn't uttered a peep about its RTX 6000 GPUs officially – but according to Kopite7kimi, a well-known leaker on X (via TweakTown), these products are now destined for a 2028 release which "means they have postponed again."

In other words, Nvidia was supposedly looking at a launch for next year, but the leaker now believes that isn't the case.

Another leaker, Moore's Law is Dead on YouTube, recently said that Nvidia is planning a 2027 launch for the RTX 6000 series, so this directly contradicts that idea. However, it's possible that this was the case, but Team Green has only just changed its mind.

Analysis: a sensible move

Of course, both of these assertions are just rumors, and we need to regard them with an equal amount of caution – but I think it makes more sense for Nvidia to delay the release of its next-gen GeForce GPUs until 2028.

Why? I have three predictable words for you: the RAM crisis. With the memory shortage – which also impacts video RAM – rapidly worsening as 2026 progresses, and predicted to descend further into nightmarish pricing territory in 2027, next year seems like a bad move for launching a family of next-gen GPUs.

Especially when you consider that the first graphics cards to emerge will doubtless be the flagship RTX 6090 and the 6080. How expensive will they be in such a climate, given that the RTX 5080 is already exorbitantly priced? The latter has reached around $1,500 in the US at this point, and is at similar levels in other regions, such as £1,350 in the UK (that's the cheapest GPU in both cases at the time of writing, I should make clear). And let's not even talk about the RTX 5090 which has got completely ridiculous.

Remember that these next-gen GPUs are going to require more memory to be an upgrade over their predecessors, and are also likely to use more expensive VRAM modules.

3GB modules will likely be used by Nvidia, or maybe even 4GB or 6GB chips, which as Wccftech reports, are rumored to debut in the next year or two (which would align with a 2028 release for RTX 6000, in theory). That's according to another prominent leaker over in Asia, Golden Pig Upgrade, as posted on Weibo.

All expectations are for the RTX 6000 series to be pricey, which is why launching them at what might be the height of the RAM crisis – 2027, going by current predictions – doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The following year seems a lot more likely, when hopefully the crisis has started to settle down and pricing is at least stabilizing to some extent (although some believe we're looking longer term for that to happen, more towards 2030).

Whatever the case, some gamers are getting jaded with the market. One of the replies to Kopite7kimi's post on X simply says of the next generation of Nvidia GeForce GPUs: "Nobody cares, nobody can afford it anyway." Others – like this Redditor, who says "I'd rather they delayed the launch to consumers" – indicate that they're happy enough to wait due to pricing or stock issues (launch quantities of GPUs would likely be thin on the ground).

The other question is whether we'll see those RTX 5000 Super refreshes that have been long rumored. I'm doubtful at this point, and I think Nvidia may be inclined to rely more on the AI and software side of the equation, principally DLSS 5, to impress gamers, rather than new (stupidly pricey) hardware.

• Acer's CEO claims RAM supply is still "quite large"
• Jason Chen does acknowledge that PC prices will rise in Q4, though, by up to 20% on average
• However, those prices will fall by mid-2027, the CEO predicts, asserting that: "It's impossible for the shortage to last until 2030!"

Not everyone is being totally downbeat about the RAM crisis, with Acer's CEO stating that he's hopeful that PC prices will drop from the middle of 2027, even if price rises are on the cards for the rest of this year.

VideoCardz higlighted a (translated) report from Taiwan's Economic Daily News that shares the most recent thoughts of Jason Chen, chief executive of Acer, on the RAM crisis.

Chen asserts that there isn't much of a DDR4 and DDR5 memory shortage at present, and that the "supply is quite large" for this RAM — we must bear in mind there may be some nuances lost in translation there — and also that there isn't much shortage of processors either.

The CEO does acknowledge that the prices of components are currently "fluctuating" at a high level, and that PC prices will continue to climb in the fourth quarter of 2026, with an average price rise of between 5% to 20%.

However, the good news, according to Chen, is that he believes PC prices should drop from mid-2027, and with more chip production coming online — especially in China — the memory shortage won't last for the rest of the decade.

Chen is pretty firm on that one, claiming that, "It's impossible for the shortage to last until 2030!"

Analysis: new hope for some stability?

As to whether there isn't much of a RAM shortage currently, almost everyone else begs to differ on that — although I accept that Chen's meaning may be altered in translation somewhat here, as noted, and perhaps the gist is that supply isn't as bad as some in the industry would have you believe.

Whatever the case, Chen is clearly sounding a more optimistic note than most. There have certainly been some analysts and prominent industry figures who are suggesting that the RAM crisis will indeed last until 2030, and those are the people who Chen is clearly directing that last comment at. The CEO does appear to be talking more about the Chinese market than the global picture here, though, and we should also bear that in mind.

Still, it's a relief to hear some more positive thinking on the RAM crisis, although there's one point that everyone can agree on: namely that prices are going to rise over the rest of 2026 and into 2027. Even Chen's predicted fall in PC pricing isn't forecast to come about until the middle of next year, and so for the time being, it's clear enough that we're stuck with rising prices.

The cost of RAM in particular has been soaring of late — against all odds, as it was already exorbitantly high — and GPUs are now being subject to some worrying price hikes (the top-end in particular is getting ridiculous), with more to come I expect. It's not pretty out there for consumers, and nothing is going to get better for some time — the question for me right now is: how much worse might things become?

I hope Chen's more positive noises here are indicative of at least some stabilizing around high pricing for PCs and components alike.

It's been over four years since Intel Arc graphics made their debut. Team Blue, primarily known for making some of the best processors of all time, had made its second big swing against the best graphics cards. Alchemist had promise from a price-to-performance perspective; the A-series impressed with budget-friendly performance in 1080p and 1440p with the Arc A750 and Arc A770, respectively, despite some driver issues and (initially) a lack of developer support.

Everything changed with Battlemage. Intel's second-generation Arc graphics cards received higher praise, with far superior generational performance, rivalling the best cheap graphics cards. In particular, the Arc B570 was a powerhouse for 1080p gaming with its $219 / £219 MSRP, and the Arc B580 confidently earned a perfect review from us with its all-star 1440p performance for just $249.99 /£249.99. However, that was some time ago.

Now, nearing the end of 2026, the concept of a cheap video card, or a true graphics card deal, is (sadly) extinct. You can expect to pay double (or more) for a B580 that made waves due to its value proposition just two short years ago, lessening the impact of an otherwise excellent GPU. Team Blue has reportedly canceled its Celestial range of discrete graphics cards, and the future of Druid (the codename for Intel's fourth-generation GPU) and beyond is uncertain.

Has Intel abandoned the dedicated GPU market to go all-in on the likes of its G3 Extreme chip found in the best gaming handhelds? Moreover, is there still hope for a third major competitor during the worst time to build (or buy) a gaming computer in recent memory?

What were Intel's original plans for Celestial?

When Intel Arc was originally announced more than five years ago, Team Blue confidently laid out its "Multi-Year Roadmap", with Alchemist (A-Series) slated for Q1 2022, a goal the company only just achieved as the initial GPU lineup dropped on March 30. With that said, no dates or timeframes were confirmed for the second, third, and fourth generations of its Xe platform.

Intel Arc Battlemage (B-series) graphics cards were officially launched on December 3, 2024, meaning almost three years (or two years and eight months) had passed between the two Xe generations. This release schedule is fairly standard for GPU launches; Nvidia launched the Blackwell-based RTX 50 series on January 30, 2025, with the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, succeeding the RTX 40 series that debuted on October 12, 2022, with the then-flagship RTX 4090 (two years and three months).

It's nearing the time when we should start hearing about Intel Celestial, especially given just how well-received Battlemage was, and yet there's radio silence from Team Blue. More specifically, speculation around The C-series' cancellation were sparked from rumors dating back to April. Specifically, it was hardware leaker Jaykihn on X who alleged that "Celestial was canned long ago" and that "Druid is up in the air".

If we look at the updated Intel Arc Graphics roadmap, the company alleged that the Xe3P Cestial graphics cards should have been arriving in 2026.

What happened to Intel Celestial?

Intel had clearly stated in 2025 that next-generation Xe3 Battlemage graphics would arrive that year, and then year-on-year we would receive Xe3P with Celestial in 2026, Xe4 with Druid in 2027, and Xe Next, the "Next-Gen," in 2028. So what actually came of these claims? So far, so good, as the B-series is integrated into the latest G3 family.

As well as the Intel 18A-based Compute Tile (14-core with NPU 5 and up to 8,533 MT/s LPDDR5x memory), it also uses the Xe3 architecture for its 10-12 Xe-cores, 10-12 RT units, and 80-96 XMX AI Engines, whether it's the standard or the G3 Extreme variant. In other words, Intel has decided to renew Battlemage for a third year running, with no apparent space (or need) for Celestial at this time, at least for the purpose of dedicated gaming.

It's alleged that Xe3P architecture (Celestial) is being baked into the upcoming Intel Nova Lake processors. More specifically, the C-series could be entirely relegated to integrated graphics onboard certain incoming chips rather than powering discrete graphics cards.

This is claimed to be the case with the Nova Lake-S lineup, which is said to be a 16-core CPU with a 12-core Xe3P iGPU forged on the silicon, unlike other Nova Lake processors that could feature just two Xe3 cores.

While Xe3 is already being used in gaming handhelds powered by the G3 and G3 Extreme, the combination of both Xe3 and Xe3P in Nova Lake could be where Celestial lives. It's been rumored that the extra performance of the newer-generation cores could be primarily for driving the Visual Engine rather than being used for anything more intensive. Revealed at Hot Chips 2026, Intel announced that Xe3P would be powering its Crescent Island AI GPUs. At the moment, then, it seems that Team Blue has no interest in bringing over Celestial tech for gaming.

Battlemage isn't worth the price anymore, and Intel needs to learn from this

There's no easy way to say this: Intel Arc isn't worth the inflated asking prices. While the two main Battlemage graphics cards initially won favor with us and the general gaming public, the value proposition simply isn't justifiable this late in 2026. As touched upon above, both entry-level GPUs have doubled in price, and it's really hard to see the justification against a considerably stronger graphics card like the RTX 5060 and RX 9060 XT.

The average Arc B580 GPU nowadays costs around $330 / £340 for the 12GB variant from Intel's board partners such as ASRock and Sparkle. That gets you the current top-end Battlemage card with a 192-bit memory bus, 12GB of GDDR6 memory, and a total of 2,560 GPU cores.

However, for around the same price, you can also opt for an RTX 5060 8GB, or bump your budget up to around $400 / £400 for the far more capable RTX 5060 Ti instead. The former has a smaller 128-bit memory bus, although it benefits from 8GB of GDDR7 memory and 3,840 CUDA cores, whereas the latter comes with the same bus width but with up to 16GB of GDDR7 VRAM and 4,608 CUDA cores. Which one would you pick when weighing up a cheap gaming PC build?

Let's forget the tech specs and instead look at the performance numbers laofcct. According to testing conducted by Mark PC, both the similarly priced RTX 5060 and RX 9060 XT. We see this in countless examples with the demanding PC games tested, such as The Last of Us Part 1, Cyberpunk 2077, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Starfield; all of these games had superior average framerates from the AMD and Nvidia GPUs when benched in 1080p at max settings.

This is consistent with the testing conducted by Hardware Unboxed as well, as the three entry-level graphics cards were benched in 1080p with Medium to High settings, depending on the game. It's the same story with the likes of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Assassin's Creed Shadows, The Last of Us Part 2; you get the idea. If buying a graphics card from a processor company wasn't already a hard sell, then the price-to-performance of Arc circa 2026 certainly is.

Druid is Intel's last chance at remaining in the gaming GPU market

If Celestial is truly canceled (or relegated to an obscure APU), as has been claimed, then all hopes hinge on Druid and its Xe4 architecture, which is slated to be released in 2027. "Up in the air" really is an understatement with Team Blue's plans for its proposed fourth Arc generation; there's nothing circulating about this tech at all, which is rare considering the usual slate of rumors and speculation that usually whir up a year or so out from release.

The only real sliver of information that points to Team Blue still being in the GPU race at all comes from Alex Katouzian, Intel EVP and GM of Client Computing, who spoke to Dutch tech site Tweakers during Computex 2026. Katouzian is quoted as saying: "GPUs are a super important part of our PC product range" and "the traction of our GPU cores is really very good". It's a non-answer to a tough question that doesn't really give any indication as to what the company is planning; typical corporate speak to cover up the fact that it may have no idea where (or if) Druid has a future at all.

Worst-case scenario, then. Let's say Celestial is properly canned, but that Intel gives Druid a shot as a last-ditch effort to save the fledgling Arc graphics division in its dedicated form. Following the same blueprint as its last two GPU generations, a prospective launch of the D570 and D580 would need to be 12 to 16GB GDDR6X at a minimum, be built with XeSS 3's MFG in mind for 1080p to 1440p gaming, and still retail new for $250 to $350, respectively. Is this really something that can happen in 2027 with the price of graphics cards continuing to rise? I remain unconvinced.

There's a pathway for Intel to win back favor and consumer trust with a line of affordable graphics cards that deliver playable results for today's games. However, given the dire state of the industry and some truly puzzling top-level decision-making over the last two years, it just doesn't seem like things can be salvaged here. I would love to be wrong; more competition and consumer choice are always good for business, particularly if it means showing Nvidia the true meaning of budget and mid-range, but is Intel really the company to do that in 2027 and beyond? It's unlikely.

• AMD is rumored to be hiking prices for its chips
• Industry insiders in the supply chain indicate that a rise of around 10% will be applied across AMD's "entire chip line"
• This means GPUs and processors, as well as motherboards, and the hike is expected in Q4, so it could happen next month

AMD's processors and graphics cards could soon get more expensive in the latest blow from the RAM crisis rumor mill.

Wccftech spotted that leaker Harukaze5719 highlighted a post from ChannelGate (the Board Channels over in Asia) that cites sources in the supply chain who claim that TSMC has informed its customers of a 10% price rise.

The post observes that most of AMD's chips are manufactured by TSMC, and that Team Red has in turn notified its customers of a 10% "price adjustment" across its "entire chip product line".

That means everything, so on the consumer front, we can expect AMD's GPUs and Ryzen processors to be hit with price increases — and motherboard chipsets are also affected, so the price of those AMD boards will climb, too.

It's worth noting that processors aren't referred to explicitly in the post on the Board Channels, but given the mention of the entirety of AMD's chips, I think we can take that as real (as the leaker Harukaze5719 indicates).

The sources believe that AMD will enforce this new policy in Q4, so it could happen next month, in theory (although all of this remains a rumor).

In other RAM crisis bleakness, the Steam Frame arrived earlier this week with a much-inflated price tag compared to what Valve first envisioned for the VR headset. It starts at $1,059 / £889 / AU$1,609, which is a few hundred more dollars than what Valve was thinking originally.

As PC Gamer reports, a hardware engineer at Valve, Joy Lyons, said, "We set out to design [the Steam Frame] with one particular price in mind, but we've made choices to make sure that we're making a product that is choiceful, that people can purchase. They can upgrade with different features later. But we wanted to make sure we had a base product with really great performance. Then that price target shifted due to the ongoing RAM crisis around the world."

Analysis: a believable enough prediction

Sadly, the AMD rumor is another worrying doom nugget from what seems to be a never-ending supply of bad news in the past couple of months. Just this week, we've had a report that shows DDR5 RAM is somehow getting even more expensive, blowing past the levels I'd expected — not to mention the laptop price hikes.

The RAM crisis was forecast to worsen as 2026 rolled on, and that appears to be unfolding just as predicted — and there's very possibly worse to come in 2027, going by rumors elsewhere. If the pundits, analysts and insiders were right about this year, there's a fair chance they'll be right about next year, too.

Okay, so that's not a foregone conclusion, and some kind of more positive developments could yet happen — we can hope. This particular rumor must also be treated with some caution, as a Board Channels post may not have everything right (by any means), but the problem is that given the current climate, it's believable enough that AMD has price hikes in the works. Team Red already warned us earlier this year about pricing pain for the second half of 2026, after all.

• AMD is rumored to be working on its own version of DLSS 5
• A leaker says that the neural rendering tech will be launched with next-gen RDNA 5 GPUs
• That means we could be waiting until late 2027 or 2028 to see this debut, which might leave AMD lagging behind Nvidia considerably

AMD could be working on its own take on Nvidia's DLSS 5, and apparently this alternative attempt at neural rendering will be for its next-gen RDNA 5 graphics cards.

VideoCardz spotted that a known leaker in the GPU field, Kepler L2, posted on the Anandtech forum in a discussion around RDNA 5 speculation to say that: "AMD will have their own version of 'Neural Lighting' like DLSS5 next-gen."

Kepler then clarified that he didn't mean a version of Ray Reconstruction, but a take on DLSS 5 (neural rendering), and that next-gen RDNA 5 GPUs would be required because "this stuff is pretty heavy" (as in resource-intensive).

In a further post, Kepler elaborated: "There's a lot of issues with Nvidia's approach [with DLSS 5], but it's possible to have a version of this with minimal hallucinations and 'AI slop' look."

He then suggests a way that AMD could work its version to improve on DLSS 5, including giving the AI "direct access to 3D game data such as geometry, ray data, depth buffers, materials, etc so it doesn't have to guess and can accurately know how each object in a scene should interact with light."

Kepler's outline of a proposed alternative for AMD would have a separate model (AI) for lighting improvements, and another different model solely for the shading of complex surfaces. DLSS 5 bundles these together with its neural rendering system, and adds color-grading on top — to adopt what the AI judges as more natural colors — which Kepler advises that AMD should dispense with entirely.

Analysis: a race against time – or a chance to get it right?

I won't pretend to be able to critique what Kepler is suggesting as an alternative for AMD and the technical nuances therein, except to say that the idea is clearly to achieve a result that looks less like it's been 'messed' about with by AI and minimizes any 'slopification' therein — preserving more of the original artistic intent.

And that seems a laudable goal, of course, and it also brings up how AMD is in an interesting position here in lagging behind Nvidia with its graphics tech (which has, of course, been the case from the start, with FSR following DLSS — version 2.0 of Nvidia's upscaling tech was already in play, in fact, when FSR 1.0 arrived). Team Red can sit back for now and see how DLSS 5 plays out, as more games emerge that use it, and gauge the reaction of gamers, and forge its own neural rendering tech to tackle any perceived weaknesses.

The performance hit will be an obvious area to target, and if AMD can bring that down — it's substantial with DLSS 5 as it is now — that will obviously be a big win. That said, I'd expect Nvidia will be working with some haste to make DLSS 5 more performant, and as with DLSS 1, the tech will be improved considerably by the time Team Red has its own version out.

This is the other side of the equation here, where Nvidia could win out. With RDNA 5 GPUs not expected to arrive for at least a year, and quite possibly longer (the RAM crisis isn't helping), there's quite a lengthy timeframe on any AMD rival to DLSS 5. By the time it arrives, DLSS 5.5 may be in town with considerable improvements in tow. There's already been a notable turnaround in the perception of DLSS 5 with its official launch (compared to Nvidia's sneak preview earlier this year).

This is, of course, assuming AMD is indeed working on its own neural rendering technology, but I'd be surprised if this wasn't the case. For now, though, the word of a single leaker needs to be thoroughly seasoned, as ever, even though it's believable enough that Team Red would be aiming to use this on RDNA 5 graphics cards.

• DDR5 RAM has hit a new pricing high in the German market
• It's now 544% up on the price it was before the RAM crisis began
• This inflation backs up predictions of the memory shortage worsening, and Dell has just hiked the price of one of its popular laptops, too

If you wanted a telling example of how bad the cost of RAM is getting, the latest report on DDR5 pricing makes it crystal clear – and it reaches us as Dell moves to hike the price of its affordable XPS 13 laptop (in a roundabout way).

I'll come back to the ins-and-outs of what's happening with Dell, but first the DDR5 price jump, which has happened over in Germany.

3D Center keeps tabs on the monthly pricing of DDR5 memory in the German retail market – some 20 products are covered in this largest market in Europe – and as Wccftech flagged, the report for September shows this RAM is now 544% up on the price it was in July 2025 (the baseline level before the crisis began).

This is a big leap from 486% where the DDR5 price index sat in August, and since June, when it was at 419% having remained flat for much of the year. This obviously represents a depressingly hefty additional toll on the wallets of PC buyers or those upgrading their memory.

Meanwhile, as Mashable noticed, Dell has effectively upped the price of its XPS 13 laptop in the US, without actually increasing the baseline cost – instead of doing that, the laptop maker has introduced a new entry-level model with less storage.

So, previously the XPS 13 started from $699 in the US for the model with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. What Dell has done is brought in a new model with 256GB of storage at that $699 level, so while technically the cheapest XPS 13 is still at that price, you're getting a lower spec for the money.

The old baseline model with 8GB RAM and a 512GB SSD is now $799, so it's been hiked by $100 – a pretty nasty bump in cost that moves this notebook into a distinctly less affordable price bracket.

If you want the XPS 13 with 16GB of system memory (and 512GB of storage), that's also gone up $100 so it's now at $999. Do note that these are student-targeted laptops, and students get a $100 discount on the XPS 13, so you will pay less in that case. However, while $599 (with $100 off) remains a tempting price in this climate, 256GB storage is cutting it thin.

Analysis: as predicted, 2026 is turning much nastier with RAM

The DDR5 price spike is truly worrying in my opinion, simply because it's an acceleration of an already worsening picture. Yes, it's only one retail market and a snapshot of the overall landscape as such, but the same pattern is seen elsewhere. Just look at Tom's Hardware's price tracker, which shows 32GB of DDR5-5600 RAM in the US is now $409 (at the time of writing) compared to $72, which was the lowest price seen before the memory crisis.

That's over a 5.5x price increase in the US market (mirroring the German level of RAM inflation in this particular case). The end result is that what used to be a no-brainer of future-proofing any desktop PC – particularly a gaming rig – with 32GB of RAM is now a difficult choice to make, as sticking with 16GB is saving you $200 (or the regional equivalent). Bearing in mind that you're battling all sorts of other component inflation if you're building a new PC, too (most notably with the likes of SSDs and increasingly GPUs).

We were told that the second half of 2026 would see more RAM price misery, and these German market figures illustrate exactly that. Since June, buyers in the country have witnessed an effective 30% increase in the cost of DDR5 (when it was already hugely overinflated). It's worse than I imagined it could get, frankly, and I fear that the most pessimistic predictions – which also forecast a very rough 2027 – are very much on the money.

All these RAM price hikes are eventually reflected in the cost of laptops, of course, and the Dell XPS 13 provides an apt illustration here. Interestingly enough, I recently wrote about Dell's revelation of its new 14S laptop – which was shown off at IFA, but without any price tag being attached – saying that this made me nervous about how much the notebook might cost.

Given this XPS 13 hike, it's easy to see why Dell was hesitant, and to be fair to the company, it isn't the only manufacturer that's reticent to pin launch prices on incoming devices. This is becoming a trend because the memory shortage, and its knock-on effects, are making life difficult for all device makers.

• Nvidia's RTX 5090 is now over $9,000 in the US
• A new rumor suggests that RTX 6000 gaming GPUs are coming in 2027, maybe in the first half of the year
• If true, the price tag that's attached to the RTX 6090 will likely be colossal, and lower-tier GPUs could be pricey too

Nvidia's RTX 5090 flagship has hit new heights in terms of ridiculous asking prices, just as a new rumor suggests that RTX 6000 (Rubin) GPUs are coming in 2027 — earlier than anticipated, and to say the price of those next-gen offerings is a worry given the current climate is a huge understatement.

A Redditor pointed out the current state of RTX 5090 prices, which are close to commanding $10,000 in the US for some models. Notably, the Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 will set you back a princely $9,659 on Newegg US, although that's not sold directly by the retailer.

Indeed, none of the big retailers have any stock of the RTX 5090 anymore, and the only graphics cards you can buy are from third-party marketplace sellers, often shipping from Asia (that ROG Astral GPU comes from Hong Kong).

You can find more expensive RTX 5090s than that if you want to get the gold-plated version (Dhahab Edition) of the ROG Astral, which is now $11,999. The very cheapest RTX 5090 that I could find at the time of writing is an MSI Ventus model that's priced at $6,549 on Newegg.

What about outside of the US? Price inflation is rampant in other countries too. If we take the UK as an example, you can pick up an RTX 5090 for around £4,500 on Overclockers UK, which is still an eye-watering asking price. (And those are the cheapest GPUs — they go up in price from there to £6,600 for the aforementioned Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090).

It's an alarming situation, and one that heaps worries on top of a new rumor about the RTX 6000 launch as aired by Moore's Law is Dead (MLID) on YouTube (via TweakTown).

Previous rumors have contended that Nvidia's looking at 2028 for the arrival of its next-gen GeForce graphics cards, but a source at the firm told MLID that this is incorrect, and Team Green is aiming for a 2027 launch. Moreover, the current plan is still to get the RTX 6000 ball rolling for PC gamers in the first half of next year, meaning within the next nine months.

There's an obvious sticking point here, though: if the RTX 6000 generation is this close, how come we haven't had much in the way of leaks yet, and nothing of any real substance? The source claims that this is due to Nvidia's management successfully clamping down on leaks with the next-gen products.

The first offering will presumably be the RTX 6090 (or maybe an RTX 6080 as well), and it's going to have some kind of interesting spin on the design — though we aren't told what. It could have beefed up hardware to better cope with running DLSS 5, perhaps, as that would make sense — something to help deal with the performance hit of neural rendering would clearly be very welcome.

Analysis: house deposit or GPU?

There are obvious problems with a possible RTX 6000 launch next year, if we take this rumor at face value. As noted, the RTX 5090 is now being sold for beyond ridiculous prices — and so how much is an RTX 6090 going to run? The fiscal equivalent of an ultramarathon, presumably, and with AI demand likely coming into play with this GPU, the next-gen flagship could be 'unobtainium,' as the disgruntled gamers out there are already predicting.

When you consider that the RAM crisis is going to get worse next year, going by the more recent forecasts from analysts and industry insiders, video RAM is going to be more problematic — and how much of the stuff will be on an RTX 6090? — it all adds up to a frightening prospect for an MSRP. And the likely reality is that the price to actually buy the next-gen Rubin gaming flagship will blow well past that towering recommended cost. (The RTX 6080 won't likely be much different, either.)

For all these reasons, I find it difficult to believe that Nvidia will go ahead and launch the RTX 6000 series next year. Surely it makes sense to wait longer, although what Team Green may know is that 2028 isn't going to be any better for RAM price inflation, and so perhaps that's why next year is greenlit for next-gen GeForce graphics cards to arrive. It's a sobering thought. As one Redditor observed: "Can't wait to decide if I want a down payment on a house or an Nvidia GPU."

• A new report from KB Securities gets very gloomy about the RAM crisis
• We're told the "memory chip market is heading toward a severe supply shortage" in 2027
• AI demand has ramped up massively with infrastructure investments up 60% year-on-year to $1.3 trillion, creating even more demand for memory as fuel for that rise

If you thought the RAM crisis was going to get worse next year, you're very probably right — but apparently we might suffer an even more severe shortage than some analysts already expect.

Wccftech flagged up an article from Business Korea (translated from Korean), which suggests that the RAM squeeze is tightening its grip on two of the biggest memory chip makers.

Citing a report from KB Securities, the rumor is that Samsung and SK Hynix are now down to fewer than 10 days of memory inventory, which is very close to running dry.

This has caused concerns that available memory supplies could dwindle and be depleted in 2027, with analysts believing that the "memory chip market is heading toward a severe supply shortage" (again, bear in mind this is a translation, but the message is clear enough).

KB Securities notes that the AI boom is what's causing this, as memory chip manufacturers struggle to meet demand for HBM4 memory in AI data centers. Infrastructure investments for AI development have been revised upwards to $1.3 trillion for 2027, we're told, which is a 60% year-on-year increase.

Kim Dong-won, head of research at KB Securities, told Business Korea that: "AI servers will absorb demand for not only HBM but also server DDR5 and enterprise SSDs, potentially leading to a historic shortage."

There's a brighter spot of news from laptop maker Framework though, which, as VideoCardz reports, has taken an unusual step in reducing the price of some of its products. As you may recall, Framework has been hiking laptop prices due to the increased cost of RAM (as have other notebook manufacturers), but the company just announced that it has secured some fresh memory modules at a lower price.

This means that some of its current Framework Laptop orders will be knocked down in price, and the company said on X that it's "retroactively reducing prices for orders that shipped at higher price" too.

Analysis: there's a historic level of gloom, that much is certain

It's impressive to see Framework acting in the best interests of its customers, particularly seeing as the firm could have (theoretically) kept quiet about bagging a batch of cheaper memory chips, and just kept the difference itself.

While that's commendable, it's a pretty small (but still welcome) bone we're being thrown in the face of the bad news for the RAM crisis here. Talk of a "historic shortage" is worrying, and it feels like this is an escalation of the recent chatter about global memory supply woes which has already turned highly negative.

While this latest report talks about server DDR5 RAM (and HBM), this will obviously have a bearing on consumer products, too. Those less profitable memory sticks are going to end up sidelined even further.

With rumors about GPU price hikes again coming to the fore this week, it's difficult to catch a breath between the bouts of bad news. We can hope that the pessimism is overblown here, but I can't shake the feeling that this seems unlikely.

• Japanese retailer warns of further GPU price hikes
• The retailer doesn't specify which GPUs will see increases
• Consumers are urged to buy now, but GPUs are already overpriced and unaffordable in many cases

The PC hardware market is still in disarray, with RAM shortages impacting almost every component, and unfortunately, matters could get even worse for GPU hunters.

As reported by VideoCardz, Japanese retailer Applied has warned consumers about potential price hikes for GPUs (yet again). It's unclear which GPU models this might apply to, but the retailer urges PC owners looking to upgrade their GPUs to buy as soon as possible.

VideoCardz also highlights that Japanese retailers only recently adjusted GPU prices upwards. In August, stores in Akihabara warned that pricing would be around 20% to 30% higher than usual.

Considering the recent rumblings of price hikes from Nvidia's board partners, it's fair to suggest that these increases will likely apply to other regions outside of Japan (assuming there's anything in these rumors).

If it wasn't exactly clear already, these price hikes are caused by the RAM crisis which is affecting all manner of PC components. Graphics cards are hit due to the rising cost of the video RAM on board.

Panic buying still isn't the best solution

PC owners are now hard-pressed to find affordable hardware upgrades, and it's been that way since the start of 2026. The RAM crisis is showing zero signs of slowing down, too, especially with reports from Samsung and industry analysts suggesting that the memory shortage will last past 2027 or beyond that, even.

Despite that, I still don't think it's the best idea to panic buy now when it comes to a GPU. Many Nvidia GeForce or AMD Radeon third-party GPUs are either unaffordable or overpriced at various major retailers. Prime examples of the former are the RTX 5080 at $1,699 at Best Buy in the US currently, while the RTX 5060 remains overpriced between $450 and $500, despite its $299 MSRP.

The same goes for AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT, which has a $599 MSRP but can now cost up to $929 (specifically the Gigabyte overclocked model). The Radeon RX 9060 XT (16GB) also sits at least $200 to $300 above its MSRP, and the list goes on (in the US and elsewhere).

Simply put, buying a new GPU doesn't seem worth it unless you're a gamer looking to dive into the PC ecosystem for the first time. That's a harsh reality to accept, but panic buying might do more harm than good by increasing demand (which could lead to further short-term price hikes).

• More mods are out for DLSS 5
• They allow for the tech to be easily used with many more PC games
• One of these mods also alters the way in which DLSS 5 is applied to improve performance considerably — at a cost

As you've no doubt seen, modders have been having a field day messing about with Nvidia's DLSS 5, and the latest experiments include a trick to boost performance in a big way, and a method of easily running the tech in a lot more games.

Let's start with the latter, which as TweakTown reports is the DLSS 5 Swapper app which appeared on GitHub courtesy of developer Rakan Alkhaldi.

This takes the pain out of having to manually fudge DLSS 5 to work in unsupported games by automating the process, adding all the required files in the blink of an eye. You just drag and drop the game folder into the app, and it takes care of everything from there.

Swapper can even detect games on the PC it's installed on which can have DLSS 5 modded in. Not every game is supported, of course, but plenty are — and any given title doesn't necessarily have to have DLSS support at all, in any form (this is achieved via another community mod called DLSS 5 Feeder which is included with Swapper).

A similar tool, DLSS 5 Autopilot, published by 'Kizzuwatnaa' and also on Github, offers one-click DLSS 5 setup (via Feeder) along with an additional trick in the form of the 'neural upstream' add-on (from 'matiasLombo'). This runs the neural rendering (AI) process before the DLSS upscaling happens.

Normally, the AI polishing that DLSS 5 applies is performed as the last step of the rendering process to the upscaled final frame, but if you choose this option with Autopilot, it's happening earlier in the chain of events.

Based on experiments detailed on Reddit (posted by ToxicFatee), this makes a major difference to performance. The Redditor has an RTX 4080, and ran Assassin's Creed Shadows at 4K which went from 63 frames per second (fps) to 31fps with DLSS 5, but it was around 50fps with the neural upstream take on DLSS 5. That's a 20% loss, and a far more palatable hit on the frame rate rather than it being cut in half.

Others have aired similar results on Reddit, and there's plenty of excitement about what's being achieved with this mod (and the automated implementation of DLSS 5 across all manner of games). As one Redditor put it: "Absolutely amazing time to be a PC gamer."

Analysis: tread carefully with unofficial mods

All these latest developments with modding are great to see, but for me, it ends at just seeing this progress. By which I mean I wouldn't advise jumping in and installing these kinds of mods – as wonderful as they seem – and I'm content to merely observe, and see the frame rates and visual results, that others are getting. And we aren't short of these observations of late.

Why do I take that view? Well, for starters, I'm not keen on installing third-party software from unknown sources as a rule, because of the concerns around security that this involves. Granted, these are open-source tools (so can be checked over), and I'm sure they're on the proverbial level; but nevertheless, I'd still rather be careful around the risks of viruses and the like.

The second note of caution here pertains to the idea of messing with the rendering pipeline in terms of having DLSS 5 applied earlier in the process (with the Autopilot mod). This will likely involve image degradation or artifacts to some extent — or generally messing with the graphics more than Team Green intended — and I'm sure if this really was a genuinely better way of doing things, Nvidia would've used this route itself. As per observations on Reddit, there does appear to be a quality trade-off for the improved performance here.

All that said, perhaps there will be some kind of official option along these 'performance or quality' lines in the future, as some gamers are already hoping. However, DLSS 5 is, for now, officially designed to work with just one supported title, NBA 2K27, and it does an excellent job with that basketball game.

Following the leak of the tech and a raft of unofficial mods, this week saw Nvidia's official launch of DLSS 5, with the company showing it off in NBA 2K27 at Gamescom 2026 and providing some further illuminating details.

Before, after Nvidia's initial DLSS 5 reveal in March, I was skeptical on some points, but I wasn't tearing holes in the idea like some gamers were. However, this week, we've seen a rapid shift in opinions and the general online sentiment around DLSS 5 — and I'm a good deal more excited about this AI trickery myself.

Indeed, I think there are a number of reasons to be hopeful that DLSS 5 could prove to be a compelling step forward for PC gaming, from Nvidia's clarification on support for GPUs, through to what modders have shown that the tech can achieve since it was leaked — some of which is truly eye-opening.

Here are my five reasons why Nvidia's incoming neural rendering model could turn out to be a very literal game-changer.

1. Nvidia has clarified that DLSS 5 won't just be for RTX 5000 GPUs

While DLSS 5 is currently only supported by RTX 5000 graphics cards — the tech went live this week in NBA 2K27 — Nvidia has confirmed that it will come to older GeForce GPUs. Indeed, we won't have to wait that long before wider support is ushered in, which is good news.

VideoCardz spotted an update from an Nvidia rep on Reddit which stated: "Our current focus is on optimizing performance for the GeForce RTX 50 Series with model updates expected later this fall. Once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series."

So, we could be looking at early 2027 for work to begin on bringing DLSS 5 to RTX 4000 models — and possibly previous generations of GPUs will be in line for the same treatment. Modders have already got the tech working on RTX 3000 and 2000 models, after all — although the performance levels could well be the sticking point here.

At any rate, this puts paid to fears that DLSS 5 could remain locked to just the latest Nvidia RTX 5000 graphics cards.

2. Continual optimization should improve performance a good deal

I just touched on performance, and this is the area which has proved to be the biggest downer with the mentioned unofficial experiments that have been conducted with DLSS 5.

As Tom's Hardware observes, the performance hit with DLSS 5 is a nasty one, and it's generally causing a 40% to 50% drop in frame rates. In some reports, it's less than this (more like 30%), and what we have to remember is that all these unofficial figures are based on a pre-release version of DLSS 5 being fudged into play by modders.

The final version of DLSS 5 will likely provide better performance, and in any case, optimization is going to be high on Nvidia's list of priorities. I'd be surprised if there weren't major strides taken in this department as 2027 rolls around and more games are supported.

3. Experimental results with DLSS 5 are pretty incredible

Those modders playing with the leaked version of DLSS 5 have clearly shown us that this tech can be used to produce seriously impressive results. Of course, on the official front, the demo of NBA 2K27 at Gamescom 2026 proved the case that this AI-powered graphics uplift can work wonders, too.

That said, the benefits of DLSS 5 are situational to an extent, and it's not a silver bullet for making all graphics better. It really shines in certain use cases, though. For example, even if you don't want the main character models in a game to have the tech applied because you hate that idea, it can still make a huge difference to background details, and the likes of the faces of NPCs in the lurking atmospheric crowds which are the backdrop for open world games.

As one Redditor points out: "NPC crowd faces are one of the best use cases for it [DLSS 5]. It sometimes takes you out of the game when you're talking to a character model that's clearly been hand crafted with a lot of effort, and as you said then there's some janky smooth skinned ghoul walking by you lol. Watching an LTT [Linus Tech Tips] vid where they showed the difference in random NPCs was actually super impressive."

DLSS 5 can also transform lighting and shadows to make graphics look far more realistic, including character models — some of the results shared by modders in a megathread on Reddit make that crystal clear. I was blown away by some of these examples, frankly. When it works, DLSS 5 works really well — although it doesn't always come off.

That said, some of the wonkier examples that have been aired are down to modders being daft with the sliders and options on offer, which brings me onto my next point.

4. Tuning options are key for DLSS 5

As noted, some of the more stomach-churning moments from the various modders messing around with DLSS 5 have come from those folks ramping up the intensity of the sliders — sometimes intentionally just to provoke an anti-AI reaction.

There's a decent level of granular control over various aspects of what DLSS 5 does (including intensity, tone, and structure), and when a game developer properly tunes the tech for their particular release, the effect is going to be more subtle, appropriate, and in line with the overall art direction. (Well, hopefully — you'd assume this will be the case, anyway).

Used judiciously, it's clear enough that DLSS 5 can really enhance the visuals of a game — modders have proved that in some cases, and NBA 2K27 is a great official example of how this works, too.

Yes, it is very possible to get 'uncanny valley' kind of effects with character models if you're extravagantly flinging sliders up towards their maximum limits — and not every game's art or graphics style suits DLSS 5, by any means. But we come back to the last point — when it works, it really does work.

5. DLSS 5 will probably age like a fine wine (ahem)

My final point is a simple — but important — one. And okay, I've said this before, but I think it bears repeating. Rewind time back to when Nvidia revealed the original DLSS, the very first take on this tech that was purely about upscaling, and it had some quite pronounced flaws. Problems like blurriness, ghosting and artifacts proved a blight on the upscaled graphics, but these were issues that Nvidia resolved with the next iteration of the tech.

I'd expect there will be examples of DLSS 5 which show the visuals going off the rails in a similar kind of way, although it already looks off to a far better start than DLSS 1. The point being that whatever we think now, at launch, may change quite drastically in a year or two, and there's a genuine potential for DLSS 5 to be revolutionary in polishing up gaming graphics — albeit that caveats around its misuse and situational nature aren't going to go away.

• The Lexar Muse SSD gets as thin as 1mm (0.04 inches)
• It comes with a proprietary connection mechanism
• 512GB and 1TB storage models of the drive will be available

Every year at the IFA tech expo, there are claims of gadgets being lighter, thinner, faster, and smarter than ever before — but amid the usual crop of claims we've seen in 2026, the Lexar Muse particularly stands out.

This is officially the thinnest portable SSD on the market, measuring a mere 1mm (0.04 inches) at its thinnest points around the edges, and a not-exactly-chunky 3.8mm (0.15 inches) at its thickest point in the middle.

It's not unlike a credit card in terms of its looks and dimensions, and Lexar seems particularly keen to promote the idea of it being used strapped to the back of a MagSafe iPhone to provide some additional storage space on the go.

The unibody metal enclosure around the drive has been formed from a single piece of metal to minimize gaps and seams, while some space saving has gone on inside with custom PCB architecture and high-density NAND stacking.

Speeds and storage

What's a little unusual here is the connectivity, which has to happen via the magnetic pogo-in connector on the back of the drive — there's no traditional USB-C port that you can plug an existing cable into.

You do get a bespoke cable included with the drive, as well as a carry case for easily attaching the drive to the back of something like an iPhone. However, the magnetic connection might not be the most robust.

The Lexar Muse offers some respectable read and write speeds of up to 1,050MB/s and 1,000MB/s respectively (so good enough for 4K 120fps Pro Res video on an iPhone), and there are going to be 512GB and 1TB models available.

As is often the case at IFA, there's no word on pricing yet, but you can expect the Lexar Muse to hit shelves before the end of the year. If you prioritize thinness and lightness over everything else, it may be worth checking out.

• CD Projekt Red's joint CEO Michal Nowakowski has confidence in game consoles coping with the RAM crisis
• Nowakowski is convinced consoles will 'weather the storm', as analysts expect shortages to continue through 2027
• Sony isn't just facing the RAM crisis, but also a major backlash over its decision to end physical game discs

The RAM crisis is continuing to cause havoc with the hardware market, affecting component prices, PC makers, and potentially delaying next-gen console launches. However, it's not so bleak as you might think, at least in the eyes of CD Projekt Red's boss.

As reported by IGN, CD Projekt Red's (CDPR) joint CEO Michal Nowakowski was interviewed by The Game Business and voiced his confidence that next-gen consoles will survive the RAM crisis despite the prospect of high pricing.

This comes amid concerns and projections from industry insiders and analysts that RAM shortages are going to get worse in 2027 and beyond. The big three memory chip makers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — are expected to increase combined capital spending to nearly 340% from 2024 to 2027.

It doesn't look like RAM shortages and high hardware prices will die down anytime soon, but this doesn't faze Nowakowski, at least when it comes to ensuring CDPR delivers the best possible content.

"Consoles are still necessary to broaden the audience on the casual or semi-casual level. It's important to have easy to plug in and enjoy gaming," Nowakowski says.

"I'm a big believer that they're [consoles] going to weather the storm. Pricing is the objective challenge. And the rumors... we hear them about the next-gen being delayed. I don't know if they're true."

RAM isn't the only worry for Sony

Besides the RAM crisis pushing up prices and causing potential console launch delays, Sony in particular may have an uphill battle ahead. Its recent decision to end production of physical game discs for PlayStation consoles, starting in January 2028, already has gamers in the ecosystem protesting and planning alternatives to escape the impending doom of discs.

An all-digital future means any form of game ownership will cease to exist, as digital content can theoretically be taken away from gamers at any time, and that has led to a loud (and justified, I think) reaction from the console community.

The Game Business didn't question Nowakowski directly about physical game ownership, but did probe further on the effect that delayed next-gen consoles might have, with Nowakowski making CDPR's stance very clear.

"If the next-gen gets delayed, it could be the case that some ideas [for games] are put on a shelf for the future. We'd have to adjust. We're not worried on the commercial side. Consoles are here to stay."

It's fair to say that Nowakowski's last statement is a realistic assessment. Even given Sony's dismissal of physical game discs, this isn't going to lead to a complete collapse in the popularity of consoles.

However, Sony may not make life easy for itself and publishers such as CDPR, as from 2028, when the discs are dumped with the PlayStation ecosystem, a hit to games sales is far from impossible — especially if the ongoing backlash from gamers is anything to go by.

• Nvidia's latest graphics driver has a frustrating bug
• Version 616.56 is causing distracting screen flickers and color corruption
• A patch is coming, and there are potential workarounds — but gamers are getting fed up with the prevalence of bugs in GeForce drivers

Nvidia's latest graphics driver is causing chaos for some GeForce GPU owners in the form of a glitch that makes the screen flicker.

Wccftech spotted the bug with Nvidia's Game Ready Driver version 616.56, and as flagged by Renan Maniero on X, Team Green has said it's testing a fix for the issue (as revealed on the GeForce forums).

The screen is reportedly flickering white or black and exhibiting other brief flashes of color corruption, and this is happening in certain games (The Last of Us and Minecraft are mentioned, among others) or on the Windows desktop. It's also occurring in web browser sessions and while playing YouTube videos, based on Reddit reports — of which there are plenty.

There's no shortage of gamers losing their temper with Nvidia, too, and blasting Team Green for the quality of its graphics drivers. Many are venting with an observation that GeForce drivers just haven't been the same since the launch of the RTX 5000 series.

For example, this Redditor says: "It's been particularly bad since Blackwell [RTX 5000] release. Just on Blackwell alone, between the whole DisplayPort 2.1 not working with HDR, screen flickering, and black screens on the initial release, it's been a complete mess."

Another gamer complains: "It is pretty shocking seeing this from a trillionaire company on a stable build. Nothing about this driver is stable."

Yet another Redditor grumbles: "It's crazy how things are now. You used to be able to update each time or be one driver behind at worst. Now I'm half a year outdated and thinking I'll just leave it."

Analysis: more drivers, more problems? There are possible workarounds though

This seems like quite a widespread issue and one that affects modern Nvidia graphics cards all the way back to RTX 2000 models.

If you're getting frustrated by this bug — random screen flickering gets pretty old, pretty fast, if it's happening regularly — Maniero also shared an apparent potential workaround on X that you can try while waiting for the official fix.

Seemingly, this is a bug that mostly affects monitors in 8-bit mode, and if you switch to 10-bit color (assuming your display supports this), the problem may disappear. Maniero also suggests that you try turning on Windows Auto Color Management (ACM).

Other folks on Reddit have shared various possible remedies, including switching from DisplayPort to an HDMI connector instead, and disabling Multi-Plane Overlay (MPO) in Windows 11, as one Redditor suggested. Nvidia provides a Registry file for turning off MPO (and enabling it again), but as ever with anything in this area of Windows, proceed at your own risk. (Although this method should be much safer than trying to edit the Registry directly yourself).

Your other choice is simply to roll back driver 616.56 to an earlier version, and there's no shortage of gamers who've done exactly that and report that the problem vanishes.

Hopefully Nvidia's official flicker-begone patch will be coming soon enough in the form of a hotfix, because this is an unduly annoying gremlin in the GeForce works that needs to be sorted out promptly.

• Nvidia unveiled DLSS 5 at Gamescom 2026, showing it off in NBA 2K27
• DLSS 5 will launch alongside NBA 2K27, and be available from September 3, 2026
• DLSS 5 is exclusive to RTX 5000 GPUs, but Nvidia is working to eventually make it available on older GeForce cards

It's no secret that Nvidia's reveal of DLSS 5 earlier this year led to instant controversy and a backlash from gamers, not to mention game developers. The technology was branded as generative 'AI slop', effectively changing the look and style of character models, notably Leon S. Kennedy and Grace Ashcroft in Resident Evil Requiem.

Since then, Nvidia has worked on developing its neural rendering tech, and DLSS 5 is now ready for launch — and it's arguably being used in the game that's most appropriate for it.

DLSS 5 will debut on September 3, 2026, and will be first available in NBA 2K27 on September 4. The new tech will be exclusive to RTX 5000 GPUs, but Nvidia made it clear that it will explore ways to bring DLSS 5 to older generations of GeForce graphics cards eventually.

At Nvidia's Gamescom 2026 booth, I was treated to a brief hands-on sample of DLSS 5 running in NBA 2K27, on multiple systems including an RTX 5060 gaming laptop and also on GeForce Now.

Much to my surprise, DLSS 5 looks absolutely amazing with NBA 2K27's environments and character models, providing a level of realism that can only be described as the next leap in visuals for gaming.

The level of detail in character faces in terms of lighting and shadows is truly next-level, and it's all possible thanks to AI-enhanced lighting on the rendered frame, which Nvidia states is trained to 'preserve artistic intent'.

When DLSS 5 was first revealed in March, I was bewildered by what Nvidia was attempting, which appeared to be generative AI used to make everything in-game more lifelike. If it wasn't clear already, I have strong feelings against generative AI in gaming, but my initial fears were misplaced, as this isn't what DLSS 5 is about.

DLSS 5 uses three different models, with each including options for structure intensity, tone intensity, and masking. Structure and tone are both responsible for aspects such as ambient occlusion, contact shadows, reflections, and broader lighting.

Masking allows manual or automatic control of where each effect is applied, and Nvidia has designed DLSS 5 for developers to have full control over the final frame that's rendered.

The DLSS 5 model running in NBA 2K27 was fine-tuned directly by the game's developer, not Nvidia, and the result is way different from the first glimpse of DLSS 5 in March. What was illuminating here is that the team at Nvidia stressed that the initial reveal had the sliders for each of those models at maximum levels.

As I saw with NBA 2K27, when put in the hands of developers, it's easier to see just how great DLSS 5 is when used appropriately. Developers will be able to adjust the intensity for each scene for both the environment (foliage and other objects) as well as character models.

Performance is a different ball game too

DLSS 5 isn't exactly easy to run, which isn't a huge surprise considering how realistic the results are. However, Nvidia has made significant progress in six months: DLSS 5 required two RTX 5090 GPUs to function at the initial reveal, and now works with any RTX 5000 series GPU.

The RTX 5060 gaming laptop running NBA 2K27 displayed very smooth performance, only using Frame Generation x2 with DLSS 5 enabled. This was a big surprise to say the least, and suggests that it may not take as long as expected to introduce this new tech to RTX 4000 series GPUs (and older).

My only concern at this stage isn't related to Nvidia at all, in fact. DLSS 5 on its own now looks very useful for producing lifelike visuals, and seems set to be the future for impressively detailed graphics.

Visual Concepts, the developer behind NBA 2K27, has done enough here to quell my fears that DLSS 5 would somehow mess with game art and design direction in a negative way.

However, we're yet to see how other developers will implement the tool in their games. I'm somewhat worried that many could fall into the trap of using DLSS 5 as a shortcut for great game visuals, rather than an added bonus on top of already well-crafted graphics.

I shared similar concerns regarding Nvidia's Multi Frame Generation, and how developers may rely on this very useful tool as a band-aid for poor game optimization.

Fortunately, though, if NBA 2K27 is anything to go by in terms of what to expect from the likes of Capcom, Bethesda, and Ubisoft, then I'm excited to see DLSS 5 implemented in upcoming games. After all, it is an optional game setting, so if you don't like it, you don't have to use the tech.

Nvidia's DLSS 5 has been nothing short of a bubbling cauldron of controversy ever since the next-gen gaming tech was first aired. That initial reception shocked Nvidia as what seemed like a legion of PC gamers took up arms and vowed, well, all sorts of colorful things — most of them involving the term 'AI slop' in some fashion.

However, there are signs that this overwhelmingly negative tide of opinion is turning courtesy of a fresh revelation this week. This comes in the form of a leak rather than anything official from Nvidia, with Team Green's only DLSS revelations at Gamescom 2026 pertaining to the current incarnation of the feature (namely DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction for better quality ray-traced graphics, alongside some interesting GeForce Now announcements).

To refresh your memory and recap — in a nutshell, as there's a lot more to it than this — Nvidia has billed DLSS 5 as a 'real-time neural rendering model' that polishes up a game's visuals using AI (without altering the game assets, and with the developer being given a decent level of control over the exact implementation).

What actually happened here was that on Friday, VideoCardz spotted that following NBA 2K27's early access going live, a DLSS 'neural rendering' DLL was discovered in the build. It didn't take long at all before modders (in the RenoDX community) fudged things to get this working in games ('SpeedLemur' being the principal modder who "made this happen").

So, in theory this is effectively our first glimpse at DLSS 5 in the wild, with those modders demonstrating what it looks like by using the third-person fling-stuff-about action-adventure Control – as seen on Reddit. However, do note that the tech is only working for application to character models for now (not the environment or objects).

Nuts and bolts

There have been some very interesting revelations from those experimenting with this apparent leak of DLSS 5 in terms of how it works, how it runs — and perhaps most telling is the broad reaction to this spillage, which I'll return to shortly.

First, the nitty-gritty. In this leaked form — so add a whole heap of seasoning, because nothing here is remotely official — DLSS 5 seems to have a small set of adjustable parameters, including seven different 'styles' and various sliders to play with intensity, tone and structure. We're told that neural rendering doesn't need much in the way of data to do its stuff, and works off much the same inputs as regular DLSS (basic upscaling – where all this started, remember?).

It's also for Nvidia RTX 5000 GPUs only (although that's still not fully confirmed, it was always likely to be the case anyway). The news on the performance front goes a bit awry, though, with the discovery that in Control the frame rate is cut in half by the AI polishing up the visuals. With an Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti running Control at 4K with ray tracing on high and DLSS (Quality), the frame rate was 71 fps and it dropped to 35 fps with neural rendering.

That is, of course, a nasty hit indeed. However, this is a piece of leaked code – in an unknown state as far as the stage of development is concerned (one clue suggests that the model may date back to the start of July) — extracted and fudged to work on an old game. Given all that, we can't take this as anything like an indication of what the finished version of DLSS 5 might be like performance-wise.

Although it's at least comforting that it works in a playable (enough) manner on a single RTX 5070 Ti graphics card, because if you recall, Nvidia's demos used not one, but two, RTX 5090 GPUs. Clearly a 50% frame rate drop won't fly, granted, but Nvidia wouldn't release this neural rendering trick if the hit was anything like that, because no gamer would use it in that state.

Change in tone

What we can really take from this leak and the modding efforts thereafter is quite limited, then. But what's clear is that as mentioned, there's been a marked turnaround in the commentary and debate on the image quality on offer with neural rendering.

As one Redditor observes: "Remarkable difference in tone of the reactions compared to when the [initial] Resident Evil footage was released."

Someone replying to that says: "People freaked out about what was obviously just a bad demo, and failed to see what was actually going on with the underlying tech.

"There were a few talking about how different tone mapping fixed the issue with minimal effort, or how it wasn't actually adding/changing details, and it turns out they were correct. People freaked out over nothing imo."

Another gamer notes: "This looks like legit magic. I was saying this when the reveal happened and people wanted to burn Nvidia down: the tech is amazing, the demo might be off because it's too heavy handed, but the tech itself is incredibly impressive."

And a further Redditor enthuses: "Insanely huge graphical update. There's no going back."

You get the idea, then, and it's quite an eye-opener how many comments there are along these lines. Quite a lot of gamers are impressed by this leaked spin on DLSS 5 — and I can see why, frankly, at least with the Control material presented here.

And remember, this is with DLSS 5 working on character models, with the facial tinkering and tweaking being one of the main causes of concern with Nvidia's initial demos. The likes of Flight Simulator addicts are positively drooling about what this might mean for the graphics of the landscapes beneath their virtual wings.

And there's a lot of excitement about how the tech might be applied to older games like Control to make them look a good deal better.

Skeptics remain

Naturally, not everyone is convinced. The detractors remain and are unswayed by the material which has popped up around this leak so far. They argue that the AI-enhanced Jesse (Control's protagonist) is still all too 'uncanny valley' in appearance, and that DLSS 5 is still very much a visual downgrade.

Others also worry that there aren't enough fine-grained controls for the developer in what we see here. Although again, we can't take this leak as evidence of what DLSS 5 will turn out to be eventually, whether that's the end result of the graphics themselves or the suite of dev controls under the hood.

The performance hit has been seized on, too — as noted, though we can't judge on that yet, not with an early leak — and some feel that while screenshots might look good, this doesn't hold up in motion.

Simply put: it is still too early to judge, and we need to grab large handfuls of seasoning with all this. But the general sentiment on DLSS 5 appears to be turning around in quite a sizable shift of opinion — and Nvidia may yet convert PC gamers to its AI-enhanced vision of the future (providing any performance hurdles are cleared, of course).

• Nvidia GPUs are about to run out of road in Windows 10
• Game Ready Driver support finishes in just two months
• With the last such driver coming in October, you need to bear in mind issues around game performance optimization and fixes – but you'll still get security updates

Gamers running Windows 10 need to be aware that if they have an Nvidia GPU, they're only two months away from that graphics card running out of road for support with drivers.

VideoCardz reminded us that Nvidia's deadline for ditching Windows 10 support is now nearly upon us, with the final Game Ready Driver that supports the older operating system arriving in October 2026.

Does that mean you need to be thinking about upgrading to Windows 11 if you have an Nvidia graphics card?

No, it doesn't – well, not necessarily, although there is a major downside to remaining on Windows 10 after October of this year. In case you're at all unsure, let's dive into the exact ins-and-outs of what's happening here – as well as touching on the subject of whether Nvidia might just have a change of heart here.

You'll still be secure with an Nvidia GPU

The key point to remember is that while the Game Ready Driver that comes out in November 2026 won't support Windows 10, Nvidia will still provide security updates for your graphics card. As Team Green explained in a short FAQ: "Windows 10 driver support will transition to a quarterly security update for a period of three years where critical bug fixes will be delivered to end users through October 2029."

That means Windows 10 users will get an update every three months to fix any critical bugs or security flaws with the Nvidia drivers. This will continue for another three years, so effectively to the end of the decade.

At that point, when 2030 is about to roll around, you will then potentially be risking exposure to a vulnerability as any driver security holes will no longer be patched. But that's still a good long way off.

So what does the end of Game Ready Driver support really mean?

After October, Windows 10 PCs will only get the benefit of these quarterly security updates, and they won't be covered by Nvidia's regular Game Ready Driver packages. That means as new games come out, Windows 10 users won't get the performance optimizations that these driver releases contain – or bug fixes for these titles.

As time goes on, then, more and more PC games will be left out in the cold in terms of that tweaking and optimization. That's bad news, of course, although it doesn't mean those games will be somehow unplayable. In fact, in many cases they might be just fine – but there are no guarantees, and you may get subpar frame rates (indeed, that's quite likely to be the case to some extent).

Of course, existing games will continue to run just as they always have, and you shouldn't run into any issues on that score.

Could there yet be a reprieve from Nvidia?

If you're not happy about the idea of not getting the latest patches, tweaks, and optimizations for new PC games, then you'll have to seriously start to think about planning your upgrade to Windows 11.

Assuming you have an upgrade path, that is, because your PC may not meet the hardware requirements of the newer OS. (Although bear in mind that a simple BIOS tweak may be all that's needed to ensure compatibility with the TPM requirement). If you're looking at a major PC upgrade, or an entirely new rig, that's a painful prospect given the RAM crisis and all the price hikes around that.

As one Redditor puts it: "'This is terrible news considering PC prices."

However, as another gamer on that Reddit thread observes, there may yet be a glimmer of hope of a reprieve from Nvidia. If you recall, just a couple of months ago, Microsoft quietly extended consumer support for Windows 10 for a further year, through to October 2027.

Now, when Nvidia announced the end of driver support for October 2026, which happened last year, as far as Team Green was concerned, it was aligning the curtailment of Game Ready Driver releases for Windows 10 with Microsoft's original consumer support extension. But now Microsoft has pushed out extended support for another additional year to October 2027 – could Nvidia mirror this move?

It doesn't seem likely, in all honesty, and I'd think Nvidia would have announced this already if it was the intention. Concrete driver plans are likely already in place that can't be changed. That said, you never know – and we can't fully rule out the notion of a last-minute reprieve. Watch this space.

• GPU price hikes are coming later this year, PC Partner Group warns
• The parent company of Zotac notes that entry-level GPUs will suffer 'more severe shortages'
• A manufacturer of gaming monitors, KTC, has also warned on price hikes

PC gamers should be aware that there are further signs that GPUs could get more expensive, and gaming monitors too, so you might want to consider buying now rather than waiting.

First off, the gloomy GPU news which comes from PC Partner Group (PC PG), an Asian graphics card giant based in Singapore and the parent company of Zotac, Inno3D, and Manli.

VideoCardz reports that PC PG just published its latest fiscal results that came with a warning on GPU pricing as part of the trends and conditions which are likely to affect the company's finances in the upcoming year.

PC PG notes that "graphics memory costs are expected to rise further, leading to a substantial increase in VGA Card costs in the second half of the year." VGA Card simply refers to discrete PC graphics cards, and although it's a well outdated term now, it's one still used behind the scenes in the industry.

PC PG says that shipments of GPUs "declined substantially" in the first half of this year, and that they're likely to drop further in the second half of 2026. The firm writes that: "Beyond the price increases, entry-level VGA Cards are expected to face even more severe shortages, which may further drive ASP [the 'average selling price'] upward in the second half of 2026."

The company also highlights that other PC components, including system RAM and CPUs, are taking longer to get hold of.

VideoCardz also noticed that monitor pricing could be on an upward trajectory, too, as manufacturer KTC has issued a notice of a likely 'product price adjustment' in the future.

KTC observes that the "production cost of monitors has increased significantly" and that it can no longer absorb those pressures, therefore: "KTC's monitor product line may see a price increase in the future."

While that's just a 'may' rather than a 'will' or a certainty, it sounds like there's a high likelihood of it happening. Particularly because KTC advises: "For users with a clear need to purchase a device [monitor] in the near future, the current pricing window offers excellent value for money, and we recommend planning your purchase time accordingly."

And at the end of its statement, KTC talks about price adjustments being a "necessary measure", so it sounds pretty much like they're coming no matter what.

Analysis: is anything immune to the component crisis?

This isn't the only warning on monitor price increases, as AOC recently said that the rising cost of components for its products will mean price hikes starting from this month. Is this the start of a growing trend? The bigger monitor producers will, of course, have more financial wherewithal to weather component rises, but it may only be so long before even those firms start to jack up prices.

The way things are going, I wouldn't bet against it, and this latest news has people on social media asking what isn't immune to the RAM crisis – and what might we expect to see hit next?

How about pricier PC cases, one Redditor jokes: "Wouldn't you enjoy a simple case costing like $300?"

The crisis does feel rather relentless at this point, but the clearest worry is now GPUs. PC Gamer is tracking graphics card prices on a weekly basis, and there have been some clear cost increases coming through in the last few weeks, which suggests that PC PG's prediction is on the money here. And there are multiple other rumors of late warning that graphics cards are set for considerable price hikes. For me, this noise is becoming too consistent to ignore.

As I recently advised, if you need a graphics card upgrade, or think you will in the next year or two, I believe now is the right time to get in and buy. It's particularly notable that according to this latest rumor, entry-level GPUs are mentioned as apparently coming under more pressure, meaning that mainstream buyers are going to be suffering.

The effects of pricier video RAM, and other pressures besides, are no longer going to be mostly about high-end (or 16GB) cards becoming ridiculously expensive, and we could see some unfortunate hikes with lower-end GPUs.

There's very little good news of late across the gamut of PC components, and as we've already seen today, RAM and SSDs are getting even more expensive.

• DDR5 RAM pricing has risen swiftly again in Germany
• That means two months of sharp increases, backing up recent rumors that memory is going to get pricier
• An exec from the storage world has also said that SSD-related pricing pain is seemingly going to last until 2030

I've recently been writing about how the RAM crisis appears to be reaching new levels of severity, and unfortunately there's more evidence that the situation is worsening with the price of system memory and storage.

Wccftech noticed that 3D Center has a new set of monthly figures for the German retail market which shows that as of mid-August, DDR5 RAM pricing has risen to 486% of the cost it was in July 2025. So, effectively it's five times pricier than before the crisis began a year ago.

That's a substantial jump from the 445% level seen last month, and an even bigger increase than the previous month, in which prices were at 419%. To look at it another way, prices have risen 16% in August compared to the cost of DDR5 in mid-June.

Internal SSD prices have also increased 7.7% month-on-month in the German retail market – and those drives are now 2.2 times as expensive as they were pre-crisis – and Wccftech also picked up another interesting but bleak storage revelation.

Pua Khein-Seng, the CEO of Phison, which makes controllers for SSDs, observed that the NAND market (flash memory chips for SSDs) is in deeper trouble than was previously believed in terms of the time needed to ramp up production.

Taiwan's Commercial Times reports that Pua said he recently had a conversation with senior executives from a NAND manufacturer, and that he asked about how long it would take from investment (being made now) to actual mass production being realized.

The CEO noted (bear in mind translation issues): "He originally estimated it would take about two years, but the answer they gave was 'four years.'"

What this means is that the expectation is now that NAND supply difficulties are going to persist through to 2030 (rather than 2028).

Analysis: there may be trouble ahead…

That's an unsettling prediction from the storage world, coming as it does on top of a lot of other recent bad news suggesting that the RAM crisis will last a long time, and possibly to 2030 and beyond – and that the remainder of this year, and 2027, are going to see matters get worse.

The German retail market appears to be a clear indicator of how things are going, seeing as DDR5 pricing had dropped slightly and then plateaued (more or less) since the beginning of 2026, but started a sharp climb in July as noted. Yes, this is just one source of info, but it's a snapshot of the market of a large European country, and it correlates with all the gloomy predictions we're hearing of late.

As 3D Center points out (again, this is translated): "The bigger picture now points to a worrying price trend, which is likely to break exorbitant levels very soon, unless this trend is halted – for which there are currently no indications."

Sadly, it seems that RAM and storage prices really are going to increase as 2026 rolls on. While there would appear to still be room for further hikes to SSDs (sadly), with system RAM it's arguable how much more consumers can take before they completely refuse to buy until costs come down at least somewhat. That said, new desktops and laptops are still going to be sold, so this isn't just about refusing to upgrade your home PC's memory, of course.

The RAM crisis is everywhere you look these days, and it’s impossible to go a day without seeing more headlines predicting doom and gloom for tech lovers worldwide. But there’s another side to this grim situation — one that I wouldn’t even have thought about if it wasn’t directly affecting me.

It all comes down to the hidden costs of upgrading your PC, costs that sky-high memory prices have stretched to breaking point. Because for certain people, picking some new components for your computer is more complicated than simply wincing as you add a new set of memory to your online basket. When one new part necessitates changing several others, costs can balloon and upgrading becomes a whole lot more daunting.

There’s not been much conversation about this, but it’s a very real problem for a lot of people. And with the RAM crisis showing no signs of abating any time soon, it’s likely to claim more victims as the months roll on.

A galling prospect

My gaming PC is starting to show its age. Aside from a new Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti that I somehow managed to get at below retail price last year (don’t @ me), it’s not exactly running on the newest hardware.

It’s powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU from 2020, a B550 motherboard, and 32GB of DDR4 memory. I’ve noticed it slow down and struggle in certain tasks, so I’ve been thinking about upgrading. The problem for me, though, is that this is a much more involved process than simply buying a new CPU or a fresh set of RAM.

Because my 5600X CPU is part of the final desktop AM4 generation, any upgrade would mean stepping up to AM5. And because we’re talking about a different platform, I’d also need to purchase a new motherboard and set of memory modules to ensure that everything is compatible (AM5 only supports DDR5 RAM).

And now my problem becomes apparent. This is not just a simple swap out situation — I need to rip out and replace half of my rig if I want to freshen things up. I can’t just snap up a speedy new CPU and be done with it.

In any ordinary timeline, that would be a costly undertaking, but not one that could potentially bankrupt you. Now, though, it’s a very different situation — and a substantially more expensive one — because my existing DDR4 memory would need to be replaced, opening me up to a whole new world of pricing pain.

Tot up the combined outlay for all the new components and it’s enough to put anyone off. Thanks to the RAM crisis, my mooted upgrade is a far more galling prospect than would normally be the case — and it doesn’t look like things are going to get better any time soon.

Work out the true costs involved

For people like me who are looking to change from one hardware platform to an entirely new one, the memory shortage takes on a whole new level of pain. It’s a hidden cost that not everyone thinks about when they look at the soaring costs of RAM.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, you’ve got two choices: wait it out and accept lower performance than you’d like for longer than you’d like, or stump up a much weightier pile of cash than you’d ever hoped to. It’s not exactly a win-win scenario, but we’re short of options at the moment.

If you can upgrade other parts of your rig, as I did with my graphics card, take that opportunity to lock down gains where you can. Of course, even that is a money-gouging endeavor, but GPU prices haven’t quite kept pace with those of RAM or storage in recent months — although recent reports suggest they’re about to get much worse. Now could well be the time to act.

And if you’re considering changing any part of your PC setup, think carefully about all the costs involved. That means looking beyond the one component you want to upgrade and considering any knock-on effects that might be created thanks to compatibility issues.

That could lead to a rather unpleasant dose of sticker shock when you work out the true cost of your PC upgrade. But the last thing you want is to be surprised when you go to pull the trigger and see how much you really have to spend.

As many attendees of this year’s DEF CON hacker conference departed Las Vegas recently, many unsuspecting passengers on Delta Flight 591 attempted to access an onboard Wi-Fi network.

What they didn’t know was that ‘Delta WiFi Fast’ was actually a fake network, allegedly set up by a fellow passenger intended to mimic the actual onboard Wi-Fi network and scam other users.

The unknown passenger was able to disable the legitimate Wi-Fi networks for 30 minutes while they launched the attack, and in doing so, may have violated United States federal law.

How did the attack take place?

According to Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) messages, the situation was first brought to light by the crew of the flight, who shared the following message:

“HEY ALERT CORP SECURITY WE HAVE A PAX [passenger] ON THAT HAS CREATED A SCAM WIFI CALLED DELTA WIFI FAST WE BELIEVE THEY ARE TRYING TO SCAM THE OTH PAX”

Another message read:

“NO INFO AS OF NOW WE HAVE A BUNCH OF PAX THAT WERE AT A CYBER CONFRENCE IN LAS THE WERE ABLE TO JAM OUR WIFI AND BRODCAST THERE SIGNIAL”

The actual details of what happened on the flight outside of these messages isn’t clear, but according to Monika Hathaway, head of press for DEF CON, similar attacks happened in Las Vegas: “Our conference this year also suffered from multiple similar ‘deauthorization’ Wi-Fi attacks and it impacted some of our operations.”

Delta airlines confirmed that no aircraft operating systems were affected and flight safety was never in question.

Wi-Fi deauthorization attacks can be launched with cheap, widely available ‘deauth boards’ which are small, battery powered devices that send deauthentication frames to devices within their range. On board a plane, these could easily reach most devices.

Once the legitimate Wi-Fi has been jammed and the other users booted from the network, the attacker can then set up an ‘evil twin’ network that users will attempt to connect to, which can be used to snoop on their internet traffic, steal credentials, and perform other malicious activities.

Expert perspectives on the Delta Wi-Fi attack

‘Evil twin’ attacks and the risks of connecting

Aras Nazarovas, Senior Information Security Researcher at Cybernews:

An evil twin attack is when hackers create fake Wi-Fi networks with the goal of stealing sensitive information from people, or exploiting known vulnerabilities present on victim devices. The fake networks often have a very similar (or identical) name to the legitimate network, which was the case here.

Once a person connects to the hacker’s Wi-Fi network, the hacker may be able to see what the victim is doing online and what data they transfer. However, since most websites have HTTPS/TLS encryption, much of what the user does, even on the rogue network, is private.

The risk here is that the hacker may attempt to redirect the victim to a phishing website – for instance, in this case, it may have been a fake Delta login page asking for personal data like name, email, address, etc. Or, the hacker may even go further and provide fake login pages for banks, social media, and try to extract login details from the victims.

Connecting to such a network comes with some risk in itself. Connecting to a network controlled by a threat actor allows them to probe your device for potential vulnerabilities and maliciously redirect your internet traffic to their own servers.

If a person entered credentials into a Wi-Fi login page, noticed security warnings popping up after visiting a website, downloaded something, or entered payment information into an unfamiliar page, then they may have had their data stolen. In that case, the victim should immediately change any passwords that were transmitted, do a thorough scan of their device for malware, and if bank details were transmitted, freeze the bank account until new credentials are received.

However, if a user just connected and disconnected to the Wi-Fi without entering any details or clicking suspicious links, they should be fine.

Who would launch the attack?

Seemant Sehgal, Founder & CEO, BreachLock:

Flying out of Vegas after Black Hat myself just a few days before this incident, I can tell you the security conference crowd that passes through that airport is unlike any other, and the crew on Flight 591 made the right call with the information they had in front of them.

Rogue access points impersonating a legitimate network are one of the oldest tricks in the book, and doing it on an aircraft to scam passengers is a federal crime regardless of the sophistication involved.

The people most likely to pull something like this on a DEF CON departure flight are the ones who know exactly where that line is, which makes crossing it a choice rather than a mistake. Disabling the Wi-Fi and investigating was exactly the right instinct.

Denis Calderone, CTO, Suzu Labs:

Hackers will hack. I go to DEF CON most years, and it's pretty common to have a terrible wifi experience on those flights because everyone is playing with their WiFi Pineapples and whatnot. That said, my flight home this year had no rogue SSIDs that I could see, and although, as usual, the wifi was shoddy, I never took the time to analyze the radio signals in the cabin, but if a few deauths were flying around, I wouldn't have been too surprised. It is concerning to hear about attempted credential harvesting on the flight though, and I feel that that's taking the expected hijinks way too far.

The deauthentication and evil twin combination used on Flight 591 is a well-documented attack that the security community has been demonstrating for a good two decades. These sorts of wifi threats are very common. DEF CON still displays their famed Wall of Sheep which displays the sniffing clear text credentials on the conference network, and every year the WiFi Pineapples have been selling out at the Hak5 booth.

But there's a significant difference between demonstrating a technique at a conference and deploying it against 199 unsuspecting passengers on a commercial aircraft. Last November, an Australian man was sentenced to seven years and four months in prison for running the exact same attack on domestic flights using a WiFi Pineapple and now the FBI is already involved in this case. There is definitely a legal exposure here.

For anyone who travels for work, in-flight WiFi should be treated as an untrusted network, period. The enterprise advice is encrypted DNS through your MDM and always-on VPN with captive portal remediation configured. But honestly, a VPN is something every traveler should be using, not just corporate road warriors. I make sure mine is on whenever I travel, and my family does the same.

Beyond that, if a WiFi network on a plane doesn't match what the crew announced or what's printed on the seat card, don't connect to it. If a network asks you to log in with your Google account or email credentials to get WiFi access, that's not how airline WiFi works. Airline captive portals ask for a credit card or a loyalty account, not your personal email password. If you're being asked for something that doesn't make sense for the context, you're probably not on the real network.

Reputational harm for the cybersecurity industry

Jacob Warner, Director of IT, Xcape, Inc.:

While a rogue Wi-Fi access point on a commercial airliner poses zero direct risk to air-gapped flight safety controls, it creates a serious enterprise security hazard for business travelers relying on inflight networks.

Dismissing an onboard network impersonation as a harmless prank ignores the reality of man-in-the-middle attacks, credential harvesting, and fake authentication portals targeting captive passengers connecting to the Internet.

Given that the flight departed Las Vegas immediately following DEF CON, it requires little imagination to conclude an attendee deployed the unauthorized access point.

This juvenile behavior is precisely why hackers suffer such a poor reputation among non-technical audiences and why security professionals struggle to build mainstream trust. Enterprise security teams must mandate always-on virtual private networks or zero-trust network access, disable automatic connections to open SSIDs on corporate endpoints, and instruct travelers to treat cabin wireless environments as untrusted networks.

Setting up an evil twin at 30,000 feet does not make you a clever researcher; it just proves why we cannot have nice things.

John Strand, Owner, Black Hills Information Security, Inc.:

This one hits differently because this is my community. These are my people. When security professionals engage in this kind of behavior, they’re betraying the very community they’re claim to represent.

There’s nothing impressive about it. It doesn’t make you look clever, and it certainly doesn’t make you an elite hacker. In most cases, these attacks aren’t even technically sophisticated. They’re simply people with enough technical knowledge taking advantage of others who don’t have the experience to recognize what’s happening. That isn’t skill. It’s bullying.

I hope the people responsible are held accountable. This isn’t funny, it isn’t clever, and it doesn’t demonstrate technical excellence. It’s just people abusing their knowledge to prey on those who are at a disadvantage. That’s not what this profession should stand for.

• Apple's MacBook Air is facing supply constraints, as delivery estimates last up to a month
• The delivery delays are a direct result of the ongoing RAM crisis
• Consumers may have to look at Windows alternatives, as the RAM crisis gets worse

PC hardware manufacturers can't catch a break from the ongoing RAM crisis, and unfortunately, Apple arguably knows that more than anyone.

As reported by 9to5Mac, MacBook Air shortages are worsening, as delivery estimates for configurations on Apple's online store are longer than usual. Nearly all configurations have a 2-3 week shipment estimate, while those with 32GB of RAM have up to 4-5 weeks.

It's increasingly clear that RAM shortages are causing supply issues for Apple, and the extended delivery estimates come shortly after Apple's recent slate of price hikes on Macs and iPads. Notably, the MacBook Air M5 saw a $200 price increase earlier in June, and despite that, shortages remain.

Supply is so bad that 9to5Mac notes that Apple retail employees state that the MacBook Air shipments are "more constrained than they can ever recall", and that's a fitting statement since the PC hardware market is possibly at its worst state ever.

Fresh rumors also point to Apple being set on a price increase for its iPhone 17 — so without a doubt, proceedings aren't looking great for the tech giant (and several other hardware companies) in terms of supply stability.

Apple also has a history of rarely dropping prices for its devices, so the only other options consumers have are to buy MacBooks from other retailers or consider Windows alternatives.

What now?

Outside of Apple's online store, Amazon currently has the 13-inch M5 MacBook Air available at a lower price ($1,256) and a shorter delivery window using Prime. The same applies to several other configurations, including the 15-inch model.

Apple's RAM and supply constraints won't end anytime soon, so Windows alternatives are also sensible for consumers to aim for. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, Yoga Slim 7i Aura, and even Dell's XPS 13 are solid laptop options. They may not all match the MacBook Air in performance, but they are enough to get the job done.

There's no better time than now for consumers to act on purchasing a new laptop, as insiders like Mark Gurman and even Apple chief financial officer Kevan Parekh indicate that Apple's supply constraints aren't set to improve, but only worsen — and that likely extends to 2027 and beyond.

• DapuStor's R6060 packs 512TB into a single E2 form-factor drive
• The drive doubles the capacity of E3.S and U.2 alternatives
• PCIe 5.0 and NVMe 2.0 protocols power this massive drive

DapuStor has unveiled a massive 512TB NVMe SSD at the FMS 2026 storage trade show event, pushing enterprise storage capacity into half-petabyte territory for demanding data center applications.

The drive, officially named the R6060, belongs to the company's high-capacity family and uses its newer E2 form factor design for enterprise storage systems.

At 512TB, the R6060 holds exactly twice the storage capacity of E3.S or U.2 drives, which top out near 256TB.

DapuStor packs half a petabyte into one drive

The 512TB SSD belongs to DapuStor’s high-capacity NVMe family and measures approximately 200 × 76 × 9.5 mm, giving it substantial capacity within a relatively compact enterprise storage form factor for NAND placements, allowing manufacturers to pack substantially more flash memory inside each device.

The drive pairs DapuStor's in-house DP800 controller with PCIe 5.0 connectivity and the newer NVMe 2.0 protocol standard used industry-wide.

DapuStor uses QLC NAND because modern workloads increasingly require huge storage capacity rather than maximum performance from every individual drive.

Artificial intelligence workloads require large repositories for training datasets, while inference systems can also generate substantial demand for high-capacity cache storage.

Video, audio, and other rapidly expanding datasets are creating similar demands, making high-capacity drives increasingly useful for data centers managing enormous volumes of information.

A server equipped with 36 E2 drive bays could theoretically accommodate 16PB of raw storage using these 512TB drives.

That density could reduce the number of servers, processors, memory modules, and networking components required for certain storage-heavy deployments.

The approach is particularly relevant to systems designed around 1PB and beyond, where physical infrastructure can become substantial.

Bigger drives could also reduce infrastructure requirements

The E2 approach can add more storage capacity to a single-CPU or dual-CPU server, potentially reducing overall system requirements.

Fewer processors, memory modules, chassis and network interfaces could also lower power consumption when storage capacity remains the primary requirement.

However, NAND pricing has become an increasingly important factor in determining the overall economics of extremely high-capacity solid-state storage.

Higher flash memory costs can make smaller drives more attractive, as multiple lower-capacity devices may offer greater flexibility in some deployments.

E2 could nevertheless offer another option by accommodating more NAND locations while using lower-density flash components in certain configurations.

That flexibility could potentially create lower-cost capacity points without requiring manufacturers to rely exclusively on the highest-density NAND available.

The 512TB R6060 therefore tries to increase storage density for systems handling rapidly expanding datasets and AI infrastructure demands.

DapuStor has not provided a confirmed price, although current NAND pricing suggests the drive will sit in the premium segment of enterprise storage.

The DapuStor R6060 arrives as NAND and DRAM suppliers report stronger market conditions following periods of weaker demand.

Via ServeTheHome

• A new 8-in-1 smart display dock is now on Kickstarter
• Cabletime's ScreenDock features a 5.5-inch screen which can be used as a secondary display
• The device could prove an interesting alternative to Corsair's Xeneon Edge thanks to its extra docking capabilities

Multi-tasking on a PC is made easier using Corsair's Xeneon Edge touchscreen LCD as a secondary display — but now this solution seemingly has some strong competition.

As reported by Notebookcheck, the Cabletime ScreenDock is a new 8-in-1 smart dock with a 5.5-inch built-in display, and it could be ideal as a secondary display alongside a desktop PC or laptop. This device is a Kickstarter project with an early-bird price of $119.

There are some marked differences in comparison to Corsair's Xeneon Edge. The ScreenDock has a much smaller 5.5-inch display (with a 1080 x 720 resolution) instead of 14.5-inches, and it lacks any touchscreen capability. The latter is what gives the Xeneon Edge its Stream Deck-style functionality (Elgato's shortcut command center with programmable keys), especially with the official virtual Stream Deck widget.

However, the ScreenDock serves the same broad purpose as Corsair's handy display, allowing PC owners to use it for overlays, third-party applications, or simply as an extended screen on Windows 11.

And the ScreenDock has two major advantages itself. Unlike the Xeneon Edge, Cabletime's device is also a dock, with multiple USB-C, USB-A, and Ethernet ports, as well as an HDMI port (4K 60Hz). The ScreenDock has a foldable design too, helping users preserve desk space, with brightness and power on/off buttons which aren't present on Corsair's display.

Caution first

If you're liking the look of Cabletime's ScreenDock, bear in mind that it's still at a relatively early stage. A lot could go wrong with a crowdfunded device as we've seen in the past, between potential manufacturing issues or shipping delays, so be suitably cautious about committing your cash.

If this crowdfunding effort is successful, it could serve as a strong competitor to Corsair's device, which has been considered overpriced (starting at $249.99 / £219.99 / AU$389).

The ScreenDock is only at early-bird pricing right now, so naturally it will be more expensive at its full price. With its 8-in-1 smart dock capabilities, it will be interesting to see how it stacks up against Corsair's premium device.

Seeing the red 'limited-time deal' banner on some DDR5 RAM at Amazon should elicit some excitement given the rarity of price cuts lately. But when you click through and see the price for this 32GB Corsair Vengeance kit, you'll wonder if there's genuinely a deal here at all — and other wannabe buyers aren't wholly convinced, either.

"It's 'only' 4x the price it should be," wrote one user named Technikal on HotUKDeals, a community that shares deals from across the web and asks the community to vote whether they think they are hot or cold. "The current average is 5x," he continues, "so, in that sense it's a good deal...I guess."

A muted response, that's for sure. And while it may be true that the deal price of the RAM kit is technically one of the lowest prices available right now, it's so far from the much lower prices we saw before the RAM crisis turned buying memory for your PC into a depressing exercise.

"Blimey, just checked my receipt for mine from 2 years ago - cost £85..." says another HotUKDeals user named Jacko_1975.

In fact, even just a year ago, this very same RAM kit was available for £99.99 when it wasn't even on sale, according to price history information from Keepa.

Given that, it's no surprise that shoppers have reacted negatively to Amazon's flash deal. Unfortunately, though, it doesn't look like things are getting any better when it comes to RAM prices. A report from Samsung suggests the RAM crisis is just getting started, and it could extend to other components in the near future.

If you're looking at these deals and are trying to convince yourself to purchase any RAM in the near future, we've got a PC gaming expert delivering advice on what to do if you're considering buying memory, a GPU, or other components.

Sadly, the news is grim, and these prices could be with us for a while yet. So, yes, it may be difficult to feel happy about seeing supposed RAM deals like this, but from what I'm seeing and hearing, I don't think they're going to get any better, either.

It appears that the RAM crisis is getting worse than ever as we head further into 2026. I've been closely watching and reporting on memory price hikes — which were soon followed by other PC component cost increases — since this crisis first began, and the worrying thing is, I can't recall a gloomier stream of negative news than I've witnessed over the past few weeks.

That includes Samsung recently declaring that the RAM crisis is going to become more severe in 2027, and rumors that even mighty Apple is floundering in its attempt to secure new RAM supplies from China (as other notebook makers consider this alternative route to the three main memory chip giants: Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix).

Previous to that, we saw laptop maker Framework break news of a truly eye-opening cost increase for mobile RAM, just as one gauge of DDR5 pricing saw it jump in price to a new all-time high (after plateauing earlier this year). On top of that, the boss of SK Hynix voiced the opinion that 2027 will be the worst year in the RAM industry's history, and that the crisis is likely to be drawn out to the next decade.

This isn't just about RAM, of course, but other components, including CPU price rises, and devices themselves — PCs and laptops (and phones). But most notably over the past month it's been graphics cards in the crisis limelight. We've witnessed the resurrection of old GPUs to try to bolster stock levels of more affordable cards, and more recently we've been subjected to what seems like an endless parade of negativity about imminent price hikes.

Apparently, Gigabyte is set to increase the price tags of its graphics card to the tune of 20% to 40% in Japan, and MSI is going to jack up prices of Nvidia GPUs in China by 20% or more. Asus is supposedly preparing a similar 20% hike (as Wccftech reported).

Another recent gloom nugget is the assertion that Nvidia RTX 5000 models will get hikes of 30% in South Korea this month, and all of this pain is mainly rooted in the increased price of video RAM, of course. (Those cost increases are the reason the RTX 5000 Super refreshes have been delayed, according to the grapevine, as those rumored cards are packed with VRAM).

While a good deal of this is individual pieces of regional activity with GPU pricing, it's obvious that these hikes are happening as part of a concerted shift, one that will surely be reflected globally — it's not like Asian markets are in a bubble of their own.

The overarching theme is a worsening of price hike misery, and that the pricing storm is likely to intensify this year, and probably in 2027, too. While previously the RAM crisis has been more of a light-and-shade affair, now it feels like the depression has been turned up a notch. Whereas before, there was certainly more darkness than light, we've had notable spots of relief where an exec in the memory industry stepped forward and theorized that maybe things aren't as bad as we think. But lately those embers of optimism appear to have burned out.

To me, it feels like there's a shift underway towards a full acknowledgement that we really are going to experience a lot more pricing pain in the foreseeable future. If it's so bad that even Apple is purportedly scrambling to secure RAM supplies, and is having trouble doing so, I think it's time to turn up the worry meter by a notch or two.

What should you do?

Here's my advice on the current landscape with PC components and hardware (season it appropriately). Obviously, worrying isn't going to help you, but awareness of what might be sensible upgrades or purchases to make now will, based on the likelihood of hikes (we could call it the 'hike-lihood' – or maybe not). Nothing is certain about the future of components, of course, but it does feel like there's a clear area in which the potential price hikes are a bigger threat: GPUs.

As I discussed above, there's a lot of recent evidence that graphics card pricing is going up. Yes, it's a collection of rumors in the main, but there's a lot of it all pointing in a very similar direction — and a video RAM toll was always going to be exacted in the end. We've seen it already with higher-end graphics cards, and now I believe we're going to see it in the mid-range, and even budget models. Indeed, top-end GPUs are likely to get even more expensive as well.

If you're thinking about a GPU upgrade for this year or next, given all this, I think now really is the time to buy — especially with a lower-tier model, as you can still get more affordable graphics cards at their MSRP. Ditto for mid-rangers, although it's tougher to recommend higher-end Nvidia boards when they are already so expensive.

As noted, though, that could get worse. And granted, you may still want to wait for Black Friday — it's not that far off, and there might be some GPU deals then. However, I wouldn't bank on anything hugely compelling (or discounts that aren't offset by the price rises which are predicted to take hold in the next few months).

So, if there's one PC component that I think you should buy now, it's a graphics card. I think the signs are pretty clear on that (and see here for my recommendations on different models to consider). By extension, higher-end gaming laptops could also be a wise move for purchasing sooner rather than later. That's for the same reason, really — they have beefy (mobile) GPUs (with plenty of VRAM in some cases).

I don't think it's a bad move to buy any laptop, by the way, gaming or not (away from the higher-end), come your earliest window of opportunity. I think we'll see further price rises here, too, and RAM is going to cause more upward pricing pressures for notebooks — just look at Framework's recent revelation as mentioned.

What about RAM and SSDs themselves? While system memory kits and storage have already seen huge price rises, it now looks like there's worse to come (somehow).

On the other hand, there's a ceiling as to how expensive this stuff can get before buyers withdraw from what they see as an increasingly unrealistic and out-of-touch market. This is a much more difficult call to make, but if you can find something that looks relatively reasonably priced, I don't think you'll regret the purchase in the next couple of years. But that said, I can't recommend a RAM upgrade in particular at current pricing levels, unless it's unavoidable, frankly.

Above all, though, consider a GPU upgrade if you're in the market for a new card, or you think you'll need one in the next couple of years (yes, I think it's wise to be looking quite far down the road here).

The other thing to bear in mind is that there's a danger there will be a rush for GPUs, a flurry of buying that puts further strain on supply and therefore prices. As VideoCardz reports, one Japanese retailer has warned of Nvidia RTX 5000 graphics card sales increasing "sharply", even just with the news of rumored price increases — let alone the confirmation. Prices are already rising and restocks of the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080 are already being labelled as "unstable", hinting that inventory could start to dry up quickly.

That's just one report, of course, and it pertains to the high-end of the market, so it's not something to start panicking about yet. But it does make some sense that if pricing begins to creep up, more PC owners may start to act on GPU upgrades. I wouldn't blame them, frankly.

• Someone made a tool for Asus Astral RTX 5080 and 5090 GPUs
• It's designed to prevent a melting connector, shutting down the PC before this happens
• This third-party utility – and the response to it – shows the level of paranoia out there when it comes to this issue

Do you have a high-end Nvidia Blackwell GPU, and if so, are you worried about the perils of a melted power connector? It appears that definite concerns remain in this area, to the point that a new utility has been crafted to address those worries.

An enterprising Redditor has made their own open source tool for Windows which is designed for Asus Astral RTX 5090 and 5080 graphics cards, acting as a monitoring app that will (hopefully) step in to prevent any melting disasters before they happen.

The creator, Humza Khalid, tells us how the small utility, which is available to grab on GitHub, works: "It reads per pin 12VHPWR current straight from the card's own sensor chip and force shuts down your PC if any pin stays over 9.5A for 15 seconds, before the connector can melt."

The idea is that it's a lightweight and standalone app which is an easy way to defend against the situation where there's a sustained level of too much current flowing to the Nvidia graphics card.

As noted, the PC is forced to shut down in these cases (in a safe manner, with any running or interfering apps being force-closed, we're told), before any damage is done.

The creator has taken a suggestion on board from the comments, and Khalid notes that the tool will be changed from initiating a shutdown to dropping the power limit (via the Nvidia management API) for a much faster response. (Shutting down can take a while). That change will happen in a future version of the utility, Khalid tells us.

The creator also reminds us: "This only works on Astral 5080/5090 cards because those are the only ones with per pin sensors. Windows only, needs Python. And it doesn't replace seating your connector properly, it's a last line of defense not a first one."

Analysis: default paranoia

That's all good in theory, of course, but I'd always be careful about what you're installing on your PC. Not to say this isn't a trustworthy app – I don't know whether it is or not, and that's the point. However, it is open source, so that's good, as it provides visibility into what it's doing under the hood.

Another point to note is that a co-creator of the app is listed as 'Claude', meaning that this AI has been used in making the tool. Khalid explains that they wrote the original utility, but it was based on HWiNFO, so they wanted the app rejigged to be standalone, and Claude "did a lot of the rewrite".

At any rate, Asus Astral GPU owners can make their own decision about what's worth installing, or not, although I wouldn't personally recommend installing a third-party utility from an unknown developer. As ever, if you do install such software, you do so very much at your own risk.

Regardless, what this does show is the clear level of concern about Nvidia's RTX 5090 and 5080 GPUs. One Redditor sums it up: "As a 5090 owner, I can confirm the card comes with a default paranoia about bursting into flames."

That received some pushback from other Redditors who said their overclocked RTX 5090s were just fine, and in turn, there was a further story relayed about a melting incident. Obviously, all that is anecdotal (on both sides of the coin), but the paranoia is real enough.

Cable melting worries began with the RTX 4090, of course, before the RTX 5090, and when we looked into the issues with the Blackwell flagship back at the start of last year, Nvidia firmly denied that any of this is its fault. Cable melts remain a controversial topic, though, and more recently we've even had a report of an exploding RTX 5090, no less, which PC gamers who run these high-end graphics cards probably didn't take much comfort from.