Even before the threat of President Trump’s tariffs, there were questions about the company’s inability to make good on new ideas.

Macworld The Finder is one of the most customizable elements of macOS. However, Apple’s two interrelated settings for how folders open a Finder window don’t seem to have any effect and haven’t for years. Despite this, you can take control to get the desired outcome. You may want one or more of the following behaviors to happen when you double-click a folder within a Finder window, which may vary depending on what you’re trying to accomplish: Its contents replace what you see in the Finder window. A new tab opens in the window with the double-clicked folder’s contents. A new window in the Finder opens, showing the contents of the double-clicked folder. How it’s supposed to open folders If you search Apple’s support documents, you find that the company says you control this in two ways: Via  > System Settings > Desktop & Dock by choosing a value from the “Prefer tabs when opening documents” menu: Always, Never, or In Full Screen. Via the Finder setting in Finder > Settings in the General tab labeled “Open folders in tabs instead of new windows.” The Desktop & Dock setting for Windows should let you control window behavior, but appears to have no actual effect. Finder settings let you control how tabs open from folders. The outcomes should be like this: With the General setting “Prefer tabs…” set to Never, double-clicking should open folders in a new window; Always, in a new tab; In Full Screen, in a tab when you have a window set to full-screen mode. With the Finder setting “Open folders in tabs…” checked, double-clicking should open folders in tabs, as it says; otherwise, in new windows. Forum posters and readers alike find this is not the case and has never been. In testing, I cannot get the promised behavior to work at all. But there are workarounds. Apple even hints at one on its support page, but its description of how it works is incorrect. How you open folders the way you want Regardless of how you have Desktop & Dock and Finder settings configured, here’s how you can achieve what you want in a Finder window. It hinges on whether the Finder toolbar and sidebar are visible. You can change whether they appear by using View > Hide Sidebar (Command-Option-S) or View > Hide Toolbar (Command-Option-T). The sidebar cannot be shown if the toolbar is hidden. With the toolbar and sidebar visible, here’s how folders behave: Replace the window’s contents: Double-click a folder within the window. Open the folder in a new window: Hold Command and double-click a folder (Finder settings “Open folders…” unchecked). Open the folder in a new tab: Hold Command and double-click a folder (Finder settings “Open folders…” unchecked). Open a folder in a new window and close the previous one: Hold Option and double-click a folder. The current window disappears, and a new one opens with the contents of the double-clicked folder. (The new folder has no active Back button in the toolbar.) This changes when you hide both the toolbar and the sidebar. Here’s what your actions result in: Open the folder in a new window: Double-click a folder within the window (Finder settings “Open folders…” unchecked). Open the folder in a new tab: Double-click a folder within the window (Finder settings “Open folders…” unchecked). Open a folder in a new window and close the previous one: Hold Option and double-click a folder. The current window disappears, and a new one opens with the contents of the double-clicked folder. (The new folder has no active Back button in the toolbar.) The “Prefer tabs” setting doesn’t seem to have any effect in the Finder This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Jeff. Ask Mac 911 We’ve compiled a list of the questions we get asked most frequently, along with answers and links to columns: read our super FAQ to see if your question is covered. If not, we’re always looking for new problems to solve! Email yours to mac911@macworld.com, including screen captures as appropriate and whether you want your full name used. Not every question will be answered; we don’t reply to emails, and we cannot provide direct troubleshooting advice.

In a move that could reshape public-sector IT procurement, Google has entered into a landmark agreement with the US General Services Administration (GSA), offering its Workspace productivity suite to all federal agencies at discounts of up to 71%. Effective through September 30, 2025, this pricing applies across agencies regardless of size or volume and includes both Google Workspace Enterprise Plus and Assured Controls Plus — pairing productivity tools with advanced security features required for sensitive government operations. “This common-sense pricing reflects GSA’s role as a central procurement hub, leveraging purchasing power to reduce redundancy and streamline IT acquisition,” the GSA said in a statement. The federal government, acting as a single customer, bypasses traditional agency-by-agency negotiations. This shift underscores Google’s strategy to prioritize long-term positioning in the public sector — traditionally a stronghold of Microsoft — over immediate profits. “This is less about direct monetization and more about gaining a strategic foothold in a sector long dominated by Microsoft,” said Sanchit Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research. “The US government is the most scrutinized technology customer in the world. Convince them, and you open doors across global public-sector and regulated industries.” About $2 billion in savings According to Google, if adopted government-wide, the agreement could save agencies approximately $2 billion over three years. This comes amid a broader initiative by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut federal IT spending and modernize procurement processes. “This new approach allows Google to treat the federal government as one unified customer,” GSA Acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian said in the statement. “It’s about securing lower prices for top-tier technology across the board.” According to Neil Shah, VP for research and partner at Counterpoint Research, the deal is significant for Google to expand into the public sector, simplifying the business model and any price-related friction by viewing the US federal government as one customer. “For government, this is all about cost savings and simplification at scale and having an alternate vendor diversifying its IT software and systems.” Challenging the status quo For years, federal IT has been dominated by a handful of providers, largely due to the complexity of compliance requirements and established vendor relationships. Google’s agreement is poised to disrupt this balance, especially as it comes equipped with FedRAMP High Authorization — a key certification for working with sensitive government data. Notably, Google emphasized the inclusion of Gemini — its AI assistant — as the first to receive FedRAMP High Authorization. This directly challenges competitors who are increasingly baking AI capabilities into government offerings. “This is not just about matching features—it’s about aligning with evolving government IT policies,” said Gogia. “Standardized pricing undermines a key advantage of incumbent providers: their strong ties to individual agencies.” “Every agency can now benefit from enterprise-level pricing, no matter how small,” GSA Federal Acquisition Service Commissioner Josh Gruenbaum said in the statement. Shah added that the compliance milestone makes Google a serious contender in global public-sector engagements. “This sets a precedent that could build trust with other governments worldwide,” he noted. Implications for enterprise customers Beyond the public sector, the deal sends a powerful message to enterprise IT buyers. Google’s aggressive pricing strategy highlights its focus on expanding market share rather than maximizing short-term profits. “This kind of discounting doesn’t stay in Washington — it reaches enterprise boardrooms,” Gogia remarked. “That 71% figure tells CIOs globally to push harder during contract renewals and evaluations.” The bundling of AI tools like Gemini, NotebookLM, and Advanced Gemini 2.0 at no added cost is another compelling hook. These offerings, once considered premium, are now table stakes — potentially pressuring other vendors to match. More than half of CIOs — 53%, according to Greyhound Pulse 2025 — plan to use public-sector pricing disclosures to negotiate better commercial deals. One Fortune 100 firm already leveraged the Workspace discount to re-benchmark terms for over 120,000 Microsoft 365 licenses. The deal also underscores Google’s security credibility, previously seen as a barrier for adoption in sensitive enterprise environments. “With FedRAMP High certification, Google shows it can meet the strictest standards,” said Gogia. The road ahead The agreement runs until September 30, 2025 — a window during which Google aims to rapidly expand its public-sector footprint. The temporary nature of the discount adds urgency, both for federal buyers and for Google’s competitors to respond. Yet challenges remain. Microsoft’s deep integration in government and enterprise environments gives it a strong foothold. “Breaking Microsoft’s lock-in won’t be easy,” said Shah. “It’s not just about tools — it’s about years of workflows, data structures, and platform dependence.” Gogia echoed that sentiment, noting the difficulty of dismantling entrenched systems like Active Directory configurations and Power Platform automation. “You’re not flipping a switch — you’re unbundling years of technical and operational decisions,” he said. Still, for enterprise customers facing contract renewals, this deal provides new leverage. Google’s willingness to trade margin for momentum can be used to reset expectations across the board. “While Google plays the price disruptor, expect Microsoft to respond with value bundling,” Gogia predicted. “You’ll see accelerated integration of Copilot into Teams and Microsoft 365, aimed at locking in customers with AI-enhanced workflows.”

For much of last year, about 2,500 US service members from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit sailed aboard three ships throughout the Pacific, conducting training exercises in the waters off South Korea, the Philippines, India, and Indonesia. At the same time, onboard the ships, an experiment was unfolding: The Marines in the unit responsible for sorting through foreign intelligence and making their superiors aware of possible local threats were for the first time using generative AI to do it, testing a leading AI tool the Pentagon has been funding. Two officers tell us that they used the new system to help scour thousands of pieces of open-source intelligence—nonclassified articles, reports, images, videos—collected in the various countries where they operated, and that it did so far faster than was possible with the old method of analyzing them manually. Captain Kristin Enzenauer, for instance, says she used large language models to translate and summarize foreign news sources, while Captain Will Lowdon used AI to help write the daily and weekly intelligence reports he provided to his commanders.  “We still need to validate the sources,” says Lowdon. But the unit’s commanders encouraged the use of large language models, he says, “because they provide a lot more efficiency during a dynamic situation.” The generative AI tools they used were built by the defense-tech company Vannevar Labs, which in November was granted a production contract worth up to $99 million by the Pentagon’s startup-oriented Defense Innovation Unit with the goal of bringing its intelligence tech to more military units. The company, founded in 2019 by veterans of the CIA and US intelligence community, joins the likes of Palantir, Anduril, and Scale AI as a major beneficiary of the US military’s embrace of artificial intelligence—not only for physical technologies like drones and autonomous vehicles but also for software that is revolutionizing how the Pentagon collects, manages, and interprets data for warfare and surveillance.  Though the US military has been developing computer vision models and similar AI tools, like those used in Project Maven, since 2017, the use of generative AI—tools that can engage in human-like conversation like those built by Vannevar Labs—represent a newer frontier. The company applies existing large language models, including some from OpenAI and Microsoft, and some bespoke ones of its own to troves of open-source intelligence the company has been collecting since 2021. The scale at which this data is collected is hard to comprehend (and a large part of what sets Vannevar’s products apart): terabytes of data in 80 different languages are hoovered every day in 180 countries. The company says it is able to analyze social media profiles and breach firewalls in countries like China to get hard-to-access information; it also uses nonclassified data that is difficult to get online (gathered by human operatives on the ground), as well as reports from physical sensors that covertly monitor radio waves to detect illegal shipping activities.  Vannevar then builds AI models to translate information, detect threats, and analyze political sentiment, with the results delivered through a chatbot interface that’s not unlike ChatGPT. The aim is to provide customers with critical information on topics as varied as international fentanyl supply chains and China’s efforts to secure rare earth minerals in the Philippines.  “Our real focus as a company,” says Scott Philips, Vannevar Labs’ chief technology officer, is to “collect data, make sense of that data, and help the US make good decisions.”  That approach is particularly appealing to the US intelligence apparatus because for years the world has been awash in more data than human analysts can possibly interpret—a problem that contributed to the 2003 founding of Palantir, a company now worth nearly $217 billion and known for its powerful and controversial tools, including a database that helps Immigration and Customs Enforcement search for and track information on undocumented immigrants.  In 2019, Vannevar saw an opportunity to use large language models, which were then new on the scene, as a novel solution to the data conundrum. The technology could enable AI not just to collect data but to actually talk through an analysis with someone interactively. Vannevar’s tools proved useful for the deployment in the Pacific, and Enzenauer and Lowdon say that while they were instructed to always double-check the AI’s work, they didn’t find inaccuracies to be a significant issue. Enzenauer regularly used the tool to track any foreign news reports in which the unit’s exercises were mentioned and to perform sentiment analysis, detecting the emotions and opinions expressed in text. Judging whether a foreign news article reflects a threatening or friendly opinion toward the unit is a task that on previous deployments she had to do manually. “It was mostly by hand—researching, translating, coding, and analyzing the data,” she says. “It was definitely way more time-consuming than it was when using the AI.”  Still, Enzenauer and Lowdon say there were hiccups, some of which would affect most digital tools: The ships had spotty internet connections much of the time, limiting how quickly the AI model could synthesize foreign intelligence, especially if it involved photos or video.  With this first test completed, the unit’s commanding officer, Colonel Sean Dynan, said on a call with reporters in February that heavier use of generative AI was coming; this experiment was “the tip of the iceberg.”  This is indeed the direction that the entire US military is barreling toward at full speed. In December, the Pentagon said it will spend $100 million in the next two years on pilots specifically for generative AI applications. In addition to Vannevar, it’s also turning to Microsoft and Palantir, which are working together on AI models that would make use of classified data. (The US is of course not alone in this approach; notably, Israel has been using AI to sort through information and even generate lists of targets in its war in Gaza, a practice that has been widely criticized.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, plenty of people outside the Pentagon are warning about the potential risks of this plan, including Heidy Khlaaf, who is chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute, a research organization, and has expertise in leading safety audits for AI-powered systems. She says this rush to incorporate generative AI into military decision-making ignores more foundational flaws of the technology: “We’re already aware of how LLMs are highly inaccurate, especially in the context of safety-critical applications that require precision.”  One particular use case that concerns her is sentiment analysis, which she argues is “a highly subjective metric that even humans would struggle to appropriately assess based on media alone.”  If AI perceives hostility toward US forces where a human analyst would not—or if the system misses hostility that is really there—the military could make an misinformed decision or escalate a situation unnecessarily. Sentiment analysis is indeed a task that AI has not perfected. Philips, the Vannevar CTO, says the company has built models specifically to judge whether an article is pro-US or not, but MIT Technology Review was not able to evaluate them.  Chris Mouton, a senior engineer for RAND, recently tested how well-suited generative AI is for the task. He evaluated leading models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and an older version of GPT fine-tuned to do such intelligence work, on how accurately they flagged foreign content as propaganda compared with human experts. “It’s hard,” he says, noting that AI struggled to identify more subtle types of propaganda. But he adds that the models could still be useful in lots of other analysis tasks.  Another limitation of Vannevar’s approach, Khlaaf says, is that the usefulness of open-source intelligence is debatable. Mouton says that open-source data can be “pretty extraordinary,” but Khlaaf points out that unlike classified intel gathered through reconnaissance or wiretaps, it is exposed to the open internet—making it far more susceptible to misinformation campaigns, bot networks, and deliberate manipulation, as the US Army has warned. For Mouton, the biggest open question now is whether these generative AI technologies will be simply one investigatory tool among many that analysts use—or whether they’ll produce the subjective analysis that’s relied upon and trusted in decision-making. “This is the central debate,” he says.  What everyone agrees is that AI models are accessible—you can just ask them a question about complex pieces of intelligence, and they’ll respond in plain language. But it’s still in dispute what imperfections will be acceptable in the name of efficiency. 

Apple's latest M4 iPad Pro 13-inch is $200 off at Amazon, but limited supply remains at the reduced price.Save $200 on Apple's M4 iPad Pro 13-inch.You can grab the $200 markdown on the 2TB 13-inch iPad Pro with an M4 chip in Space Black. This high-capacity Wi-Fi spec has an ample 2TB of storage, but the base model and even Wi-Fi + Cellular models are eligible for discounts as well in our 13-inch iPad Pro M4 Price Guide.Save $200 at Amazon Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

The two-tower CityWave scheme from BIG has topped out near central Milan, completing the final two pieces of a larger district-sized CityLife puzzle that features designs from Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid Architects, and Arata Isozaki.  BIG’s contribution—designed with the local practice Atelier Verticale—is capped with a 460-foot-long roof clad in photovoltaic tiles equaling 118,000 total square feet. That design feature is one of the largest in the world. Others include shaded loggias culminating in a 20th-floor roof bar and a steel colonnade-framed, timber canopy-shaded open space connecting the development to the city. BIG experts the public opening sometime in 2026. Image courtesy Alberto FanelliImage courtesy Alberto FanelliImage courtesy Alberto FanelliImage courtesy Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)

Microsoft’s biggest exclusive of 2024 is rapidly approaching PlayStation shores. On April 17th PS5 players get to experience what many are calling the best Indiana Jones experience in decades. With its blend of exploration and finely honed cinematic direction, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has a lot to offer the PS5 crowd. Here are some key takeaways regarding the PS5 version of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle worth knowing before a purchase. Additional Updates and Fixes The PS5 version brings some cool new features which will be available to all platforms. Most notably, whips get two new abilities: ‘Open Season’ and ‘Sleight of Hand’. Open Season causes a kind of debuff which renders foes more susceptible to attacks, while Sleight of Hand conveniently disarms opponents, flinging their weapon right to Indy. And since the game’s December release, there’s been three updates fixing up a long list of bugs and issues, ensuring a glitch-free experience for first-time PS5 players. DualSense Functionality One of the things that differentiates the PS5 from other consoles is the tactile feel of its DualSense controller. This is something Machine Games is making sure to harness with its upcoming port. Not much has been said regarding specifics, but the PlayStation Store page does indeed highlight that DualSense vibration effect and trigger function are supported. Going off of other games with DualSense support, we can expect haptic feedback that changes with terrain as well as dynamic resistance levels with the triggers when  shooting different guns and priming a well-aimed grenade. PS5 Pro Enhancements You’re especially happy if you’re an Indy fan with a PS5 Pro since some the great visual updates exclusive to high-end PCs will translate the advanced Sony console. While Bethesda has been rather hush-hush concerning specific PS5 Pro enhancements, we know via the PS Store that this Indy adventure has the ‘enhanced for PS5 Pro’ label and will most likely harness things like PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), advanced ray tracing, and (fingers crossed) a 120 FPS option. PS5 Editions There are three editions for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PS5. The standard edition comes in at the standardized $69.99 price and only includes the game. The $99.99 Premium Edition includes access to the future story DLC titled ‘The Order of Giants’ as well as a new Temple of Doom outfit and a digital artbook. The modern trend of including early access play in higher tiered editions continues here as Indy’s foray onto the PS5 allows access for premium edition buyers. But that’s not the cream of the edition crop. There’s also an expensive $189.99 Collector’s Bundle giving players a bevy of physical goodies. This bundle includes an 11 inch globe that hides a secretive storage compartment, in addition to a leather-bound adventure journal, and the all Premium Edition content. Pre-order Bonuses Regardless of edition, any PS5 version pre-order includes a new Traveling Suit outfit for Indy to wear and a whip. These two items are purely cosmetic and it’s unlikely they’ll become available through the store at a later date for those who didn’t pre-order. Release Date and Early Access Times And there’s not much time left to secure a pre-order since the game releases April 17th which falls on a Thursday. Early access begins two days before the official release date, so Premium Edition players can look forward to playing it on April 15th. Is a Microsoft Account Needed to Play? While it’s not confirmed whether or not PS5 users will need a Microsoft account to play Indy and the Great Circle, previous Xbox exclusive games as well as the upcoming Forza Horizon 5 indicate that it’s likely. That said, some of Microsoft’s single-player offerings didn’t require a Microsoft account sign-in (neither Hi-Fi Rush nor Pentiment required it), so we’ll have to wait and see if this particular single-player adventure does. Disc Versions Require Internet Download Unfortunately, we do have confirmations that disc versions of the game require an internet download in order to play the game. Bethesda’s images of the highest-priced Collector Bundle states in the fine print that a disc is still included, but “internet connection is required to download game and content”. Voice Talent As for the game itself, there’s quite a lot to love. Any Indiana Jones project has to have top-tier voice talent in order to succeed, and this game nails that aspect. Troy Baker surprisingly sold us on his Indy voice. It’s charming and personalized, yet still has that Harrison Ford identity. Indy’s partner in uncovering the Great Circle mystery happens to be a woman named Gina Lambardi, who is excellently portrayed by actress Alessandra Mastronardi. The main villain is my pick for best performance though. Emmerich Voss is the perfect Indiana Jones villain and actor Marios Gavrilis captures his creepy and deranged personality too well. Exploration One distinction this game has to other’s in the genre is the first-person perspective. This heightened immersion allows for more intricate exploration and problem solving. Indy uses a camera and journal to jot down hints and notes as he explores the game’s diverse environments. The diegetic UI with Indy looking at his journal maps and whatnot really add to the immersion of stepping into his shoes as an explorer. And the game is teeming with collectibles around well-hidden nooks and crannies, giving players a compelling reason to go off the beaten path. Wide Environments This emphasis on exploration is owed in large part to the game’s wide environments. Exploration is satisfying because there’s just a lot of open space to wander around through. That said, this is still a fairly linear adventure, at least in story terms. Plenty of set piece moments and cinematics dot the game’s progression, but its accompanied by a wealth of slower paced exploration in wide areas. Stealth The game’s more methodical pace exemplifies itself perhaps most of all in its stealth. A large portion of combat strategy revolves around sneaking up to enemies for a silent knock-out. Routing past patrols and sneaking around guarded zones is a big part of this Indy adventure and it’s done really well thanks to excellent level design and smooth controls. Combat But there is visceral combat in this game too, though it’s not your traditional Machine Games high-paced shooter. Instead, combat in The Great Circle revolves around found melee weapons, Indy’s whip, and a limited amount of small firearms. The famous whip is used to great effect here, being employed to stun and disarm foes. Oodles of Melee Weapons Since ammo is so scarce throughout the game, you’re often relegated to picking up random melee weapons through the environment. There’s a lot of wacky objects used for melee here: oversized flyswatters, pipes, pots and pans, and much more. But there’s one trusty melee weapon you always have access to: your fists. The game has a big emphasis on brawling, and while it can be somewhat sloppy, there’s something satisfying about KO’ing Nazis in the face. Game Length It’s good that the game has such variety in its gameplay because it has an average run time of around 25 hours. Howlongtobeat has an average completionist playthrough sitting around 38 hours and a rushed story run taking 15. This makes Indiana Jones and the Great Circle one of Machine Games’ most lengthy titles, giving PS5 players with an Indiana Jones craving plenty to dig into and explore.

html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd" Foundry has unveiled Nuke Stage, a new application for virtual production and in-camera visual effects (ICVFX).The software, currently available in invite-only early access, is designed for real-time playback of photorealistic environments onto LED walls, with support for live layout and compositing. Workflow is USD-based, and does not require Nuke, Foundry’s compositing software, but Foundry describes it as “familiar and friendly” to Nuke artists. Below, we’ve put together our FAQs about the new product. What is Nuke Stage, and why is Foundry developing it? Foundry is the latest developer of offline VFX tools to enter the virtual production market, Chaos having launched Chaos Arena, its real-time rendering solution for LED walls, last month.Both new products are attempting to carve out a space in a sector in which Epic Games has done a lot of the early running through Unreal Engine, its game engine and real-time renderer, which now has a dedicated ICVFX toolset. As with Chaos Arena, part of Foundry’s pitch to studios and film-makers is greater continuity with existing offline visual effects workflows. The firm describes Nuke Stage as “reducing the risk of costly rework” of content, such as when offline assets have to be converted for use in a game engine, or vice versa. Nuke Stage’s node graph lets users manipulate USD scenes in real time. What is workflow in Nuke Stage like? Nuke Stage is designed for creating detailed background environments that can be projected onto LED walls behind actors during principal photography, as 2D, 2.5D or 3D imagery.The core workflow is OpenUSD-based, with users able to load USD scenes created in other DCC applications that support USD into the Nuke Stage Editor. It is then possible to edit the scene in real time, adding 3D meshes, or using the Nuke Stage Editor’s node graph to add images or effects to cameras, displays and USD primitives. The scene can then be played out to the LED wall as B44-compressed EXR files: a format that Foundry describes as “real-time-suitable” and “VFX-friendly”. To ensure continuity of color management between principal photography and post-production, the software supports the OpenColorIO standard. https://www.cgchannel.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/250411_NukeStage_testimonials.mp4 Nuke Stage can be used independently of Nuke, but the familiarity of its workflow to Nuke artists is cited in this video of testimonials from ICVFX and virtual production supervisors. Does Nuke Stage have to be used with Nuke? Despite the name, Nuke Stage is a “purpose-built” application based on a “new technology stack”, and does not require Nuke, Foundry’s family of compositing and editorial tools.However, Foundry clearly hopes to attract existing Nuke users: the UI and workflow of Nuke Stage are described as “familiar and friendly” to Nuke artists. And while it can use USD scenes created in any application, the online documentation describes “advantages in using Nuke with Nuke Stage to prepare assets”. Both applications have a Hydra 3D viewport, “ensur[ing] that the scene you’re seeing in Nuke is exactly what you will see in Nuke Stage”. Nuke Stage runs on set on standard workstations and render hardware. What hardware does Nuke Stage need? Nuke Stage is hardware-agnostic, in the sense that it runs on “commodity hardware”, and does not require a specialist media server, but it is designed for NVIDIA GPUs.It uses a render node architecture, with a control machine running the Nuke Stage Editor, and a series of render nodes rendering its output to different sections of the LED wall. Each render node needs a NVIDIA Quadro Sync II card to synchronize their output, and a compatible GPU: all current- and recent-gen NVIDIA professional cards – the documentation namechecks the RTX A6000. The architecture of a Nuke Stage production set-up. A license is required for each render node. How much does Nuke Stage cost? Nuke Stage is priced on enquiry, and scales “based on rendering requirements and project demands”: it requires a license for each render node used.All of Foundry’s other products are now available subscription-only. Release date and system requirements Nuke Stage is currently in invite-only early access. Foundry hasn’t announced a wider release date. You can register your interest by filling in this online form.The current version, Nuke Stage 0.9, is available for Windows 10+ only. You can see the hardware requirements in the online documentation. Read an overview of Nuke Stage on Foundry’s website Read more about how Nuke Stage works in the online documentation Have your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.

Video game M&A rises to $6.6 billion in Q1 2025, driven by mobile acquisitions Scopely's acquisition of Niantic's games business was partly behind the spike News by Samuel Roberts Editorial Director Published on April 11, 2025 Games industry mergers and acquisitions in Q1 of 2025 rose to $6.6 billion, their highest level in over a year, driven by activity in the mobile sector. That big number was partly down to Scopely's $3.5 billion acquisition of Niantic's games business, including the likes of Pokémon GO. That's according to a newsletter by gaming-focused investment bank Aream, made in partnership with InvestGame. This previous quarter was the highest for mergers and acquisitions since Q4 of 2023, when Microsoft completed its purchase of Activision Blizzard. It's worth noting that the report delineates between completed mergers and acquisitions and those that have been announced. Here's a graph documenting recent M&A trends from the report: Image credit: Aream Other key deals made in that timeframe include Miniclip's $1.2 billion purchase of Easybrain, and AppLovin divesting its mobile gaming arm for $900 million as it focuses its business on mobile advertising. The Q1 numbers also include Take-Two's $460 million acquisition of Borderlands developer Gearbox Entertainment. The report points out that overall activity exceeds pre-pandemic levels. This most recent wave of deals is motivated by "strategics taking a more active role in reshaping their portfolios" and a "select group of private consolidators pursuing acquisitions and growing private-equity interest in the space." Elsewhere, the report points out that private financing remains challenging in games, "particularly in late stage rounds", with this quarter the lowest in years: Image credit: Aream There's a similar trend curve for early-stage private investment, particularly Series A funding. The full newsletter has more insights on the state of the industry at large.

OpenAI is giving ChatGPT a memory upgrade that allows it to recall old conversations that you didn’t ask it to save. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X that the chatbot can “now reference all your past conversations,” and that the update aligns with the company’s goal to develop “AI systems that get to know you over your life.” This builds on the “Memory” feature that was added to ChatGPT last year, which allowed limited information like queries, prompts, and customizations to be retained and used for future responses. With the long-term memory update, ChatGPT will now recall information in two ways — using the “saved memories” that users have manually asked it to remember, and “reference chat history,” which are “insights ChatGPT gathers from past chats to improve future ones,” according to OpenAI. The update will be available everywhere except in the EU, UK, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein, likely due to these regions having tight AI regulations that Altman has objected to in the past. It’s currently being rolled out to users paying for ChatGPT’s $200 monthly Pro subscription and will be available “soon” for $20 Plus subscribers, according to Altman. OpenAI also says it will be available to Team, Enterprise, and Edu users “in a few weeks,” but there’s no word on when — or if — it will roll out to free users. Memory is an optional feature for ChatGPT. Users who don’t want the chatbot to save any conversations can toggle off saved memories under the ChatGPT personalization settings, or use the temporary chat function to ask it inquiries that won’t use or affect memory. ChatGPT’s memory upgrade follows a similar update that Google made to Gemini AI in February that allows it to recall older conversations to provide more personalized or relevant responses.