As Windows 10's end-of-support date looms, people have to choose between the options available to them. Some will continue using Windows 10 and grab extended support, some will move to the LTSC branch, and some will even migrate to Linux. However, there is the option of forcing Windows 11 on a device that doesn't officially support its hardware requirements, usually because the CPU doesn't have TPM 2.0 compatibility.

It’s been two and a half years since Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service got a big boost in graphics, latency, and refresh rates — this September, Nvidia’s GFN will officially add its latest Blackwell GPUs. You’ll soon be able to rent what’s effectively an RTX 5080 in the cloud, one with a whopping 48GB of memory and DLSS 4, then use that power to stream your own near-maxed-out PC games to your phone, Mac, PC, TV, set-top, or Chromebook for $20 a month.The news comes with some caveats, but a bunch of other upgrades, too, the biggest of which is called “Install-to-Play.” Nvidia is finally bringing back the ability to install games without waiting for Nvidia to formally curate them. Nvidia claims that will double the GeForce Now library in one fell swoop.No, you can’t just install any old PC game you own — but every game that’s opted into Valve’s Steam Cloud Play will immediately be available to install. “Literally the moment we add the feature, you’ll see 2,352 games show up,” Nvidia product marketing director Andrew Fear tells The Verge. After that, he says Install-to-Play will let Nvidia add many more games and demos to GFN on their release dates than Nvidia can manage on its own, just so long as publishers tick that box.Currently, Steam is the only platform compatible with Install-to-Play, but Fear tells me many publishers tend to opt in through Valve’s distribution network, including Ubisoft, Paradox, Nacom, Devolver, TinyBuild and CD Projekt Red.One important caveat is that Install-to-Play games won’t launch instantly like curated titles; you’ll need to download and install them each time, unless you pay Nvidia extra for persistent storage at $3 for $200GB, $5 for 500GB, or $8 for 1TB per month. Installs should be fast, though, since Nvidia’s servers are linked to Valve’s Steam servers. When GFN originally launched with a similar feature, I remember downloading games far faster than I’ve ever done at home.And Nvidia has a new use for your home bandwidth, too. If you’ve got enough, GFN will also now let you stream at 5K resolution (for both 16:9 monitors and ultrawides) at 120fps, or at up to 360fps at 1080p. There’s also a new optional Cinematic Quality Streaming mode you can toggle that Nvidia claims can reduce color bleed and restore detail to dark and blurry areas of a scene as it’s streamed over the net, and you can now stream at up to 100Mbps, up from 75Mbps previously, to help maintain that quality. (It uses HDR10 and SDR10, with YUV 4:4:4 chroma sampling, streamed over AV1 with an added AI video filter and some optimizations for clearer text and HUD elements.)Plus, Steam Deck OLED owners will be able to stream at its native 90Hz refresh rate (up from 60Hz), LG is bringing a native GeForce Now app directly to its 4K OLED TVs and 5K OLED monitors — “no Android TV devices, no Chromecast, nothing, run it directly on the television,” says Fear — and Logitech racing wheels with haptic feedback are now supported too.How much more performance will you truly get from an RTX 5080 in the cloud? That’s the real question, and we don’t have a clear answer yet. For one thing, Nvidia isn’t promising you’ll always have an RTX 5080-tier GPU for every game you play. The company’s $20-a-month GFN Ultimate tier will still include RTX 4080-class cards too, at least for the time being.Fear says there’s no ulterior motive there — it’ll just take time for 5080 performance to roll out “as we add the servers and bring up capacity.” He also rattles off a laundry list of popular games that’ll have 5080 performance right away, including Apex Legends, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Baldur’s Gate 3, Black Myth Wukong, Clair Obscur, Cyberpunk 2077, Doom: The Dark Ages… you get the idea.The other caveat is that while Nvidia claims its new Blackwell Superpods are up to 2.8 times faster at gaming, that’s only if you have DLSS 4 generating three fake frames for every real frame (4x MFG) and being OK with any resulting lag. We weren’t blown away with the uplift from RTX 4080 to RTX 5080 in our review of the physical card, and latency is even more important when you’re streaming over the net.That said, Tom and I have been impressed with GFN’s latency in the past. I’ve parried Expedition 33 foes and Sekiro bosses with it — and in lightweight games, Nvidia’s latency may have gotten even better this gen thanks to partnerships with ISPs like Comcast, T-Mobile and BT for low-latency L4S tech and the new 360fps mode. The company claims the 360fps mode can deliver end-to-end latency of just 30ms in Overwatch 2, a game where you don’t need multi-frame generation (MFG) to get that many frames. That’s more responsive than a home console — assuming you’re close enough and peered well enough to Nvidia’s servers to get 10ms ping, like I do in the San Francisco Bay Area. The good news is, you won’t have to pay an extra cent for the RTX 5080 performance boost either way. GeForce Now Ultimate will remain $19.99 a month for now. “We’re not going to increase our price at all,” says Fear, in a group briefing. When I ask him privately whether Nvidia will increase it later, he can’t say, but claims GFN has only ever increased price when Nvidia saw a big increase in power usage or needed to rebalance currency exchange in some regions. “Nothing’s written in stone, but we’re saying for now no plans to make a price increase.”Additionally, Nvidia is trying an intriguing new experiment that bakes GeForce Now into Discord so gamers can instantly try new games for free right from a Discord server, no GeForce Now login required. Epic Games and Discord are the first partners demoing the technology at Gamescom this week.“You can simply click a button that says ‘try a game’ and then connect your Epic Games account and immediately jump in and and join the action, and you’ll be playing Fortnite in seconds without any downloads or installs,” says Fear. He tells The Verge that it’s merely a “technology announcement” as of today, but that Nvidia hopes game publishers and developers will reach out if they’re interested in potentially adding it to their games. I hope so, as I’ve been in awe of try-before-you-buy cloud gaming ever since Gaikai introduced the idea 15 years ago, but Gaikai’s founder told me years later that publishers didn’t necessarily want it.I’m looking forward to trying GeForce Now’s 5080-class servers when they launch in September, alongside the new 90Hz mode for Steam Deck OLED, and I’m curious whether the influx of games will finally make it feel like a true console alternative for me. One of my last big remaining reservations is how many of my Steam games are still missing. Speaking of which, don’t expect to see Sony or Rockstar games like Grand Theft Auto on the service anytime soon. “I have no updates, they have chosen not to be on GFN, and you should go ask them,” Fear tells me.

Nvidia’s GeForce Now is getting a big upgrade next month — and it’s also part of an intriguing new experiment. Nvidia, Discord, and Epic Games have teamed up for an early test of instant game demos for Discord servers, which could theoretically let you immediately try a game without buying it, downloading it, or signing up for an account.Sound familiar? That’s probably because instantly try-before-you-buy was the original vision for Gaikai, one of the first cloud gaming services, and Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service also tried it many times by letting you demo games in a web browser or even in Google search. Now, Nvidia will be showing off the idea at Gamescom this week by letting people try Fortnite from within Discord.“You can simply click a button that says ‘try a game’ and then connect your Epic Games account and immediately jump in and and join the action, and you’ll be playing Fortnite in seconds without any downloads or installs,” says Nvidia product marketing director Andrew Fear. Here’s a screenshot of what it might look like, from an Nvidia video, which also shows the Fortnite demo is currently limited to a 30-minute free trial:It doesn’t sound completely frictionless if you still need an Epic Games account to play, and it’s not clear if Nvidia, Epic and Discord will offer the demo outside of Gamescom just yet. Nvidia is calling it a “technology announcement” rather than a confirmed feature, one that’ll hopefully see game publishers and developers reach out if they’re interested in potentially adding it to their games.After Sony bought Gaikai in 2012, it initially suggested it would offer instant try-before-you-buy game demos on the PlayStation 4 too, but that never happened. Years later, Gaikai’s founder told me that publishers didn’t necessarily want it.

I’m ashamed to admit it: when I’m working, my mouse frequently drifts to Instagram, YouTube, Reddit — even LinkedIn and Amazon — for bursts of dopamine. I can spend hours mindlessly scrolling from one reel to the next without realizing the day is slipping through my fingers. Suddenly, the sun is cresting, and my page is still blank. Cue deadline anxiety and a mad scramble to finish my work.

During the last half month, we've covered a lot of interesting gadgets and apps and thought we'd highlight a few that caught our attention the most. For example, we have a robovac that can mop the edges of your walls (something that my manual mop usually fails at), a charging cable that with any luck will last a good long time, and a new dock for the Mac Studio that adds a bunch of ports. And what's cooler than 3D printing a lightsaber? Let's dive in.Cool gearNarwal FlowWhere to Buy: $1499.99 $1099.99 at Narwal (basic)One of these years, I will get myself a robovac - hopefully one that will clean and mop the floor, pick up stray detrit …Read the full story at The Verge.

When I first started with Linux, I used to mostly rely on the graphical interface simply because it felt familiar and straightforward, especially since I am used to the Windows OS. However, after spending some time, I realized the terminal offers more power and speed. At first, learning even the basic commands was a task, but when I picked up a few essentials, my workflow improved significantly.

You probably know SSDs are quite a bit faster than spinning hard drives. They've replaced conventional HDDs in most use cases, and might become the universal standard when prices become comparable to those of hard drives. You might be curious about SSD caching, and whether it could help you increase drive performance even more. By using an SSD as a dedicated cache, you can improve access times significantly, but the benefits aren't worth it on every system. With the right hardware, however, you stand to gain a lot, and setting it up is a breeze.

I’ve been a longtime advocate for self-hosting my digital life, and for me, it's about reclaiming privacy and control from big corporations. I even self-host LLMs to bring local AI into my daily workflow.

The Nvidia app is getting improvements to DLSS override, more control panel features, and Project G-Assist changes this week. Nvidia has been gradually improving its new app over the past 18 months since its release, and it’s getting closer to fully migrating all the legacy control panel options.This week’s Nvidia app update will include anisotropic filtering, anti-aliasing, and ambient occlusion options, meaning you won’t have to navigate to Nvidia’s older control panel app to improve classic games. The setup tool for Nvidia Surround will also be part of the Nvidia app now.You also won’t have to configure DLSS override features on a per game basis anymore, as Nvidia is now adding a global option. You can set your DLSS preferences across all override supported games, and Nvidia’s overlay will also show which DLSS settings are active if you toggle this option on.Nvidia is also bringing its new Smooth Motion feature, which was previously exclusive to RTX 50-series GPUs, to all RTX 40-series owners. It’s a driver-based AI model that enables smoother gameplay for games that don’t support DLSS Frame Generation. Smooth Motion can be applied to games running with DLSS Super Resolution, at native resolution, or even titles with other upscaling technologies. Nvidia says it will typically double “the perceived frame rate.”If you’re a fan of Nvidia’s G-Assist AI assistant, Nvidia is changing the AI model behind the scenes so it will use 40 percent less memory. The smaller footprint won’t affect performance either, as it’s designed to respond even faster to queries.These latest Nvidia app changes will arrive on August 19th for beta users at 9AM PT / 12PM ET, followed by a general release next week.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will be the first game to get Nvidia’s new RTX Hair features next month. Instead of using triangles to model hair, Nvidia will use spheres to improve Harrison Ford’s virtual hair in the Indiana Jones game.RTX Hair is designed to improve lighting and shadows, all while maintaining performance in the game and not taking up too much extra memory. It also makes Ford’s hair look fuller and more realistic, and will be available as an update to the real-time path tracing mode in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.The RTX Hair improvements use new hardware capabilities in RTX 50-series GPUs, as Nvidia added hardware acceleration of ray tracing for hair and fur and support for the linear swept sphere (LSS) primitive. Nvidia says LSS is a “big step toward rendering high-quality digital humans in real time.”

Capable of running entire operating systems in isolated environments, virtual machines have a lot of utility for tinkerers. If you’re a fan of distro-hopping, you can spin up VMs to try out some fun distributions without setting up dual-boot. Likewise, the ability to relegate packages and project files to separate environments makes virtual machines quite useful for developers, as you won’t have to worry about unnecessary clutter or dependency-hell on your main system.

Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer now known for his science-focused stunts he publishes to more than 70 million subscribers on YouTube, will launch a competition show on Netflix in 2026. Rober will also bring “some of his most beloved, ambitious, and informative experiments to Netflix later this year,” Netflix says.The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that Netflix had talked to Rober. According to that article, Netflix has also had discussions with the creators at Dude Perfect, a channel with more than 60 million YouTube subscribers, about a new series. And earlier this year, Netflix brought videos from Ms. Rachel, known for her videos for toddlers and early education, to its platform.The push from Netflix into bringing on YouTube creators follows the success of MrBeast’s Beast Games game show on Prime Video. That show debuted last year and quickly became Prime Video’s “most-watched unscripted show ever.” It has been renewed for two more seasons.