Dune: Awakening, the multiplayer survival game inspired by Frank Herbert's legendary sci-fi novel and Legendary Entertainment's award-winning films, will launch on May 20th. Funcom is excited to share that pre-orders begin today, and gamers everywhere are now less than two months away from descending upon the most dangerous planet in the universe.

The standard edition, the Deluxe Edition, and the Ultimate Edition are now available for pre-order on Steam, with the latter including, among many other goodies, an incredible, 90-minute-long digital soundtrack. In celebration of this moment, Funcom has prepared a journey behind the scenes of the making of the music, giving viewers a unique glimpse at how award-winning composer Knut Avenstroup Haugen brought the album to life with a live orchestra at the legendary AIR Lyndhurst studio in London.

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.