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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Intel has announced its new Core Ultra 200S Plus series desktop processors aimed at creators and gamers, including the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, marking the company's second pass at its Arrow Lake chip architecture.

Ever since it came out in 2018, ray tracing has been a classic PC gaming dilemma. It's a brilliant piece of technology that came with a frame-rate bill most of us simply didn't want to pay (and half of us couldn't afford). Early implementations looked interesting, sure, but they rarely felt transformative enough to justify the performance hit. Like many PC gamers, I admired the technology from a distance while quietly leaving the toggle switched off.

Instead of moving forward with a jury trial against Live Nation-Ticketmaster as expected, the Justice Department announced a settlement Monday that omitted what used to be on the top of its wish list: a breakup. What the DOJ did get was a series of concessions that some industry stakeholders found unsatisfying and even baffling. There are a few bright spots, those who spoke to The Verge said: a 15 percent cap on Ticketmaster service fees at Live Nation-owned or operated amphitheaters, for instance, and a pledge to give artists more transparency on their own ticket sales. But they remained unconvinced the deal would usher in the large-scale …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.

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.

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.

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.