We're here at the 2026 Game Developers Conference, where Microsoft "VP of Next Generation" Jason Ronald is talking about a topic near and dear to many gamers' hearts: the future of Xbox. Ronald says the next Xbox, codenamed Project Helix, will have a custom AMD chip with "an order of magnitude increase in raytracing performance" up to and including path tracing. It will also include a next-gen version of AMD's FSR upscaling technology that relies on machine learning and includes frame generation that can improve the perceived smoothness of a game by imagining new frames between existing ones. In a post on X, AMD exec Jack Hyunh called it …Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta is adding more scam detection tools to Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp that can help users protect their accounts. In its announcement, Meta says the new features aim to alert users about suspicious activities before they engage with them, such as unrecognized friend requests and device linking notifications, because "we know that scammers try to avoid our detection and may not immediately use accounts maliciously."WhatsApp users will now receive a warning when red flags are detected in the behavioral signals for device linking requests, helping to prevent scammers from linking other WhatsApp accounts to their own device. Meta says …Read the full story at The Verge.

With AI features popping up on practically every tool, coding-centric utilities are no different. If anything, you’ve got new code editors and IDEs featuring AI workflows as their main draw. Having tinkered with a bunch of them ever since I started looking into LLMs last year, I must admit that they have their pros, especially the VS Code forks that bring the fastest, most capable reasoning models to the familiar old interface.

The S26 phones feel awfully familiar. While Samsung has treated its Flips and Folds to a few major hardware upgrades over recent years, the Galaxy S flagships have often felt like a long, unbroken line of minor spec refreshes. The S26 and S26 Plus do nothing to change that trend.The Galaxy S26 Ultra at least benefits from the company's new privacy display, but the two smaller S26 phones lack a killer hardware feature. They both have new chipsets, and the S26 gets a bigger battery while the Plus has faster wireless charging, but these are tiny tweaks, not wholesale upgrades. Perhaps most disappointingly, Samsung hasn't followed Google in adding magnetic Qi2 charging to the phon …Read the full story at The Verge.

AltStore PAL, the alternative iOS app store available in the European Union and Japan, is joining the social web. In a post on Wednesday, AltStore PAL announced that users across Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky can now interact with apps that developers choose to federate on its explore.alt.store website.Any likes from the social web will appear on AltStore PAL, according to creator Riley Testut, who shared last October that "you'll be able to comment on an app on Mastodon, like a news update on Threads, then open AltStore and view all these same interactions in-app." Users can also now sign into the AltStore PAL with their Mastodon or Blue …Read the full story at The Verge.

Every six months or so, Nvidia's head of automotive, Xinzhou Wu, invites CEO Jensen Huang to go for a ride in a vehicle equipped with the company's hands-free autonomous driving system. But only when Wu has "good confidence" in the system's driving capabilities.Recently, the two went for a drive from Woodside, California, to downtown San Francisco in a Mercedes CLA sedan with MB.Drive Assist Pro, a hands-free driver-assist system partly designed by Nvidia that's similar to Tesla's Full Self-Driving. The mood was light, even if the traffic was pretty heavy. "Let me know when you're in autonomous mode," Huang said to Wu, according to a vid …Read the full story at The Verge.

A friend of mine in Austria recently sent me something strange. He'd connected to Proton VPN's Eritrea server, a country in the Horn of Africa, and was getting sub-40ms ping to Austrian servers. For context, Eritrea is roughly 5,000 kilometers from Austria. Even with a perfect fiber optic path, you'd expect latency well north of 60ms for a round trip of that distance, and real-world routing would push it higher. Sub-40ms to a European server, while supposedly tunneled through East Africa, didn't add up.

It was a little after 1PM on Friday, February 28th, and Samantha Lujano was about to board her flight from Dubai to Colombo, Sri Lanka, when the drone attacks began. She had already received her boarding pass and gone through customs. Her flight was at the gate and her bags were loaded. She was simply waiting for the gate agents to open the flight for boarding. So she opened TikTok and started scrolling. But instead of relieving her boredom, the algorithm fed her anxiety. It showed her dozens of videos of explosions that purported to be from around the Persian Gulf - including a few in Dubai itself. She knew better than to believe everyt …Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI's Sora video generator could soon become a built-in feature in ChatGPT, as reported by The Information. Sora is currently only available on its website or as a standalone app, which has fallen shy of the popularity of ChatGPT. This update would allow users to access Sora's video generation capabilities directly within ChatGPT itself, much like the addition of image generation capabilities in the chatbot last year. Sora could help attract more users to ChatGPT, but it may also worsen the flood of deepfakes coming from OpenAI's video generator. When the Sora app initially launched less than a year ago, users generated realistic-lookin …Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft seems more determined than ever to combine Xbox and Windows - to the point that its next-gen Xbox, codenamed Project Helix, will play PC games too. Today, we learned Helix will go alpha in 2027. But the company isn't waiting for Helix before it points Windows gamers in the Xbox direction. Starting in April, it's bringing its full-screen Xbox mode to every kind of Windows 11 PC, including laptops, desktops, and tablets. And it's renamed it "Xbox mode."Technically, you've been able to try the Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE) in preview since November 2025, if you were part of both the Windows Insider and Xbox Insider Programs. But …Read the full story at The Verge.

VRAM has been a hot topic in the PC community for the last 5–6 years. I remember when YouTubers were casting doubts on the RTX 3070's longevity due to its 8GB VRAM. At the time, the majority of gamers didn't pay much heed to VRAM capacity, but fast-forward to 2026, and the discussion has certainly become more complicated. The average gamer still underestimates the importance of GPU VRAM, considering it's possible to run out of 8GB VRAM even at 1080p, given the right game and graphics settings. That said, the other extreme, which dictates that 24GB of VRAM be the minimum, is also not rooted in reality. It's important to consider VRAM capacity when buying a GPU, but don't be tricked into spending more than you realistically need for the games you play the most.

Superhuman says it has disabled Grammarly's "expert review" AI feature that said its edit suggestions were "inspired by" real writers, including our editor-in-chief and other Verge staff members."After careful consideration, we have decided to disable Expert Review as we reimagine the feature to make it more useful for users, while giving experts real control over how they want to be represented - or not represented at all," Ailian Gan, Superhuman's director of product management, said in a statement to The Verge. "Based on the feedback we've received, we clearly missed the mark. We are sorry and will do things differently going forward." …Read the full story at The Verge.