In a statement for Tom's Hardware, Intel has announced a two-year warranty extension for its 13th and 14th Generation Core processors. This decision comes in response to widespread reports of crashes and instability affecting a broad range of models, from high-end flagship chips to mid-range offerings. The extension effectively increases the standard warranty period from three to five years for most boxed processors, with even the limited-edition models seeing an increase from one to three years. This move aims to reassure customers and mitigate concerns about potential long-term damage to affected chips. Intel has identified excessive voltage as the root cause of the problem, which has led to unexpected system crashes and blue screens of death (BSODs), particularly during gaming and other demanding tasks.

The company plans to release a microcode update by mid-August to prevent further degradation in unaffected processors. However, this update will not resolve issues in chips that have already experienced problems, and users with malfunctioning processors will need to seek replacements. The tech giant has faced criticism for its delayed response to the issue, which has plagued users for months. In its statement, Intel also addressed concerns about Via Oxidation, clarifying that while this separate issue was discovered in 2022, it is not the cause of the current instability problems. The company claims to have implemented fixes and enhanced screening procedures for Via Oxidation by early 2023, with affected chips reportedly removed from the supply chain by early 2024.

The Professional Gamers League (PGL) showcased its newly upgraded tournament rig specification prior to the kick-off of their (still ongoing) CS2 Major Copenhagen 2024 esports event. As reported, over a week ago, competitors have been treated to modern systems decked out with AMD's popular gaming-oriented Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 graphics cards, while BenQ's ZOWIE XL2566K 24.5" 360 Hz gaming monitor delivers a superfast visual feed. A hefty chunk of change has been spent on new hardware, but expensive cutting-edge tech can falter. Virtus.pro team member—Jame—experienced a major software crash during a match against rival group, G2.

PCGamesN noted that this frustrating incident ended the affected team's chance to grab a substantial cash reward. Their report put a spotlight on this unfortunate moment: "in the second round of a best of three, Virtus Pro were a few rounds away from qualifying for the playoffs, only for their aspirations to be squashed through no fault of their own...Jame experiences a graphics card driver crash that irrecoverably steers the round in G2's favor, culminating in Virtus Pro losing the match 11-13. Virtus Pro would then go on to lose the subsequent tie-break match as the round was not replayed. In effect, the graphics card driver crash partly cost the team their chance at winning an eventual $1.25 million prize pool." PGL revealed, via a social media post, that officials are doing some detective work: "we wish to clarify the situation involving Jame during the second map, Inferno, in the series against G2. A technical malfunction occurred due to an NVIDIA driver crash, resulting in a game crash. We are continuing our investigation into the matter." The new tournament rigs were "meticulously optimized" and tested in the weeks leading up to CS2 Major Copenhagen 2024—it is believed that the driver crash was a random anomaly. PGL and NVIDIA are currently working on a way to "identify and fix the issue."

To all Dragon's Dogma 2 players. We would like to update you on the status of the following items, about which we have received numerous comments from the community. To all those looking forward to this game, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.

Regarding Frame Rate
A large amount of CPU usage is allocated to each character and calculating the impact of their physical presence in various areas. In certain situations where numerous characters appear simultaneously, the CPU usage can be very high and may affect the frame rate. We are aware that in such situations, settings that reduce GPU load may currently have a limited effect; however, we are looking into ways to improve performance in the future.

We're thrilled to announce that Toys for Bob is spinning off as an independent game development studio! Over the years, we've inspired love, joy, and laughter for the inner child in all gamers. We pioneered new IP and hardware technologies in Skylanders. We raised the bar for best-in-class remasters in Spyro Reignited Trilogy. We've taken Crash Bandicoot to innovative, critically acclaimed new heights.

With the same enthusiasm and passion, we believe that now is the time to take the studio and our future games to the next level. This opportunity allows us to return to our roots of being a small and nimble studio. To make this news even more exciting, we're exploring a possible partnership between our new studio and Microsoft. And while we're in the early days of developing our next new game and a ways away from making any announcements, our team is excited to develop new stories, new characters, and new gameplay experiences.

The wait is finally over for the all-new spin on Crash! Players can purchase Crash Team Rumble on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5 & 4, and dive into matches online today with friends and foes alike in this 4v4 team-based rumble. Each team aims to collect the most Wumpa fruit while preventing the opposing team from dropping off their fruit at their own Wumpa Bank. In true Crash Bandicoot fashion, every map is fraught with danger, surprises, and wild traps to put player's platforming skills to the test.

The team at Toys For Bob has taken all of the familiar locales fans know from previous Crash games, and reimagined them into combat arenas with unique Relic Stations that make every match feel fresh and unique. Relic Stations can be activated by teammates to either provide a boost to their team, or wreak havoc on their opponents. To activate a Relic Station, players must collect floating relics scattered around the map, and then deposit them at a Relic Station to activate the power.

Phil Spencer, CEO of Xbox Game Studios, appeared on the popular (Xbox-themed) Kinda Funny Games podcast earlier this week for a video interview (Xcast Episode 137). The almost 45-minute long conversation touched upon several topics relating to gaming matters at Microsoft, with the hosts managing to corner Spencer about the recent (not so good) launch of Bethesda and Arkane's horror FPS Redfall. Gaming community feedback has not exactly been encouraging in the wake of the game's release two days ago, and Spencer admits that he shares similar sentiments: "I'll just say all up, there's nothing that's more difficult for me than disappointing the Xbox community. I've been a part of it for a long time. I obviously work on Xbox, head of the business, have a lot of friends, get a lot of feedback. And just to watch the community lose confidence, be disappointed, I'm disappointed. I'm upset with myself. I revisit our process - I think back to the announcement of 60 FPS and then we weren't shipping 60 FPS, that was our punch in the chin, rightfully, a couple of weeks ago. And then seeing the game come out and the critical response was not what we wanted, and it's disappointing."

He continues his thought about reacting to feedback this early on in the process: "What can we learn? What can we get better? One thing I'll fight is what went wrong. There's clearly quality and execution things we can do, but one thing I won't do is push against creative aspirations of our teams. Then a lot of people will say, hey, you've got teams, teams know how to do one kind of game, just force them to go do the one kind of game they have a proven track record for. I'm just not a believer in that. Maybe that means I'll under deliver for some of our fans out there. But when a team like Rare wants to do Sea of Thieves, when a team like Obsidian wants to do Grounded, when Tango wants to go do Hi-Fi (Rush) when everybody probably thought they were doing The Evil Within 3, I want to give the teams the creative platform to go and push their ability, push their aspirations."

AMD today released the Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.4.1 drivers, which introduce major updates to the soft-product that completes your AMD Radeon graphics cards. The drivers come with updates to the Radeon Software interface, and the AMD Link remote-gameplay utility. Radeon Software now comes with an improved installer with installation presets that let you choose between a Full (typical) installation, with all software features installed; a Minimal installation with an interface that only has basic settings related to the display and GPU; and "driver-only" that only installs the display driver, and no additional software.

There are several new features introduced within Radeon Software. Vivid Gaming Display Color Enhancement is a new monitor color profile that enables a more "vivid" color palette that lets you liven up "color deficient" scenes. The interface lets you take control of protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia components of the color. The search bar that lets you dig through the hundreds of features, has been improved. There are many other minor UI improvements, such as stats in the Games tab, a toggle for the in-built web-browser, and global controls for the hotkeys.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.4.1

Igor's Lab has posted an interesting investigative article where he advances a possible reason for the recent crash to desktop problems for RTX 3080 owners. For one, Igor mentions how the launch timings were much tighter than usual, with NVIDIA AIB partners having much less time than would be adequate to prepare and thoroughly test their designs. One of the reasons this apparently happened was that NVIDIA released the compatible driver stack much later than usual for AIB partners; this meant that their actual testing and QA for produced RTX 3080 graphics cards was mostly limited to power on and voltage stability testing, other than actual gaming/graphics workload testing, which might have allowed for some less-than-stellar chip samples to be employed on some of the companies' OC products (which, with higher operating frequencies and consequent broadband frequency mixtures, hit the apparent 2 GHz frequency wall that produces the crash to desktop).

Another reason for this, according to Igor, is the actual "reference board" PG132 design, which is used as a reference, "Base Design" for partners to architecture their custom cards around. The thing here is that apparently NVIDIA's BOM left open choices in terms of power cleanup and regulation in the mounted capacitors. The Base Design features six mandatory capacitors for filtering high frequencies on the voltage rails (NVVDD and MSVDD). There are a number of choices for capacitors to be installed here, with varying levels of capability. POSCAPs (Conductive Polymer Tantalum Solid Capacitors) are generally worse than SP-CAPs (Conductive Polymer-Aluminium-Electrolytic-Capacitors) which are superseded in quality by MLCCs (Multilayer Ceramic Chip Capacitor, which have to be deployed in groups). Below is the circuitry arrangement employed below the BGA array where NVIDIA's GA-102 chip is seated, which corresponds to the central area on the back of the PCB.

A number of RTX 3080 users have been reporting crashes to desktop while gaming on their newly-acquired Ampere graphics cards. The reports have surged in numerous hardware discussion venues (ComputerBase, LinusTechTips, NVIDIA, Tom's Hardware, Tweakers and Reddit), and appear to be unlinked to any particular RTX 3080 vendor (ZOTAC, MSI, EVGA, and NVIDIA Founders Edition graphics cards are all mentioned).

Apparently, this crash to desktop happens once the RTX 3080's Boost clock exceeds 2.0 GHz. A number of causes could be advanced for these issues: deficient power delivery, GPU temperature failsafes, or even a simple driver-level problem (though that one seems to be the least likely). Nor NVIDIA nor any of its AIB partners have spoken about this issue, and review outlets failed to mention this happening - likely because it never did, at least on samples sent to reviewers. For now, it seems that manually downclocking the graphics card by 50-100 MHz could be a temporary fix for the issue while it's being troubleshooted. An unlucky turn of events for users of NVIDIA's latest and greatest, but surely it's better to face a very slight performance decrease in exchange for system stability.

AMD today released version 20.2.2 of their Radeon Adrenalin Edition driver suite. The new version brings with it support for the launch of Zombie Army 4: Dead War, so users can experience the latest and greatest performance available for AMD graphics cards on the new release.Perhaps more importantly, the new release also features a number of fixes for Black Screen errors in a number of scenarios and games, of which much has already been written over the internet. There are still a number of instances where black screens can occur listed on AMD's "Known Issues" checklist for this driver release, however, so make sure to check the release notes to see if this driver looks to fix your particular scenario. Of course, you're likely always better off updating to this latest driver version.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Adrenalin Edition 20.2.2 Drivers

Tencent Holdings, China's second most valuable tech firm after Alibaba, was mauled at the markets Tuesday (31/07), with its share value dropping 25 percent from its January peak. This translates to a stunning USD $143 billion (yes, billion) in investor wealth being wiped out. The crash has had a domino effect on tech stocks worldwide, as FANG block member Facebook lost an equally stunning $136 billion in market value, over the past three trading sessions. Apparently, buzzwords of the season such as AI and big-data aren't proving enough to keep investors interested in tech stocks as many are beginning to question the stability of the tech industry. All eyes are now on Tencent's August 15 release of its Q2-2018 financial results.

Users beware: if you've updated your NVIDIA drivers to the recently released 384.76 version and intend to play Watch Dogs 2, you might have a hard time doing so. Reports have surfaced that the latest NVIDIA drivers, which bring support to the "Rise Up" open-beta of "Lawbreakers" as well as support for "Spiderman: Homecoming - a VR Experience.", break startup on Ubisoft's game.

The issue doesn't appear to be listed on NVIDIA's 384.76 release notes (not even on the PDF), so it seems this issue largely flew under NVIDIA's radar. But if you've had problems with Wash (sorry, Watch) Dogs 2, be sure to check if you have the latest 384.76 drivers installed. That could be the source of the problem. Our own resident W1zzard himself ran into this problem, but no amount of steampunk wand waving was able to fix the issue. However, a fresh install of NVIDIA's previous driver release (382.53) should let you go out to San Francisco again.Edit: The issue is related to Ansel and can be fixed by starting C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\Ansel\Tools\NvCameraConfiguration.exe and selecting the "disabled" option at the bottom of the window.