If you hang out on hardware subreddits long enough, you’ll hear the joke “Nvidia -$50” tossed around about AMD’s long-held Radeon pricing strategy. Well, AMD managed to buck that trend today, in the mainstream segment where pricing matters most. AMD revealed the Radeon RX 9060 XT during the company’s Computex keynote – and it priced the 16GB model at $349. That not only undercuts Nvidia’s avoid-at-all-costs 8GB RTX 5060 Ti by $30, but it means the 16GB 9060 XT is a whopping $80 cheaper than Nvidia’s actually-pretty-good 16GB 5060 Ti. Hot damn. Competition is back on the menu y’all! A quick peek at the Radeon RX 9060 XT’s high-level specs show that it’s available in both 8GB and 16GB configurations (more on the 8GB version below). With 32 RDNA 4 Compute Units, the 9060 XT’s GPU packs half those found in its bigger brother, the $549+ Radeon 9070 series. By pricing the 16GB Radeon RX 9060 XT so aggressively, it lets AMD show why 8GB of memory isn’t enough in 2025. The only performance-comparison slide shared with press compares the 16GB Radeon against the 8GB RTX 5060 Ti (which, again, costs more). AMD claims the Radeon tested an average of 6 percent faster across a suite of 40 games, with wins in individual games hitting up to 30 percent faster. Closely note that the testing was performed at the more memory-intensive 1440p resolution here – the numbers would no doubt be closer if AMD’s graphics card was compared against Nvidia’s 16GB version. The 9060 XT also hangs tough with the 8GB 5060 Ti in Ultra Raytracing games – typically an Nvidia strength. Here, the expanded memory capacity shines even more, driving up to 62 percent higher performance in its peak example. (Ray tracing gobbles up memory.) Speaking of ray tracing, as we saw with the Radeon RX 9070 series, AMD seriously updated its ray tracing chops this generation – at least on games with basic ray tracing features. In games with more intensive ray tracing features, including path-traced games like Cyberpunk 2077 overdrive mode and Black Myth Wukong, AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture struggled, languishing far behind Nvidia. AMD attacked the problem head-on at Computex, announcing “FSR Redstone” (Minecraft Mumbo Jumbo fans rise up). This technology takes a multi-step approach to improving visuals and performance in AI tasks, as you can see in the slides above. If it proves successful, Nvidia’s undoubted lead in ray tracing could be under assault (though Nvidia’s vaunted DLSS 4 already works in advanced versions of these features). Look for FSR Redstone to arrive sometime in the second half of 2025. It’s not the only new Radeon performance-boosting FSR tech coming: AMD says 40 games will support FSR 4 with frame generation when it launches on June 5, with the Radeon RX 9060 series. Finally, AMD also revealed its RTX 5060 competitor. The 8GB Radeon RX 9060 XT will cost $299 when it launches alongside the 16GB model on June 5. In case you don’t remember, Nvidia buried RTX 5060 reviews because 8GB of memory simply isn’t enough in 2025, even for 1080p gaming. That’s still true, even with the Radeon RX 9060 XT 8GB. That being said, if the 8GB version of AMD’s new graphics card still manages to outpace the RTX 5060 at the same price, it could be a great value proposition for people who focus on esports or don’t mind turning down graphics in the latest games. Hopefully AMD provides press with 8GB versions of the Radeon RX 9060 XT for review – unlike Nvidia. (Seriously, don’t buy the RTX 5060 right now.) If not, avoid the 8GB version until independent reviews arrive. Read...

Technology and AI are transforming HR in 2025, shifting it from a back-office role to a strategic function vital for organisational success. Read...

ANPR cameras would charge fees for using busy roads during peak times. Read...

Sometimes AI just feels overwhelming, like it’s another thing to manage. Google, however, is announcing a couple of features within Gmail that will use AI to actually simplify your life. At PCWorld, we’ve written numerous articles on ways to clean out your Gmail inbox. There’s nothing worse than seeing a notification that your cloud storage is out of space, and trying to decide whether to take the time to clean it out (and risk losing something!) or pay more for additional space. And cleaning it out is no fun at all, either. What email should stay? What should go? Trying to decide what’s important or not is a headache, but then trying to navigate through the Gmail interface is a pain. That’s why I’m honestly excited that Google plans to apply Gemini to the job. In a blog post by Yulie Kwon Kim, vice-president of product at Google Workspace, Google said at its Google I/O conference that Gemini is being added to Gmail to help clean up your inbox. “Simply tell Gemini what you want to do (e.g., ‘Delete all of my unread emails from the Groomed Paw from last year’) and watch as it helps you manage and declutter your inbox with a single click.” I don’t think it will be as easy as all that; you’ll still have to decide what stays and what goes. But Google uses a good example here, and you can simply apply tips from our previous stories about looking for and deleting emails with large attachments, and so on. Gemini should work on your Android phone (you do have an Android phone, right?) and Gmail, so that you can probably clean up your inbox while chilling out on the couch. Gmail’s also expanding its predictive capabilities, adding personalized smart replies that use your tone, phrasing, and knowledge of your inbox. Google’s demonstration of the technology offered responses of several sentences, which is always a bit risky. You’ll want to monitor these. On the other hand, Google is also trying to make it easier to coordinate your schedule, offering suggestions for open times and sharing a booking page, if you have one. (Honestly, that’s a lot of why we exchange emails these days, it seems.) All of these features will be available next quarter — sometime in the fall, in other words. It’s one of the few times I can say that I honestly can’t wait. Read...

Let’s say you end the month with an extra $250 in your pocket. What do you do with it? You might spend it on a nice dinner out, perhaps with friends. A day trip. A spa treatment. Or maybe… AI? Google’s AI Ultra subscription—a recurring charge, mind you—is the newest way to flaunt your wealth. Announced at Google I/O today, Google says you can have all the best of what Google has on offer, from AI to storage, for “only” $249.99 per month. Google is also renaming its current $19.99-per-month AI Premium plan to “AI Pro” and adding additional features, like access to Flow. “[The AI Ultra plan is] for people who want to be on the absolute cutting edge of AI, from Google,” said Josh Woodward, the vice president of Google Labs and Gemini. Although it’s only available to customers in the United States as of today, Google promises that it will be available to a total of 70 countries soon. Here’s what the AI subscription buys you: Gemini: The AI Ultra subscription will deliver the best of the Gemini app, with the “highest” usage limits for Deep Research, Veo 2 text-to-video access, and early access to Veo 3, which adds audio generation that’s synced with the video. You’ll also get access to the “Deep Think” option within Gemini 2.5 Pro. Gemini is also integrated into Gmail, Docs, Vids, and more. Flow: Google is launching a new AI filmmaking tool that combines Veo, Imagen image generation, and Gemini. It’s designed for creating AI films, with editing capabilities built right in. Whisk: Another experimental technology, Whisk allows for quick image generation but also remixing. NotebookLM: Google is promising that you’ll again receive the highest usage limits and the most advanced models to use in your projects. Gemini in Chrome: Chrome is integrating Gemini and allowing it to use the context of the current page for queries. Project Mariner: Google’s agentic AI, which can be used to manage up to 10 tasks from a common dashboard. Google Drive: A massive 30TB of cloud storage. YouTube Premium Unfortunately, the sky-high price doesn’t come with a new Pixel phone. Read...

Wouldn’t you want to know how a dress or shirt will look on you before you buy it? (Yes, we do have stores for that.) But in the age of online shopping, Google is suggesting an AI-powered alternative. In 2023, Google launched a feature that would let you see how an outfit looks on a series of pre-selected models. Now, Google is rolling out the same technique at its Google I/O developer conference… just on you. It’s like an AI-powered fitting room to try on clothes. All you’ll need to do is have someone take a full-body photo (clothed, of course) against a neutral background, then upload it to Google. Google’s AI will then analyze the clothing, compare it to you, and voila! You’ve tried it on. If you’re anything like my wife, that description sparked a twenty-minute monologue describing how women’s bodies vary and how women of an “identical” size vary in hips, bust, and so on. Google claims that this has been thoroughly considered; however, according to Vidya Srinivasan, who leads ads and commerce at Google. Google “We spent a lot of time working with a custom image generation model that is particularly tailored for fashion, and it has a very deep understanding of 3D shapes,” Srinivasan told reporters in a Google I/O briefing. “It also has a very deep understanding of fabrics, just how fabrics will fold and stretch and drape on a wide range of bodies. So now, once you have an image of this, you probably want to try this on multiple different dresses. So you have a save feature right there, and then you can also share it with friends, because a lot of times you want another opinion about what actually looks good.” Google is combining this new “try it on” feature with some of its existing search magic, like trying to find a rug using Google’s AI Mode that will work in a particular room. Google is also sending out its search agents, via agentic search, to find the cheapest price over time. These agents will do everything but buy it for you; you’ll need to click “buy” to make it yours. Google is rolling out the virtual try-on technology as part of its Search Labs, beginning today. Google Read...

Whether you embrace it or not, AI is shaping the future of Google Search. Google is bringing AI Mode to Google Search for every U.S. user, beginning today. Google launched AI Overviews a year ago, which aims to answer your question before showing the traditional list of links. AI Mode is the next step: from what Google has shown, the list of links will disappear entirely, replaced by tiny link icons that link back to the information Google is slurping up. Google’s Liz Reid, a Google vice president and head of Google Search, said that AI Overviews totals 1.5 billion users and will be expanded to over 200 countries. At the beginning of May, Google migrated AI Mode out of its Labs environment into a small subset of users in the real world and has apparently replaced the “I’m feeling lucky” button with an AI search button as well. It’s not clear whether AI Mode will be the default search for all U.S. users, or whether Google will allow users to express a preference or preserve the choices they’ve made before. Traditional search doesn’t look like it will go away, but it will be relegated to a different tab, in much the same way a search for “Images” requires you to shift to another search tab within Google. Reid said that it’s bringing AI Mode to AI overviews, too. “We use what we call a query fan-out technique,” Reid said, in describing how AI Mode works. “And this basically takes your question and it breaks it up into different subtopics, and then we search on each of those different search topics that allows us to go way deeper in the web and find that really hyper-relevant, incredibly specific content that might be great with you.” This what Google’s AI Mode has looked like within Google Labs.Foundry Google said that it’s upgrading the version of Gemini that powers its AI Mode to a more advanced version and bringing the technology to mobile, too. “Deep Search” will be more like the “Deep Research” mode in Gemini, where, behind the scenes, Gemini will issue dozens of separate searches and then aggregate the results. Google’s AI Mode may even generate custom graphs to present information from search and finance questions, Reid said. Agentic search is coming to AI Mode, too. What Google has previously known as “Project Mariner” can be used to research the cheapest seats for a specific game. AI Mode will then start digging through various shopping sites and point you to the cheapest seats. Finally, the Project Astra technology Google showed off last year is being added to Gemini Live so that it can “see” through your smartphone’s camera and then talk through any problems you might have. You can also add data from Gmail, Google Drive, etc. to affect your searches. “We’re going to be pulling all of that in,” Reid said. “You’re going to always be in control. So it’s your choice to opt in to doing this in the first place, but you can connect and disconnect it at any time going forward.” Bad news for tech publishers It’s impossible to entirely disconnect what Google is doing or how it will affect major media — meaning that it’s difficult to remain entirely objective. Put simply, Google’s AI overviews and AI Mode pass off third-party news, opinions, roundups, and data as (almost) Google’s own, links or not. Major publishers are beginning to sound alarm bells, and even Google itself is worried about losing money from Google Search ads. Will users click through to the sites where an AI Mode summary originates? Search data says no, though Google disagrees. Google’s AI Overviews in action. Links are either presented as tiny icons or buried at the very bottom of the summary.Google “What we’ve seen with AI overviews is that pages with AI overviews get higher quality clicks to websites,” Reid said. “And you might ask, what does that really mean? And what it means is people spend more time on those websites. They’re not going to those sites and immediately figuring out it’s not what they want and bouncing back. They’re really digging in to the content there, and that’s our goal with AI Mode as well.” Google seems like it’s being pressured by Wall Street, who seem to be wondering if Google will fall behind Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which use AI to replace traditional search results. Microsoft, too, has an AI-powered replacement for Bing Search waiting in the wings called Copilot Search. But Google remains the Web’s top search engine, and it apparently aims to stay that way. “The way you can think about that is AI mode is not just this AI-powered experience end to end, but it also is a glimpse of what’s to come in search overall,” Reid said. Great. Read...

A congestion charging scheme could let police and spy agencies access the footage recorded by automated number plate recognition, critics warn. Read...

Yesterday, Microsoft released an important out-of-band update for Windows 10, identified as update KB5061768. An out-of-band update is one that’s released outside the usual update schedule, which is typically done to address urgent security issues that can’t wait. This critical repair update is only available for download via the Microsoft Update Catalog, and it’s intended for PCs running Windows 10 (versions 1903 and later) and Windows 10 LTSB, for both x86 and x64 systems. The download size varies between 415 MB and 711 MB. Who needs the KB5061768 update? Only Windows 10 users who are affected by the known BitLocker issue and/or blue screen crashes (which started with May’s big Windows 10 patch) should download and install update KB5061768. To recap, affected Windows 10 PCs fail to start because they erroneously require your BitLocker recovery key to be entered. Furthermore, affected PCs that can log in encounter blue screen crashes. According to Microsoft, only Windows 10 PCs with activated Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) on 10th-generation Intel vPro processors or higher should be affected. Microsoft writes the following about this update: “Fixed: A known issue on devices with Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) enabled on 10th-generation or later Intel vPro processors. On these systems, installing the May 13, 2025, Windows security update (KB5058379) might cause the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) process to terminate unexpectedly, triggering an Automatic Repair prompting for the BitLocker recovery key to continue.” How to apply the update if your PC is affected and can’t log in If you can’t install update KB5061768 on your affected Windows 10 PC because it no longer starts properly, Microsoft advises that you switch off Intel VT for Direct I/O (VTD or VTX) and Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) in the BIOS/UEFI. After doing that, Windows 10 should start again and you can apply the patch after entering your BitLocker recovery key. After restarting your computer, you can re-enable Intel VT for Direct I/O (VTD or VTX) and TXT in the BIOS/UEFI. Further reading: How to save your Windows 10 PC after end-of-support Read...

Ventiva’s fanless PC cooling technology is evolving from a curiosity to what appears to be a genuine game-changer: not only is it demonstrating 45W cooling capabilities with two partners, but Ventiva is also claiming that its ICE9 system can cool up to 100 watts of thermal energy as well. Dell — the partner with which Ventiva originally worked with — is one of the companies interested in the 45W cooling solution. The other is Compal, a “white box” contract manufacturer that builds PCs for any number of vendors who then claim them as their own. Ventiva surfaced late last year, and we sat down with company executives at CES 2025. Rivals like Frore or xMEMS use a vibrating membrane to replicate the actions of a fan, moving cool air over heated elements within a PC and then outside the system. Ventiva essentially ionizes the air, which is pushed away from a charged wire and creates airflow. The amount of air moved, and how much cooling is applied, depends on a few factors: the size of the cooling component (which Ventiva calls an ICE), how much charge is applied, and how many ICE devices are working together. At CES 2025, however, Ventiva was talking about moving just 25 watts’ worth of thermal energy, enough for the 15W of an Intel Core Ultra “Meteor Lake”-U chip, for example., but not quite enough for the 28W “Arrow Lake” chips or the rival Ryzen AI 300 processors, whose TDPs are also about 28W. By pushing up to 40W, Ventiva’s partnerships with Compal and Dell would allow both companies to design laptop reference designs that could accommodate a wider variety of PC processors, including while they were running in excess of their rated TDP in turbo mode. The ICE technology is less than 12mm high, allowing thinner laptops to be made. Ventiva is also looking at the future. The company is demonstrating a 100W test laptop at Computex 2025 this week, which it will presumably use to strike even more partnerships. “AI-driven laptops are transforming the way we work, create, and play, but their increasing thermal output requires a new level of device heat management,” said Carl Schlachte, chairman, president and chief executive of Ventiva, in a statement. “This is our highest-performing thermal management system to date, enabling laptop OEMs and ODMs to push power to the limit, and stay totally cool, under any workload, from 3D design to AI development to immersive game playing.”  While 100 watts of cooling is well below what gaming laptops can consume under full load, there’s certainly a chance that a midrange laptop might be able to use Ventiva’s solution for some sort of gaming application. And boy, wouldn’t a silent gaming laptop — without the need to dunk it in a vat of coolant — be a thing of beauty? Read...