At Computex 2024, we showcased Project G-Assist - a tech demo that offered a glimpse of how AI assistants could elevate the PC experience for gamers, creators, and more. Today, we're releasing an experimental version of the Project G-Assist System Assistant feature for GeForce RTX desktop users, via NVIDIA app, with GeForce RTX laptop support coming in a future update. As modern PCs become more powerful, they also grow more complex to operate. Users today face over a trillion possible combinations of hardware and software settings when configuring a PC for peak performance - spanning the GPU, CPU, motherboard, monitors, peripherals, and more.

We built Project G-Assist, an AI assistant that runs locally on GeForce RTX AI PCs, to simplify this experience. G-Assist helps users control a broad range of PC settings, from optimizing game and system settings, charting frame rates and other key performance statistics, to controlling select peripherals settings such as lighting - all via basic voice or text commands.

Intel along the sidelines of the 2025 GDC announced the release of the XeSS 2 SDK on the company's GitHub page. This makes it possible for any game developer to understand XeSS 2 and integrate it with their current and upcoming games, covering features such as XeSS 2 upscaling, XeSS 2 frame generation, and XeSS 2 Low Latency. Intel released the XeSS 2 feature-set with its Arc B-series "Battlemage" graphics cards, it is backwards compatible with Arc A-series "Alchemist" discrete GPUs that support XMX matrix math acceleration. XeSS 2 uses an AI DNN to reconstruct details in upscaled images, making it technologically closer to DLSS than to AMD FSR. Next up, Intel also announced that it has updated its first-party programming guides, its Unreal Engine plugin, and its XeSS Inspector software development tool, to each support XeSS 2, including its upscaling, frame-generation, and low-latency components.

Perhaps the more important development in the Intel Graphics team right now is that the company announced that it has laid the groundwork to implement Neural Rendering, or at least the parts that are standardized under the latest updates to DirectX 12, bringing the benefits of DirectX Cooperative Vectors to game developers. It will soon be possible for 3D applications to directly address the XMX engines on Arc A-series and B-series GPUs for an up to 10x gain in inference performance for neural texture compression.

EA has released the source code for four legacy Command & Conquer titles under the GPL license, making them freely available to the public on Github. This includes the original source code for Command & Conquer and Red Alert, as well as the SAGE-powered Command & Conquer: Renegade and Command & Conquer: Generals. While fan projects such as OpenRA and OpenSAGE have developed their own versions of these games' code, access to the original source code is a big plus for video game preservation and future development.

The restoration and release of the source code were made possible through the efforts of EA technical director Brian Barnes, Respawn producer Jim Vessella, and Luke Feenan, a long-time member of the Command & Conquer community. To accompany this announcement, EA has also released a 35-minute video featuring alpha gameplay and previously unseen archival footage from Command & Conquer: Generals and Renegade.

Microsoft has taken another significant step in its AI integration strategy by introducing "Terminal Chat," an AI assistant now available in Windows Terminal. This latest feature brings conversational AI capabilities directly to the command-line interface, marking a notable advancement in making terminal operations more accessible to users of all skill levels. The new feature, currently available in Windows Terminal (Canary), leverages various AI services, including ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and Azure OpenAI, to provide interactive assistance for command-line operations. What sets Terminal Chat apart is its context-aware functionality, which automatically recognizes the specific shell environment being used—whether it's PowerShell, Command Prompt, WSL Ubuntu, or Azure Cloud Shell—and tailors its responses accordingly.

Users can interact with Terminal Chat through a dedicated interface within Windows Terminal, where they can ask questions, troubleshoot errors, and request guidance on specific commands. The system provides shell-specific suggestions, automatically adjusting its recommendations based on whether a user is working in Windows PowerShell, Linux, or other environments. For example, when asked about creating a directory, Terminal Chat will suggest "New-Item -ItemType Directory" for PowerShell users while providing "mkdir" as the appropriate command for Linux environments. This intelligent adaptation helps bridge the knowledge gap between different command-line interfaces. Below are some examples courtesy of Windows Latest and their testing:

After being forced to shut down at the beginning of October, it looks like the open-source Nintendo Switch emulator, Ryujinx, may have found a new home. Late last week, a new fork of the Ryujinx emulator popped up online. The original Ryujinx project's lead developer, known online as gdkchan, took down the GitHub page after a mysterious offer from Nintendo. Although there was speculation that the creator of the project was offered money to shut the emulator down, the wording on the new GitHub project seems to suggest that Nintendo forced Ryujinx to shut down. The GitHub page for the new project is run by a developer that goes by GreemDev, who doesn't seem to have been involved with the original Ryujinx before it shut down.

GreemDev's Ryujinx is starting out as a direct fork and continuation of the original, although there are hints that the new Ryujinx will take on a slightly different nature in the future. For starters, it doesn't look like GreemDev plans to offer any documentation for the Nintendo Switch emulator—at least not yet. This is likely partially to avoid Nintendo's ire and because creating documentation is a lot of additional work for developers. Instead, the GitHub directs readers to the former Ryujinx documentation on Archive.org, indicating that, although there are intended changes in-store for the future of Ryujinx, the current forked version basically picks up where the original left off.

Nintendo is living up to its litigious reputation this week, with news reports emerging of the gaming giant issuing a massive wave of copyright strikes on any YouTube videos containing footage of emulation. In addition to this, it seems like Nintendo may have had some harsh words for the lead developer of a popular open-source Switch emulator.

As of an announcement today, the open-source Switch emulator, Ryujinx, is no longer available for download from its GitHub repository. One of the more active developers for the project confirmed via a message in the official Discord that the lead developer, who goes by gdkchan, was contacted by Nintendo with an "offer," although given the outcome of the interaction, it was likely less an offer and more a threat. Shortly before that, Retro Game Corps, a popular content creator in the Nintendo emulation community, posted on X that his YouTube channel had received multiple copyright strikes, requiring that he move away from showing game emulation on-screen.

Intel on Wednesday released the XeSS 1.3 performance enhancement, which works with Intel Arc "Alchemist" discrete GPUs, and Intel Arc iGPUs powering the Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors. The new super sampling technology brings several under-the-hood improvements to the upscaler, which improves image quality at a given resolution. Intel leveraged this improved upscaler to rework the resolution-scale of each performance preset, thereby improving performance per preset; while also introducing new presets at both ends of the resolution scale. The company released the XeSS 1.3 SDK on GitHub, so developers can begin exploring the tech and implementing it on their games.

The XeSS 1.3 update is predicated on an improved upscaler. Intel says that it has updated the AI models with new optimizations, and additional pre-training, particularly with difficult to upscale elements (such as meshes, as in textures with a lot of alpha pixels). The updated upscaler offers better reconstruction of detail, better AA, less ghosting, and improved temporal stability. Intel then used this up change the resolution scale across all its presets as detailed in the table below. It introduced the new Ultra Performance preset that does a 3.0x resolution scale, something that didn't exist in the previous versions of XeSS. On the other end of the spectrum is Native AA, a mode that has zero upscaling, but just the full application of the upscaler as a varnish—this is essentially Intel's take on DLAA.

The latest version of AMD's open-source GPU compute stack, ROCm, is due for launch soon according to a Phoronix article—chief author, Michael Larabel, has been poring over Team Red's public GitHub repositories over the past couple of days. AMD ROCm version 6.0 was released last December—bringing official support for the AMD Instinct MI300A/MI300X, alongside PyTorch improvements, expanded AI libraries, and many other upgrades and optimizations. The v6.0 milestone placed Team Red in a more competitive position next to NVIDIA's very mature CUDA software layer. A mid-February 2024 update added support for Radeon PRO W7800 and RX 7900 GRE GPUs, as well as ONNX Runtime.

Larabel believes that "ROCm 6.1" is in for an imminent release, given his tracking of increased activity on publicly visible developer platforms: "For MIPOpen 3.1 with ROCm 6.1 there's been many additions including new solvers, an AI-based parameter prediction model for the conv_hip_igemm_group_fwd_xdlops solver, numerous fixes, and other updates. AMD MIGraphX will see an important update with ROCm 6.1. For the next ROCm release, MIGraphX 2.9 brings FP8 support, support for more operators, documentation examples for Whisper / Llama-2 / Stable Diffusion 2.1, new ONNX examples, BLAS auto-tuning for GEMMs, and initial code for MIGraphX running on Microsoft Windows." The change-logs/documentation updates also point to several HIPIFY for ROCm 6.1 improvements—including the addition of CUDA 12.3.2 support.

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. unveiled its latest advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) at Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona. From the new Qualcomm AI Hub, to cutting-edge research breakthroughs and a display of commercial AI-enabled devices, Qualcomm Technologies is empowering developers and revolutionizing user experiences across a wide range of devices powered by Snapdragon and Qualcomm platforms.

"With Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for smartphones and Snapdragon X Elite for PCs, we sparked commercialization of on-device AI at scale. Now with the Qualcomm AI Hub, we will empower developers to fully harness the potential of these cutting-edge technologies and create captivating AI-enabled apps," said Durga Malladi, senior vice president and general manager, technology planning and edge solutions, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "The Qualcomm AI Hub provides developers with a comprehensive AI model library to quickly and easily integrate pre-optimized AI models into their applications, leading to faster, more reliable and private user experiences."

We're happy to share that Framework Laptop 16's are now in customer hands. It's been an excellent journey over the last two years designing and building an ultra-upgradeable, high-performance machine, and we're excited to see the early feedback. As always with Framework products, the first shipment is just the beginning, and we're looking forward to continuing to deliver on longevity, upgradeability, and repairability as we go. We've seen more press reviews go live as well, including by far the most thorough one, a deep dive from Jarrod's Tech that includes both a broad range of benchmarks and subjective evaluation of the overall experience. Framework Laptop 16 pre-orders are still open as we continue to manufacture our way through the pre-order batches. Most of our factory capacity, which we doubled last year, is now allocated to getting you Framework Laptop 16's as quickly as we can.

We recently uploaded the first set of developer documentation around Framework Laptop 16 internals on GitHub, adding to the existing material we have for the Expansion Bay and Input Module systems. The new release includes drawings and connector part numbers for the Mainboard to enable re-use. We'll continue to build out this documentation over time, like we have for Framework Laptop 13.

Phoronix head honcho, Michael Larabel, has noticed another set of interesting updates for AMD Graphics on Linux—albeit in preparation for next generation solutions: "engineers on Monday (February 5) posted a few new patch series for enabling some updated IP (intellectual property) blocks within their open-source AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver. This new IP is presumably part of the ongoing hardware enablement work for their next-gen RDNA 4 graphics." Team Red GitHub patches for "GFX12" targets appeared online last November, again highlighted by Larabel's investigative work—AMD engineers appear to be quite determined with their open-source software endeavors, as seen in LLVM-Project notes regarding GFX1200's enablement.

The new "IP block" updates included patches for the enabling ATHUB 4.1, LSDMA 7.0, IH 7.0, and HDP 7.0—presumably for next generation Radeon graphics solutions. Larabel provided a quick breakdown of these components: "ATHUB 4.1 is needed for clock-gating / power management features, LSDMA 7.0 is the latest IP for Light SDMA for general purpose System DMA (SDMA) on the GPU, IH 7.0 for the Interrupt Handler on the GPU, and HDP 7.0 for the Host Data Path support for CPU accessing the GPU device memory via the PCI BAR. As far as code changes, the big chunks of the work are from the auto-generated header files." He believes that AMD's engineers have largely moved on from current generation tasks: "The big version bumps for these IP blocks all the more are likely indicative of these bits being for next-gen RDNA 4 as opposed to further iterating on RDNA3 or similar." The patches could be merged into the upcoming Linux 6.9 release, possibly coinciding with a Radeon RX 8000 series rollout.

An Open Image Denoise 2.2 release candidate was released earlier today—as discovered by Phoronix's founder and principal writer; Michael Larabel. Intel's dedicated website has not been updated with any new documentation or changelogs (at the time of writing), but a GitHub release page shows all of the crucial information. Team Blue's open-source oneAPI has been kept up-to-date with the latest technologies—not only limited to Intel's stable of Xe-LP, Xe-HPG and Xe-HPC components—the Phonorix article highlights updated support on competing platforms. The v2.2 preview adds support for Meteor Lake's integrated Arc graphics solution, and additional "denoising quality enhancements and other improvements."

Non-Intel platform improvements include updates for Apple's M-series chipsets, AArch64 processors, and NVIDIA CUDA. OIDn 2.2-rc: "adds Metal device support for Apple Silicon GPUs on recent versions of macOS. OIDn has already been supporting ARM64/AArch64 for Apple Silicon CPUs while now Open Image Denoise has extended that AArch64 support to work on Windows and Linux too. There is better performance in general for Open Image Denoise on CPUs with this forthcoming release." The changelog also highlights a general improvement performance across processors, and a fix that resolves a crash incident: "when releasing a buffer after releasing the device."

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announced the latest roadmap milestone for Vulkan, the cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API. The Vulkan roadmap targets the "immersive graphics" market, made up of mid- to high-end smartphones, tablets, laptops, consoles, and desktop devices. The Vulkan Roadmap 2024 milestone captures a set of capabilities that are expected to be supported in new products for that market, beginning in 2024. The roadmap specification provides a significant increase in functionality for the targeted devices and sets the evolutionary direction of the API, including both new hardware capabilities and improvements to the programming model for Vulkan developers.

Vulkan Roadmap 2024 is the second milestone release on the Vulkan Roadmap. Products that support it must be Vulkan 1.3 conformant and support the extensions and capabilities defined in both the 2022 and 2024 Roadmap specifications. Vulkan roadmap specifications use the Vulkan Profile mechanism to help developers build portable Vulkan applications; roadmap requirements are expressed in machine-readable JSON files, and tooling in the Vulkan SDK auto-generates code that makes it easy for developers to query for and enable profile support in their applications.

References to GFX1150 & GFX1151 targets have been spotted again—this time in a ROCm Github repository—by renowned hardware sleuth; Kepler_L2. These references were first spotted last summer, in an AMDGPU LLVM backend/compiler (reported by Phoronix)—industry experts immediately linked these target codes to next generation "Strix" APU families. The latest leak provides confirmation that the GFX1150 ID is tied to "Strix Point 1," while GFX1151 is an internal IP for "Strix Point Halo," or simply "Strix Halo." The freshly published ROCm Github's commit is titled: "Strix Halo Support and Strix support in staging," which corroborates previous rumors regarding Team Red's engineers being deep into development of Zen 5 (and RDNA 3.5)-based accelerated processing units.

AMD has published several processor product roadmaps with references to "Strix Point" next-gen APUs, with a targeted 2024 launch window. Their December 2023 "Advancing AI Event" confirmed that the "Strix Point" mobile family will sport "XDNA 2" NPUs—previous generation "Phoenix" and recently released "Hawk Point" processors are on the first iteration of XDNA (a spatial dataflow NPU architecture). It is speculated that a typical "Strix Point" laptop processor will pack 12 Zen 5 CPU cores and 16 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores. Team Red has kept quiet about "Strix Halo" (also known as "Sarlak") when conducting public-facing presentations—a loose 2025 launch window is being touted by the rumor mill. The most advanced examples could feature up to 16 Zen 5 CPU cores and 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores.

AMD on Thursday announced the first release of FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3) source code through the company's GPUOpen initiative. The company just set up an FSR 3 source code repo on GitHub that game devs everywhere can take advantage of. This includes the complete source for DirectX 12, and the source of an FSR 3 Unreal Engine 5 plugin. With it, the company also released extensive documentation that helps developers understand the inner workings of FSR 3, so they could better integrate the tech with their games and applications. With this announcement, AMD also unveiled FSR 3 support for even more new and upcoming games, which include "Black Myth: Wukong," the three latest titles from the "Warhammer" franchise, including "Darktide," "Space Marine II," and "Realms of Ruin;" "Starfield," "Pax Dei," and "Crimson Desert."

AMD is working hard on delivering next-generation products, and today, its Linux team has submitted a few interesting patches that made a subtle appearance through recent GitHub patches for GFX12 targets, as reported by Phoronix. These patches have introduced two new discrete GPUs into the LLVM compiler for Linux, fueling speculation that these will be the first iterations of the RDNA4 graphics architecture, potentially being a part of the Radeon RX 8000 series of desktop graphics cards. The naming scheme for these new targets, GFX1200 and GFX1201, suggests a continuation of AMD's logical progression through graphics architectures, considering the company's history of associating RDNA1 with GFX10 and following suit with subsequent generations, like RDNA2 was GFX10.2 and RDNA3 was GFX11.

The development of these new GPUs is still in the early stages, indicated by the lack of detailed information about the upcoming graphics ISA or its features within the patches. Currently, the new GFX12 targets are set to be treated akin to GFX11 as the patch notes that "For now they behave identically to GFX11," implying that AMD is keeping the specifics under wraps until closer to release. The patch that defines target names and ELF numbers for new GFX12 targets GFX1200 and GFX1201 is needed in order to enable timely support for AMD ROCm compute stack, the AMDVLK Vulkan driver, and the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

Yesterday, Epic Games released a preview version of Unreal Engine 5.3—users can now try out the latest batch of improvements, as well as some new features. Epic's blurb Lumen boasts that their software engineers have refined "the workflows and capabilities of core features"—namely Nanite, and Path Tracing. Optimizations have resulted in "more control over performance" and overall better-looking visuals. Epic's own Fortnite, Layers of Fear (Bloober Team) and Remnant 2 (Gunfire Games) are the only currently released games running on Unreal Engine 5. Epic first showcased this technology back in 2020, with plenty of game development studios signing up to use it—but they have been slow in adapting to the feature-rich engine. In Remnant 2's case, Gunfire chose to not implement Lumen at launch.

Newly introduced experimental features include an upgraded particle rendering system—users are granted access to tool that can "create volumetrics such as smoke and fire directly inside Unreal." Epic's notes also mention that a Skeletal Editor has been added, for in-engine character weight and skinning work. Preview version 5.3 grants full support for Orthographic Rendering—useful in the fields of "architecture plus manufacturing visualizations, and stylistic games projects." Users will also see improvements in the Panel Cloth Editor and ML Cloth simulation system.

AMD's "Vega" graphics architecture powering graphics cards such as the Radeon VII, Radeon PRO VII, sees a discontinuation of maintenance with ROCm GPU programming software stack. The release notes of ROCm 5.6 states that the AMD Instinct MI50 accelerator, Radeon VII client graphics card, and Radeon PRO VII pro-vis graphics card, collectively referred to as "gfx906," will reach EOM (end of maintenance) starting Q3-2023, which aligns with the release of ROCm 5.7. Developer "EwoutH" on GitHub, who discovered this, remarks gfx906 is barely 5 years old, with the Radeon PRO VII and Instinct MI50 accelerator currently being sold in the market. The most recent AMD product powered by "Vega" has to be the "Cezanne" desktop processor, which uses an iGPU based on the architecture. This chip was released in Q2-2021.

AI is one of the most transformative technologies to debut in the past 40 years, but taking full advantage of its capabilities requires more than just the latest processor or graphics card. Previous major shifts in computing, like the adoption of 64-bit software and the introduction of 3D-accelerated graphics in the late 1990s, required significant software support as well as sophisticated new hardware capabilities. Today, AMD and Microsoft are stepping up to this challenge, working together to create the building blocks developers and consumers will need to take full advantage of AI both today and in the future.

While many AI tasks can run on a conventional CPU or GPU, these often aren't the ideal locations for executing a machine learning inference workload. As more AI models and workloads evolve, it will be vital to use specialized AI engines on the silicon designed specifically for AI tasks to deliver the right performance and experience to end users. The select new AMD Ryzen 7040 Series processors with Ryzen AI deliver cutting-edge AI features via a dedicated on-die processing block that's purpose-built to handle AI workloads - the first of its kind for x86 Windows 11 laptops. Integrating this functionality in ultrathin laptops will give these systems the outstanding AI performance they might not enjoy if relying on more conventional processors.

MSI suffered a massive data breach at the start of April and the Taiwanese electronics company promptly alerted its customers about the cyberattack on its "information systems." A few days later it emerged that a relatively young ransomware group "Money Message" was behind the hacking effort - these cybercriminals stated that they had infiltrated MSI's internal network. Gang members proceeded to acquire sensitive company files, database information and source code. At the time, Money Message demanded that MSI pay them a ransom of $4 million, with the added threat of stolen data getting leaked to the general public on the internet (in the event of MSI failing to pay up).

Money Message has this week claimed that MSI has refused to meet their demands - as a result, an upload of stolen data started on Thursday with files appearing on the group's own website, and spreading to the dark web soon after. Binarly, a cybersecurity firm, has since analyzed the leaked files and discovered the presence of many private code signing keys within the breached data dump. Alex Matrosov, Binarly's CEO states via Twitter: "Recently, MSI USA announced a significant data breach. The data has now been made public, revealing a vast number of private keys that could affect numerous devices. FW Image Signing Keys: 57 products (and) Intel Boot Guard BPM/KM Keys: 166 products." Binary has provided a list of affected MSI devices (gaming laptops & mobile workstations) on their GitHub page.

A bunch of unreleased AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics card have been spotted in ROCm 5.6 pull request, including the Radeon RX 7950 XTX, 7950 XT, 7800 XT, 7700 XT, 7600 XT, and 7500 XT. AMD has not yet launched its mainstream Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards, but according to the latest pull request, there are several unreleased graphics cards in for both high-end and mainstream segments. While the pull request has been removed from GitHub, it has been saved on Reddit. So far, it appears that AMD's RDNA 3 Radeon 7000 series lineup will be based on just three GPUs, Navi 33, Navi 32, and the Navi 31.

According to the list, we can expect a high-end refresh with Radeon RX 7950 XTX/XT version, also based on Navi 31 GPU. The list also shows that the Radeon RX 7800 series will be the only one based on the Navi 32 GPU, at least for now, while the Navi 33 GPU should cover the entire mainstream lineup, including the Radeon RX 7700 series, Radeon RX 7600 series, and the Radeon RX 7500 series. The list only includes XT versions, while non-XT should show up later, as it was the case with the Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards. AMD's President and CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, already confirmed during Q1 2023 earnings call that mainstream Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs based on RDNA 3 architecture will launch during this quarter, and earlier rumors suggest we might see them at Computex 2023.

As expected with AMD's activity on GitHub, ROCm 5.5 has now been officially released. It brings several big changes, including better RDNA 3 support. While officially focused on AMD's professional/workstation graphics cards, the ROCm 5.5 should also bring better support for Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards on Linux.

Surprisingly, the release notes do not officially mention RDNA 3 improvements in its release notes, but those have been already tested and confirmed. The GPU support list is pretty short including AMD GFX9, RDNA, and CDNA GPUs, ranging from Radeon VII, Pro VII, W6800, V620, and Instinct lineup. The release notes do mention new HIP enhancements, enhanced stack size limit, raising it from 16k to 128k, new APIs, OpenMP enhancements, and more. You can check out the full release notes, downloads, and more details over at GitHub.

We are pleased to announce our great experiment - Dolphin is coming to Steam! Our store page is now live, and you can visit it with the handy widget below. However, due to how Steam works, you won't be able to download the emulator through Steam just yet. Feel free to wishlist us to be notified when Dolphin is available to download on Steam! Dolphin is an emulator for the big N's 6th and 7th generation consoles, featuring enhancements such as increased resolution, save states, and netplay.

When we launch on Steam, we'll have a feature article detailing the process and features of the Steam release. We're pleased to finally tell the world of our experiment. This has been the product of many months of work, and we look forward to getting it into users' hands soon! You can continue the discussion in the forum thread of this article.

Intel released the XeSS Unreal Engine plugin, letting game developers integrate the performance enhancement technology with their Unreal Engine 4 and Unreal Engine 5 powered games, simulators, and 3D visualization applications. The plugin lets Unreal Engine take advantage of XeSS not just on Intel Arc "Alchemist" GPUs, where they benefit from the accelerated XMX code-path; but also AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, where the technology takes advantage of the slower yet functional DP4a code-path. XeSS is technically a second-generation super-resolution technology that Intel claims is on-par with AMD FSR 2.x and NVIDIA DLSS 2. Integrating it is as straightforward as adding AMD FSR support. Those interested can grab the plugin from the GitHub source link, below.

Microsoft is finding more genius ways to prevent you from creating an offline (local) account for your Windows 11 PC, with the latest Windows 11 22H2 setup completely missing the option to use a local account, forcing you to either use a Microsoft account, or create one if you lack it. The side-effect of forcing you to either use or create an online account, is that you can no longer clean-install Windows without an active Internet connection. "julianxhokaxhiu" on GitHub Gist found a simple method to bypass this. According to a new method discovered by them, you simply let Windows 11 22H2 setup present you with the screen where it asks for an e-mail address (of your Microsoft account); and enter "test@test.com" with "test" as the password. Let setup fail the login, and click on "next." That's it. Windows setup will proceed without needing an active Internet connection, and you can create a local account.Update Oct 27th: What to do if you don't have Internet, or your network adapter isn't detected by Windows Setup: