Microsoft’s Project Helix Xbox Promises PC Game Support And Top Performance

Microsoft’s Project Helix Xbox Promises PC Game Support And Top Performance
Microsoft’s new CEO of Gaming and head of Xbox, Asha Sharma, shared the first concrete details about the company’s next-generation game console, essentially confirming reports that it will be a hybrid system of sorts, focusing on both console and PC gaming. She also teased a major performance uplift and, in the process, may have taken a shot

Amazon.com is experiencing issues and failing to load prices

Amazon’s website appears to be experiencing technical issues that are keeping users from logging in and preventing prices from displaying correctly. DownDetector reported a spike of outage reports around 2PM ET, and the issues seem to have grown from there.

While Amazon.com seems to be able to display the company’s homepage, prices and product information aren’t loading, and clicking through to product pages in some cases shows an error page, with text that says “Sorry, something went wrong on our end.” Users have also reported being unable to log into their accounts.

“We’re sorry that some customers may be experiencing issues while shopping,” Amazon said in a statement to Engadget. “We appreciate customers’ patience as we work to resolve the issue.”

The company shared a similar sentiment with customers on X, confirming that it’s aware customers are experiencing problems and acknowledging that its working on a fix. As a cloud provider through its Amazon Web Services (AWS) business, Amazon has experienced its fair share of outages, including one in October 2025 that took out services like Snapchat and Amazon’s own Alexa voice assistant for hours. The company’s website experiencing issues without a larger AWS outage seems a bit more unusual, and might suggest the problem lies outside of its cloud infrastructure.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/amazoncom-is-experiencing-issues-and-failing-to-load-prices-211430510.html?src=rss

Upcoming ‘Project Helix’ Xbox Will “Play Xbox and PC Games,” But PC VR Support is Unconfirmed

Microsoft today announced the codename of its next Xbox gaming console: Project Helix. Details are very light, but the company says Project Helix will “play your Xbox and PC games.” Naturally that’s got us curious about whether or not PC VR games could be in the mix, but there’s no word yet.

Xbox’s newly minted CEO Asha Sharma today teased the company’s next-gen Xbox. She confirmed the device is codenamed ‘Project Helix’.

“Project Helix will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games. Looking forward to chatting about this more with partners and studios at my first GDC next week!” she said on X.

Aside from this brief tease, it seems there’s no other official info being revealed, though we’ve reached out to the company for comment. The line about the company seeking to chat with “partners and studios” suggests this is the first time Project Helix is even being mentioned outside of internal conversations. Rumors suggest the console will launch in 2027.

So we have essentially no details yet on what the company means when it says Project Helix will be able to ‘play PC games’. But the possibility at least exists that this could open the door to compatibility with PC VR games too.

Granted, PC VR lives almost exclusively within the Steam ecosystem thanks to Valve’s ongoing support for the SteamVR platform. And while it’s technically possible that VR games could run on Project Helix without Steam (thanks to OpenXR), VR on Project Helix would be largely a non-starter if the console can’t somehow access the Steam library, because that’s the only active marketplace for the distribution of PC VR content.

If Project Helix can be ‘fully unlocked’ and operate like any normal Windows PC, there’s no reason to think that Steam and SteamVR content wouldn’t be able to run on the console. But if Microsoft plans to keep the system’s PC support locked down in some way, then practical support for PC VR content is unlikely without the company’s express interest in allowing it.

Microsoft has a storied history when it comes to VR. Not only did the company make a significant attempt at entering the market with its Windows Mixed Reality platform (only to abandon that project after several years), but back in 2016 the company officially said that its upcoming Xbox One X would include support for “high fidelity VR” gaming. By the time the console actually reached the market in 2017, those plans had been scrapped.

While we don’t expect an about-face on VR support from Xbox itself, it will be interesting to see if Project Helix retains full PC capabilities, and thus the ability to run PC VR content.

The post Upcoming ‘Project Helix’ Xbox Will “Play Xbox and PC Games,” But PC VR Support is Unconfirmed appeared first on Road to VR.

Trump’s TikTok Deal Benefited Firms That ‘Personally Enriched’ Him, Lawsuit Says

An anti-corruption group has filed a lawsuit (PDF) against Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi over the deal that transferred TikTok’s U.S. operations to a group of investors tied to the administration. The suit claims the arrangement violates a 2024 law requiring ByteDance to divest and alleges the deal financially benefited Trump allies while leaving the platform’s algorithm under Chinese ownership. NBC News reports: The suit, filed by the Public Integrity Project, a law firm that seeks to raise the “reputational cost of corruption in America,” argues the deal violates a law intended to prevent the spread of Chinese government propaganda and has enriched Trump’s allies. That law, signed by then-President Joe Biden in 2024, said that TikTok couldn’t be distributed in the United States unless the Chinese company ByteDance found an American-based corporate home by the day before Donald Trump returned to office. The law was upheld by the Supreme Court.

“The law was clear, but it was never enforced,” says the lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. “Shortly after the deadline to divest passed, President Trump issued an executive order purportedly granting an extension for TikTok to find a domestic owner and directed his Attorney General not to enforce the law.” The plaintiffs in the suit are two software engineers from California: One is a shareholder in Alphabet Inc., YouTube’s parent company; the other is a shareholder in Meta Platforms, Inc., which is Instagram’s parent company. Both say they suffered financially due to the non-enforcement of the law. “The original motivation for this law was to prevent the Chinese government from pushing propaganda onto American audiences,” said Brendan Ballou, CEO of the Public Integrity Project and a former Justice Department prosecutor. “The deal that the president approved is the absolute worst of all possible worlds, because right now ByteDance continues to own the algorithm, which means that it can censor the content that it doesn’t like, but at the same time Oracle controls the data and it can censor the information that it doesn’t like. Really it’s a situation that’s going to be terrible for users, and terrible for free speech on the platform.”


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yep, Amazon Is Down

If you’re shopping online, or just trying to access certain websites, and things aren’t loading properly, it’s (probably) not your internet: Amazon is down. As of Thursday afternoon, Amazon services, including both Amazon.com and AWS, are having issues loading and running.

You can see that from Downdetector, a site used to track user reports of issues with websites and services. (Disclosure: Lifehacker’s parent company, Ziff Davis, owns Downdetector.) As of this article, Amazon.com has tens of thousands of user reports, while AWS has thousands. Prime Video, Amazon’s streaming service, also has user reports at this time, though they aren’t as drastic.

It’s not clear what’s causing the issues just yet, but it’s not the first time Amazon has made headlines for outages. Back in October, AWS had a major period of downtime, taking down much of the internet. Many sites and services rely on AWS to operate, so when Amazon has issues, all of these companies have issues too.

I’m sure we’ll learn what the issue is in due time, and Amazon will undoubtedly issue a fix soon after. But it goes to show that even the largest companies in the world aren’t immune to problems. And when those problems do arise, it affects a lot of users.

Xbox CEO confirms next-gen ‘Project Helix’ console will play PC games

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is gearing up to spill the beans on Microsoft’s next-generation console. In a post on X today, she revealed that the system is codenamed “Project Helix.” Confirming previous rumors, she says it will “lead in performance” and play both console and PC games. Sharma also notes that she’ll be discussing the system at GDC next week with partners and developers.

The next-gen console tease follows Sharma’s appointment as Xbox CEO a few weeks ago, after former Xbox head Phil Spencer stepped down. Last year, it was clear that things were rocky for Microsoft’s storied gaming brand, and the executive shakeup certainly didn’t help much. But it’ll be interesting to hear more details about Project Helix at GDC — is it simply a PC masquerading as a console? What sort of performance benchmarks is Microsoft trying to reach, and will we get any hints about hardware?

For the first time, in a long time, there’s something intriguing happening in the land of Xbox. Much like the first Xbox, Microsoft could end up cutting this generation short to quickly prep a successor. And if the rumors about a PlayStation 6 delay end up being true, it could give Microsoft a few years with new hardware ahead of Sony.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/xbox-ceo-confirms-next-gen-project-helix-console-will-play-pc-games-204654357.html?src=rss

AMD Will Bring Its ‘Ryzen AI’ Processors To Standard Desktop PCs For First Time

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AMD has been selling “Ryzen AI”-branded laptop processors for around a year and a half at this point. In addition to including modern CPU and GPU architectures, these are attempting to capitalize on the generative AI craze by offering chips with neural processing units (NPUs) suitable for running language and image-generation models locally, rather than on some company’s server. But so far, AMD’s desktop chips have lacked both these higher-performance NPUs and the Ryzen AI label. That changes today, at least a little: AMD is announcing its first three Ryzen AI chips for desktops using its AM5 CPU socket. These Ryzen AI 400-series CPUs are direct replacements for the Ryzen 8000G processors, rather than the Ryzen 9000-series, and they combine Zen 5-based CPU cores, RDNA 3.5 GPU cores, and an NPU capable of 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS). This makes them AMD’s first desktop chips to qualify for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC label, which enables a handful of unique Windows 11 features like Recall and Click to Do.

The six chips AMD is announcing today — the 65 W Ryzen AI 7 Pro 450G, Ryzen AI 5 Pro 440G, and Ryzen AI 5 Pro 435G, along with low-power 35 W “GE” variants — all bear AMD’s “Ryzen Pro” branding as well, which means they support a handful of device management capabilities that are important for business PCs managed by IT departments. At this point, it doesn’t seem as though AMD will be offering boxed versions to regular consumers; the Ryzen AI desktop chips will appear mainly in business PCs that don’t need a dedicated graphics card but still benefit from more robust graphics than AMD offers in regular Ryzen desktop CPUs. Like past G-series Ryzen chips, these are essentially laptop silicon repackaged for desktop systems. They share most of their specs in common with Ryzen AI 300 laptop processors, despite their Ryzen AI 400-series branding. The two chip generations are extremely similar overall, but the Ryzen AI 400-series laptop CPUs include slightly faster 55 TOPS NPUs.


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Best Buy Has the Best Preorder Deals on the New MacBook Lineup

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Apple announced new products this week, all of which are all already available for preorder and will be released on March 11. But before you place your order, it’s best to compare the preorder deals from various retailers. Walmart has the best iPad Air preorder deal, for example, offering $40 off the listing price. If you’re interested in a new MacBook, however, Best Buy is the place to look: it’s the only major retailer offering any preorder deals for all three new MacBooks.

Previously, anyone looking for an affordable MacBook looked toward older models, like the M1 and M2. The MacBook Neo is changing that, along with the personal computing market in general. The Neo isn’t breathtaking in specs—it has the A18 Pro processor, the same chip as the iPhone 16 Pro—but the price is what makes it enticing. At $599, I can see a lot of people opting for this MacBook over other budget laptops, especially with the $25 pre-order gift card. (You should still consider the M1 and M2 as good options if you find good deals, though.) The Neo is also missing some premium features you’d expect from other MacBooks, like a backlight for the keyboard, Touch ID, and MagSafe charging. It’s also limited to 8GB of RAM, which in today’s standards, is subpar.

The M5 MacBook Air is tempting, starting at $1,099, but you shouldn’t be swayed if you already own an M4. The rest of the laptop is virtually the same. Of course, the basic starting model doubles the storage to 512GB, which is nice and only $100 more than the listing price when the M4 was released. Add a $50 gift card, and this is a great option for someone upgrading from the M2, M1, or getting their first MacBook.

The new MacBook Pro is a beast. It starts with 1TB of storage, the M5 Pro chip with a 15-core CPU and a 16-core GPU. The RAM is 24GB, which offers people all the multitasking and smoothness they need to run multiple programs at once. Starting at $2,199, the $100 gift card doesn’t soften much of the blow, but it’s $100 more than anyone else is offering.

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How to watch Frost Fatales 2026, kicking off on March 8

It feels like we could all use a little (or a large) boost of joy and optimism right now, so it’s a perfect coincidence that a Games Done Quick event is on the horizon. Frost Fatales 2026 is running from March 8 through March 14. This week-long livestream will be raising money for the National Women’s Law Center, a nonprofit working toward gender justice for women and girls. 

GDQ events have been branching out with more ways to tune in for the speedrunning fun. Frost Fatales 2026 will be a streaming on the GDQ Twitch channel as usual, but the organization is also now broadcasting on YouTube, and you can watch the live feed there next week as well. Each day’s pre-show kicks off at 12:30PM ET.

Frost Fatales is the winter charity event from the Frame Fatales, a community for women and femmes in speedrunning that operates under the GDQ banner. The group has raised more than $1 million for philanthropic organizations since its first event in 2019. 

The schedule for next week has a mix of speedrun standards (think Super Mario 64 and Super Metroid) alongside and newer releases, plus some more offbeat categories that promise to be a highly entertaining watch. The event kicks off on Sunday with western flair in Red Dead Redemption 2. Horror fans have a good selection on Tuesday night with Silent Hill f, Resident Evil 3 (2020) and Resident Evil Village. The Kirby Air Riders run on Friday night will highlight a bunch of community members for max wholesome vibes. Peak, a notable new game from 2025, is already getting speedruns, which you can watch Saturday afternoon before a bingo race of recent indie hit UFO 50 in the evening and the final run of Titanfall 2 to close the event. Fatales events aren’t a 24/7 affair like Awesome and Summer Games Done Quick, so be sure to check the schedule for all the highlights.

Or, if you simply can’t wait until Sunday to dive into some great speedruns, Games Done Quick recently launched GDQ TV. This dedicated Twitch channel is always on and highlights some notable moments and runs from the entirety of the GDQ archive.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/how-to-watch-frost-fatales-2026-kicking-off-on-march-8-201826864.html?src=rss