Square Enix is dropping a demo for their totally rebuilt Dragon Quest VII tomorrow. Progress carries over to the full game, and players get a bonus costume for trying it. This remake, hitting consoles and PC in early February, ditches the HD-2D look for a hand-painted diorama style. Developer HEXADRIVE crafted the world as a miniature landscape, with 3D doll-like characters based on physical models to honor Akira Toriyama's art.
They made huge cuts to the famously long story, removing three whole islands and making four others optional. New story content fills the gaps, including more backstory, a new scenario for Kiefer, and hints at a different ending. Players can tackle story arcs out of order after a certain point. The classic job...
The foldable phone crease might finally be dead. Samsung showed off a crease-free display on a mystery device at CES, hinting at a major shift for future models. Leaked pictures of a demo unit lying completely flat show no visible ridge in the screen. How they did it is still a secret, but it likely involves new ultra-thin flexible glass tech. This breakthrough comes as Apple is also reportedly hitting design milestones to eliminate the crease on its long-rumored iPhone Fold.
Both companies might be using similar glass solutions. Samsung's own answer to the iPhone Fold, codenamed Wide Fold with a passport-style shape, is slated for a launch later this year. However, that model may not get the new screen. Insiders note Samsung's mobile...
Compute demands are about to get absolutely silly. AMD CEO Lisa Su says we are entering the YottaScale era, where AI will need insane amounts of processing power. She predicts the world will require over ten yottaFLOPS by the decade's end. To grasp that scale, one yottaFLOP equals 344,828 of AMD's own Helios AI server racks. This demand is not just for cloud data centers anymore. AI is spreading into everything at the edge, from personal computers to healthcare and space tech. Su estimates total compute needs will be ten thousand times greater than they were just a few years back.
This potential growth creates a massive market for hardware companies. AMD's recent CES keynote showed its play to capture it. They revealed new Instinct...
ASUS just fixed the worst part of high-end motherboards. Their new 800 series Neo boards have smarter PCIe lane layouts, finally letting you use all your fast storage without gimping the graphics card. These refreshed models, spanning ROG, ProArt, and TUF Gaming lines, use the AMD X870E chipset but with key wiring changes. The ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming WiFi7 Neo allows two PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs and three PCIe 4.0 drives to all run at once while the GPU stays at full PCIe 5.0 x16 speed. They pulled this off by having the USB4 ports share bandwidth with one M.2 slot.
Another model, the ROG Crosshair X870E Glacial, also provides full bandwidth to the GPU and two PCIe 5.0 SSDs. A third PCIe slot on that board runs at a slower Gen 3 speed. The...
Apple's cheap iPhone trick gets another lazy rerun. The iPhone 17e is supposedly heading into mass production right after CES wraps up, sticking to a first-quarter reveal. This budget model will be almost identical to last year's iPhone 16e. The only real changes are a slower version of the new A19 chip and a screen upgrade. It will get a 6.1-inch OLED panel with the Dynamic Island cutout, ditching the older notch design. Chinese supplier BOE is tipped to provide most of these displays.
Under the hood, it is not all new tech. The phone will reportedly use Apple's older C1 5G modem, not the newer C2 or C1X versions. This cost-saving move matches the strategy with the chip. The A19 inside will be downclocked, a repeat of how the iPhone...
Total War is getting a chatbot overlord. Creative Assembly is adding an AI advisor to Total War: Pharaoh, powered by NVIDIA's tech. This is not your basic tutorial guide. It uses a local language model on your GPU for real-time, context-aware help. Players can just talk to it or type naturally instead of digging through menus. The thing is trained on the game's specific rules and knows exactly what is happening in your campaign at that moment.
It can explain why a city rebelled or give tactics based on your current map. It works by processing your question, the live game state, and a massive internal database with all the stats on units, buildings, and faction perks. Creative Assembly built it with NVIDIA ACE tools to link that game...
NVIDIA just gave modders god powers for old games. They announced RTX Remix Logic, a new system letting modders make game visuals react to gameplay. This feature drops later this month in an app update. It works by spotting over thirty common in-game events, offering more than nine hundred triggers for modders to use. Lighting, materials, and fog effects can now change based on what happens in the game. A door opening could suddenly alter the weather or shift the lighting in the room.
The system can also inject dynamic particles or full-screen effects. These can act as stress indicators when a player's health is low, adding chromatic aberration or a vignette. Big environmental effects like snowstorms are smart, only appearing outside...
Finally, a laptop you can actually fix. Schenker just revealed a semi-modular laptop, the Element 16, built with Intel's upcoming Panther Lake chips. This thing is designed to last, letting users swap out tons of parts themselves. They showed a prototype called the M16P. The bottom panel uses a screwless quick-release system for easy access inside. You can replace the modular I/O boards for ports, the battery, the cooling fans, the keyboard, and the storage. It even has an extra SO-DIMM socket for more RAM, supporting up to 64 GB added to the base 16 GB soldered on.
The keyboard is also a simple swap, making it easy to clean or change layouts like ANSI to ISO. Schenker plans to offer future motherboard upgrades, moving beyond the...
MSI is chasing the AI hype with another overpriced tiny computer. The company unveiled its AI Edge desktop, a four-liter mini PC using AMD's top Strix Halo chip, the Ryzen AI Max Plus 395 processor. This 16-core chip includes a neural processor rated for fifty AI TOPS, with the combined CPU and graphics contributing to a claimed total of 126 TOPS. The system features integrated Radeon 8060S graphics with forty compute units. It supports a massive 128 gigabytes of fast LPDDR5x memory soldered directly to the board, which is shared between the processor and graphics.
This unified memory pool is supposedly enough to run very large AI models locally. MSI states it can handle language models with up to 120 billion parameters. The mini PC is...
