Just months after announcing DLSS 4.5 at CES, NVIDIA has unveiled its next major upscaling technology, DLSS 5. The company is doubling-down on AI for this next iteration, claiming DLSS 5 “infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials” using a real-time neural rendering model when it arrives this fall.
So what does this mean in practice? In an on-stage demo at NVIDIA’s GTC 2026 keynote, CEO Jensen Huang showed off the technology with Resident Evil: Requiem, Hogwarts Legacy and Starfield. DLSS 5 adds a noticeable amount of detail to character’s hair and skin tone, but it also appears it’s being compared to those games without any DLSS features turned on. It’s unclear how much of a difference it makes compared to DLSS 4.5 with path tracing and all of its features turned on.
“DLSS 5 takes a game’s color and motion vectors for each frame as input, and uses an AI model to infuse the scene with photoreal lighting and materials that are anchored to source 3D content and consistent from frame to frame,” NVIDIA said in a blog post. The company also notes that the technology runs in real time, and it works at up to 4K.
Huang showed off DLSS 5 while running a system with two RTX 5090 GPUs. Eventually, it will be able to run on a single video card (though I’d imagine it would have to be almost as powerful as two 5090s). Huang also paints DLSS 5 as a step towards offering Hollywood-like quality for real-time rendering, without the need for the GPU horsepower required by studios. It sounds a bit like a generative AI video model that can be directly controlled by developers, instead of just AI prompts.
NVIDIA, never shy from self-aggrandizing, claims DLSS 5 is also the “biggest breakthrough in computer graphics” since real-time ray tracing arrived in 2018. But given that ray tracing itself hasn’t being mainstream for many gamers, it’ll be interesting to see if there’s any interest in NVIDIA’s AI-produced pixels.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/nvidia-claims-dlss-5-will-deliver-photoreal-image-quality-with-ai-this-fall-193452088.html?src=rss
Mario Kart World is getting a set of two officially-licensed racing wheels from Hori, nine months after the game’s June 2025 release. This set of racing wheels (Pro Deluxe and Pro Mini) are similar to the original Hori Racing Wheels released for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on Switch, but provide one key upgrade: the addition of a C button for Nintendo
Apple has quietly announced the AirPods Max 2, featuring improved active noise cancellation, an H2 chip, and new features like adaptive audio and AI-powered real-time translation. Like the original model, these headphones start at $549. The Verge reports: As noted by Apple, the AirPods Max 2 offer active noise-cancellation that’s 1.5 times more effective when compared to its predecessor. Transparency mode, which allows you to hear your surroundings while wearing the headphones, also sounds “more natural” with the AirPods Max 2, according to Apple.
The AirPods Max 2 support 24-bit, 48kHz lossless audio when connected with a USB-C cable, as well as offer up to 20 hours of listening time on a single charge. Other capabilities include loud sound reduction, a camera remote feature that works by pressing the digital crown to take a photo or start a recording, as well as a personalized volume feature that “automatically fine-tunes the listening experience” based on your preferences over time.
Two of Apple’s most important initiatives, a complete overhaul of its operating systems’ user interface design, and its efforts to become a significant player in the AI space, haven’t been home runs. Siri isn’t even close to being what the company promised at WWDC 2024, and users haven’t been particularly taken with the Liquid Glass UI overhaul.
The Delaware judge said Krafton had violated the terms of its contract with Unknown Worlds when it fired the executives. “To remedy these breaches, Gill is reinstated as CEO of Unknown Worlds with full operational authority over the studio,” wrote judge Lori W. Will.
A Krafton spokesperson said in a statement that “we respectfully disagree with today’s ruling” and that “we are evaluating our options as we determine our path forward.” Further litigation over potential damages is still pending.
This legal battle has been brewing for a while. Krafton bought Unknown Worlds back in 2021 and the contract stipulated that executives and staff would get to share in a $250 million bonus if they hit certain revenue targets by 2025. Those targets were not reached, and could not be reached, because Krafton delayed Subnautica 2.
According to the pre-trial brief, Krafton CEO Changham Kim allegedly nixed the payout because it would be a “professional embarrassment” and make him look like a “pushover.” He reportedly consulted ChatGPT to ask about ways to avoid paying the bonus and, oddly, seemed to consider a hostile takeover by a newly-formed entity.
Judge Will dinged the CEO on both counts, saying that Kim regretted committing to the payout and “consulted an artificial intelligence chatbot to contrive a corporate ‘takeover’ strategy.” Engadget reached out to Krafton and the company re-emphasized it was displeased with the ruling but said that it doesn’t resolve the ongoing litigation.
As for the game, Krafton says Subnautica 2 is coming sooner rather than later. We’ve heard that one before.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/judge-rules-that-krafton-must-rehire-fired-subnautica-director-184702823.html?src=rss
The Linux kernel’s extensible scheduler class “sched_ext” to allow for custom CPU scheduling policies as BPF programs continues enabling new functionality. Queued up in the sched_ext development code ahead of next month’s Linux 7.1 cycle is the new SCX_ENQ_IMMED capability for enabling tighter control over when tasks land on a CPU…
OpenAI cannot escape the doom cloud swirling around its rollout of a text-based “adult mode” in ChatGPT.
Late Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported that insiders confirmed that OpenAI’s “handpicked council of advisers on well-being and AI” were “freaking out” over the company’s plans to move ahead with “adult mode,” despite their urgent warnings.
Back in January, council members unanimously warned OpenAI that “AI-powered erotica could foster unhealthy emotional dependence on ChatGPT for users and that minors could find ways to access sex chats,” sources told the WSJ. One expert suggested that without major updates to ChatGPT, OpenAI risked creating a “sexy suicide coach” for vulnerable users prone to form intense bonds with their companion bots.
Samsung will reportedly end Galaxy Z TriFold sales in South Korea on March 17, three months after the device went on sale, according to South Korean newspaper Dong-A Ilbo. Samsung has not yet confirmed the report, but Engadget has reached out for comment. In the US, where the TriFold arrived in January, the phone will remain available until existing inventory runs out. A unit at retail (if you can find it) will run you almost $3,000.
Samsung seemingly never intended the model for mass production. It sold the device in small batches through its website, with each selling out within minutes. Samsung reportedly moved roughly 3,000 units across the first two allotments and did not send review units to the media.
Industry sources told Dong-A Ilbo that the TriFold was a technology showcase rather than a revenue-generating product. Rising costs of components like DRAM and NAND flash have left virtually no profit margin on the device. In South Korea, the phone briefly traded for nearly three times its retail price on the secondary market.
In Engadget’s limited time with the TriFold, the device felt solid, despite not having been built for a true production run. The original Galaxy Fold had to be delayed in 2019 after multiple review units sent to the press broke within days.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/samsung-ends-galaxy-z-trifold-sales-three-months-after-launch-182903503.html?src=rss
Video game launches for new cars are increasingly common these days—Gran Turismo alone has hosted dozens of “Vision” concepts—but Porsche decided to go a little more serious for the digital debut of its latest model. iRacing, the online driving sim that has been punishing people’s digital driving indiscretions since 2008, was not only the first place anyone could drive the new 911 Cup, but also serves as a sort of digital feeder series to Porsche’s one-make Porsche Carrera Cup.
That sim makes a great venue because the 911 Cup is as hardcore a racer as iRacing is a hardcore racing game. When I was invited to drive that new car for real, I knew exactly where to start.
The hardest part of riding a bike, Timia Porter says, isn’t the effort. It’s the beginning. Before a wheel turns, before the pedals move, there is a sequence — clothing, route planning, tire and battery checks, timing, weather, traffic, family logistics. Each decision is small on its own, but together they can become overwhelming.
“One of the biggest things is executive functioning,” Porter explained. “You have to be able to see the steps in your head and not feel overwhelmed by them.” Porter lives with ADHD, and for her, those “steps” aren’t casual considerations. They are potential roadblocks. The difference between twenty steps and eight can determine whether she rides at all. “When I think about going outside, there can be twenty different steps involved,” she said. “On Zwift, it’s maybe eight. I’m going to choose the eight.”
That choice has changed her life.
Porter, a U.S. Air Force veteran and mother of a pre-teen daughter, came to cycling during the COVID shutdown. Access to soccer, her longtime sport, disappeared overnight. At the same time, she was navigating a difficult and abusive relationship. Cycling became both movement and refuge. “It gave me an escape,” she said. She began outdoors, but Zwift entered her world the way it does for many riders: weather, convenience, practicality. What she didn’t expect was how quickly the platform would become something deeper. “Little did I know Zwift was going to come in handy on days that were mentally and emotionally challenging as well,” she said. “That has been the saving grace.”
The saving grace, she explains, is friction removal. Outside riding carries invisible stressors: traffic, flats, detours, timing pressure. As a mom, that last one matters. A ride isn’t just miles; it’s a calculation. How far can she go? Will she be back in time? What if something delays her? “Sometimes I find myself rushing back home,” she said. “With riding inside, it gives me more flexibility.” Inside, the uncertainty shrinks. There are no stoplights interrupting intervals, no wind gusts disrupting cadence targets, no animals darting across the road mid-sprint. Training becomes precise. “When you’re outside, something always interrupts the workout,” she said with a laugh. “On Zwift, I have complete control. I can check every box my coach gives me.”
Porter races criteriums — fast, technical, aggressive events she compares to NASCAR. The margins are thin and the stakes high. For that kind of racing, training specificity matters. Zwift allows her to hit power numbers, cadence assignments, and sprint targets without compromise. Yet the numbers, she insists, are only part of the story. The emotional impact is harder to quantify.
There have been days when depression pressed so heavily that leaving the house felt impossible. On those days, the bike a few feet away becomes a negotiation. “If I could just get on Zwift,” she tells herself. “Just get on.” She describes it like crawling through a desert, desperate for a drop of water. Instead of calling out “water,” she calls out something else. “Zwift, Zwift, Zwift.” Sometimes the ride lasts thirty minutes. Sometimes longer. More than once, she has recorded herself afterward — overwhelmed, crying, a cathartic experience. “I didn’t realize how much I needed that,” she said. “It’s like therapy. Except I didn’t have to talk to anyone.” She shares that with honesty and vulnerability.
Physical movement provides dopamine. The sense of accomplishment that comes by checking off a workout provides dopamine. Combined, they create momentum. “When I ride in the morning, I feel like I’ve already won the day,” she said. “I get two hits of dopamine — one from the workout and one from checking it off my list. And that momentum transfers into everything else.” For someone navigating ADHD, that transfer matters. It means the energy doesn’t dissipate. It compounds.
Zwift also does something more subtle: it offers community without performance pressure. “Human beings need community,” Porter said. “If you’ve ever seen Cast Away, he makes a friend out of a volleyball. We need connection.” For her, in-person social settings can sometimes bring anxiety — overthinking conversations, worrying about saying the wrong thing, replaying interactions afterward. Zwift removes that layer. “We’re just here riding a bike in virtual reality,” she said. “How can I offend you?” It’s a simple observation, but a profound one. On Zwift, connection doesn’t require small talk mastery or perfect social timing. It requires showing up and pedaling.
Relationships form both ways. Some begin outdoors and continue virtually. Others start through Instagram, Strava, or Zwift meetups and grow into real friendships. Accountability partners encourage each other. Group rides provide structure during dark winter months when seasonal depression hits hardest. “It’s so good for maintaining connections,” she said, “and we can build a strong bond and connection, whether we meet in person in the future or we never meet in person.” She also appreciates the way the platform makes metrics engaging rather than intimidating. The graphs are clear. The feedback immediate. Achievements visible. “With my ADHD, things need to be clear as a fifth grader,” she said. “Flashcard simple. It needs to be super clean cut and easy to decipher. If it’s too much, my brain just goes blind.” Zwift, for her, strikes that balance. The science and analytics are there, but they’re digestible and progress feels tangible.
At the same time, the platform accommodates different levels of seriousness. It serves the competitive racer chasing performance gains and the casual rider just looking for a fun way to move with friends. “It provides something for the serious and the not-so-serious cyclist,” she said. Her online identity — @theecarbonqueen — captures that blend of strength and playfulness. The name came after a particularly strong outdoor ride when her fiancé jokingly called her a “carbon princess.” “Princess? I’m too grown for that,” she recalled telling him. “I’m a queen.” The name stuck, not as a branding strategy, but as a declaration. She knows what she’s capable of.
What Porter wishes more people understood about ADHD extends beyond cycling. It comes down to expectations. “Our expectations of people come from what we’re good at,” she said. If something takes another person five minutes, it might take her an hour, or more, depending on distractions and mental bandwidth. “Don’t take the things that I drop as a personal thing,” she said. “It’s not you.” Her advice is simple and radical at once: get curious. Lead with compassion. Release rigid expectations. It’s advice that applies on and off the bike.
To outsiders, Zwift can look like a game. For Porter, it is access — to movement, to precision training, to community, to emotional reset. It is structure when her thoughts feel scattered. It is control when life feels unpredictable. It is connection without pressure. Most of all, it is eight steps instead of twenty — and sometimes, eight steps are enough.
AI infrastructure company Nebius signed a deal to provide up to $27 billion in AI computing capacity to Meta over the next five years, including a guaranteed $12 billion purchase by 2027. Reuters reports: Under the agreement, Meta will also buy an additional $15 billion worth of capacity planned by Nebius over the coming five years if it is not sold to other customers, giving the contract a total value of up to $27 billion, Nebius said. The deal is the latest example of U.S. tech giants’ efforts to supplement their own AI data-centre build-outs by locking in scarce GPU and power capacity from “neocloud” providers like Nebius. Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh said the latest Meta deal would help “accelerate the build-out and growth of our core AI cloud business.” Further reading: Data Centers Overtake Offices In US Construction-Spending Shift
Apple’s latest acquisition could be a hint towards improvements for Final Cut Pro. The tech giant acquired MotionVFX, as seen on the company’s website and first reported by MacRumors, which is known for providing plugins, templates, visual effects and more to video editors. MotionVFX currently offers its software for a handful of video-editing apps, like DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere, but is also listed as a trusted Apple partner and found in the Final Cut Pro ecosystem of third-party products.
Apple hasn’t revealed an acquisition price nor details of the deal. On its website announcement, MotionVFX wrote that it’s “thrilled to embrace” similar values seen with Apple products and that it’s the “beginning of something wonderful.”
Considering a lot of MotionVFX’s tools are designed for Final Cut Pro and Apple’s Motion app, we could see native integration of popular visual effects and templates into Apple’s app interfaces. It’s worth noting that MotionVFX already offers an extension that creates a panel directly in Final Cut Pro for users to browse, download and apply visual effects from its repository. The acquisition could also hint at Apple trying to make its Creator Studio more enticing in the future, since it includes both Final Cut Pro and Motion. However, there hasn’t been any clarity on what will happen to MotionVFX’s monthly or annual subscription plans, nor its support for competing products.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/apple-acquires-popular-video-editing-software-company-motionvfx-175429480.html?src=rss
Kurt Roeckx has announced
that Debian has moved to the campaigning period for the 2026 Debian
Project Leader (DPL) election. This year there is only one candidate,
Sruthi Chandran, so Debian voters will have a choice between Chandran
as DPL or “None of the above”. The campaign period will run through
April 3, and the voting period will run from April 4 to
April 17. Chandran has not yet posted a platform for the 2026
election, but her 2024
platform is available on the Debian wiki.
Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is a game that a whole bunch of people are looking forward to, and they might be pleased to learn Warner Bros. Games is making the wait a bit shorter. The publisher has moved up the game by a week from its previous release date of May 29, meaning it will land on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Steam and Epic Games Store on May 22. A Nintendo Switch 2 version will be released later this year.
Folks who buy the deluxe edition will still be able to jump in three days early. Everyone who pre-orders the game will get access to a The Dark Knight Returns Batsuit from the jump.
TT Games is the team behind Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. The studio did a fantastic job of folding nine movies worth of material into the fantastic Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. Here’s hoping it can pull off a similar trick this time — it has nearly nine decades of Batman history to work with.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/lego-batman-legacy-of-the-dark-knights-release-date-moves-up-a-week-174035977.html?src=rss
F is for Free, FSF, and fat chanceThe Free Software Foundation (FSF) has rattled a saber at Anthropic over the use of its materials in training the AI vendor’s models.…
Formula 1 raced in China this past weekend, just a week after the sport kicked off its 2026 season in Australia. Most of the teams had a better handle on the sport’s complicated new cars in China, and the more traditional racetrack environment played better to the strengths of their hybrid power units, with enough hard braking zones to recharge batteries without having to sap engine power instead.
We have a better idea of the grid’s current pecking order, at least for now. There’s some daylight between each of the top three teams and a close battle for midfield honors. Meanwhile, the specter of unreliability is well and truly with us; four cars failed to even take the start, and seven (of 22) were not classified as finishing. For fans of those teams and drivers, it wasn’t a great weekend, especially if you woke up at 3 am to watch the race. But F1 put generally on an entertaining show in Shanghai.
That’s a lot of fans
The sport has been visiting the city since 2004. The setting is a classic turn-of-the-century facility designed and built by Herman Tilke. It’s a captivating-looking place, with a pond-filled paddock, a vast grandstand that spans the start-finish straight, and a layout that resembles the character for “shang,” which creates some rather tricky corners, like the spiraling decreasing radii of turns 1 and 2.
After a year’s worth of development since GIMP 3.0 was released,
the team behind the open-source image editor has released
GIMP 3.2. It comes as part of the plan
to release GIMP more frequently, rather than wait six or seven years
between releases. The release comes with lots of new features (as can
be seen in more detail in the release notes),
including 20 new brushes for the MyPaint Brush tool, an “overwrite” paint
mode, new and upgraded file formats, UI improvements in a variety of
places, such as the on-canvas text editor, and new non-destructive layers:
You can now use Link Layers to incorporate external image as
part of your compositions, easily scaling, rotating, and transforming them
without losing quality or sharpness. The link layer’s content is updated
when the source file is modified
The Path tool can now create Vector Layers, which lets you draw
shapes with adjustable fill and stroke settings.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Spending on data center projects in the U.S. has exploded, surpassing offices for the first time at the end of last year. It’s a trend Matt Kunz saw early on when Meta built a computing hub outside Columbus, Ohio. Other tech companies soon swarmed into the area, drawn by its stable economy, university talent pipeline and ample power, water and land, said Kunz, vice president and general manager at Turner Construction Co., the firm that led Meta’s build-out. Since Meta broke ground in 2017, it’s expanded its data center campus, and Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft Corp. made plans to join it nearby.
“When one shows up, almost all the other ones tend to follow,” Kunz said. For Turner, a construction giant responsible for supertall office skyscrapers, sports stadiums and cultural venues around the globe, data centers are commanding more of its bandwidth. The company completed $9.4 billion of the projects last year, more than five times its 2020 total. Last month, Turner announced it was chosen as one of the contractors on a $10 billion data center for Meta in Indiana. Tech companies’ needs for AI processing facilities have made data centers the latest darling of the real estate industry. The properties are figuring heavily into portfolios of major investors such as Blackstone, Brookfield Asset Management and KKR, on a bet that long-term demand for computing power will continue to grow. At the same time, office development has slowed as cities across the U.S. contend with vacancies that have piled up since the Covid lockdowns.
Construction spending for data centers has climbed steadily in recent years, while outlays for general office projects headed downward, U.S. Census data show. The two crossed paths in December, with roughly $3.57 billion spent on data centers that month, compared with $3.49 billion for offices, according to preliminary estimates. The shift is likely to continue and “may perpetuate itself even further as AI is utilized for automating day-to-day jobs,” said Andy Cvengros, co-lead of U.S. data center markets for the brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. “It’s going to directly impact the amount of office space people need.” According to Christopher McFadden, senior vice president at Turner, more than a third of the company’s backlog is now tied to data centers.
“We’re going to be building these at this scale for years to come,” McFadden said. “There’s a lot of wind in the sail.”
Apple announced the AirPods Max 2 today, following up the original AirPods Max, which were announced in December 2020. The new model brings improved active noise cancellation (ANC) and other new features via an updated H2 chip.
The AirPods Max 2 are available in the same five colorways as their predecessor.
Credit:
Apple
Apple introduced the H2 with the AirPods Pro (2nd Generation), which came out in September 2022. The original AirPods Max released in 2021 with an H1, meaning the new over-ear headphones should be more in line with Apple’s AirPods series in terms of features.
Apple claims that the new chip, combined with new computational audio algorithms, makes ANC up to 1.5 times “more effective” on the AirPods Max 2 compared to the original AirPods Max.
OpenAI has been hit with another lawsuit. This time, Encyclopedia Britannica took legal action against OpenAI, accusing the company of copyright and trademark infringements, as first reported by Reuters. More specifically, Britannica alleged that OpenAI illegally used its “copyrighted content at a massive scale” when training its AI models. Not just with training, the encyclopedia company claimed that ChatGPT’s responses to user queries sometimes contain “full or partial verbatim reproductions of [Britannica’s] copyright articles.”
Along with claims of copyright violations, Britannica argued that OpenAI was also responsible for trademark infringement. According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT generates “made-up content or ‘hallucinations‘ and falsely attributes them” to Encyclopedia Britannica. The lawsuit doesn’t specify an amount for monetary damages, but Britannica is also seeking an injunction to prevent OpenAI from repeating these accusations.
When reached out for comment, a spokesperson for OpenAI told Engadget that, “ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives. Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use.”
It’s not the first time that Britannica has filed a lawsuit against an AI company. In September, the company, which owns Merriam-Webster, also sued Perplexity for similar reasons. On the other side, OpenAI is still embroiled in a legal battle with The New York Times, which also sued the AI giant for copyright infringement.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/encyclopedia-britannica-sues-openai-for-copyright-and-trademark-infringement-164747991.html?src=rss
