Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders are officially opening in the U.S. on April 24. This news comes after the original plan to open pre-orders on April 9 was delayed due to the “potential impact of tariffs.” Thankfully, the console isn’t increasing in price from what was originally announced — $449.99 for the console, with a $499.99 version that includes Mario Kart World. However, many of its optional accessories will cost you more (but not much more).While I wish to exist in a world where one could easily click “buy” once pre-orders open and be guaranteed a Switch 2 come the June 5 release date, it’s not so simple in reality. Hundreds of thousands of people, if not more, are going to be showing up simultaneously, putting a strain on both servers and allocated pre-order stock. In other words, it might take some luck to score a pre-order reservation.That said, there are ways you can prepare yourself for April 24 in the hopes of boosting your chance of success. You can sign up to be among the first to know when retailers go live with pre-orders at Best Buy and GameStop — and, if you’re a longtime Nintendo Switch player, you might be eligible to skip the usual online retailer rush with the tips below.How to reserve a Switch 2 pre-order at NintendoStarting with Nintendo, the company is accepting sign-ups for those hoping to reserve a Switch 2, but there are multiple requirements in place, likely to quash the number of consoles resellers can get their hands on. To express interest in pre-ordering a Switch 2 from Nintendo, you must have already done the following by April 2:Buy at least 12 months worth of a Nintendo Switch Online membershipHave at least 50 gameplay hours logged to your Nintendo accountOpt in to share gameplay data in your Nintendo account’s privacy settingsOnly if you meet that criteria can you submit the form to express interest in reserving. That said, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be chosen to receive an invite. But if you are chosen, you’ll get an email from Nintendo on or after May 8 to purchase either the $449.99 model, or the $499.99 model that includes Mario Kart World. If you receive an invitation, you’ll have 72 hours to follow through with a purchase. It’s possible that general pre-orders will be available at Nintendo starting April 24, but this opportunity is just for Switch Online subscribers.How to pre-order a Switch 2 at Best BuyWhether you qualify for Nintendo’s strict pre-order process or not, it’s a good idea to sign up for email notifications at Best Buy through this page. Doing so will ensure that you get an email with a specific pre-order time for the Switch 2. Additionally, it’ll loop you into a newsletter that’s only about the Switch 2, its games, and related content (you won’t receive other Best Buy newsletters).It’s worth mentioning as well that you’ll need to have a Best Buy account to buy a Switch 2 there, so be sure to create one ahead of time.RelatedHow to pre-order Switch 2 at GameStopGameStop has a product page up for the Switch 2, and you’ll want to enter your email address to receive communications about the specific pre-order details.Additionally, if you plan to pre-order at GameStop, you should know that it will be running a promotion that lets customers get up to $175 trade-in credit for their Switch consoles when reserving a Switch 2. The amount of trade-in credit you’ll get depends on the model you’re trading in, as well as its condition and whether you have all of the components.See More:

Menu Home News Hardware Gaming Mobile Finance Deals Reviews How To Wccftech AnnouncementHardware Intel Acknowledges Performance Degradation When Arc GPUs Are Paired With Older Processors; Investigation Has Been Started Sarfraz Khan • Apr 18, 2025 at 04:14pm EDT Intel has finally taken the performance loss issue seriously with the Arc GPUs and has started its investigation to find out and fix the problem with older CPUs. Intel Responds to the Arc GPU Performance Issue with Older Ryzen and Intel Core Processors The Intel Arc B580 and B570 GPUs looked decent on the launch but weren't seen on the charts even after offering more VRAM than their competitors. Nonetheless, one of the reasons why many didn't settle with the Battlemage GPUs is lackluster optimizations. Here, we aren't talking exclusively about the Intel GPU drivers but about an issue that kept the Arc Battlemage GPUs behind their rivals. If you remember, Hardware Unboxed was among the first ones to point out the lackluster performance of Arc B580 when paired with older processors such as Ryzen 2000 and Intel Core processors from the 9th gen. It has been a while since it has been even addressed or acknowledged by Intel. Finally, Intel took its time and responded on the forums. Here is the full message Intel released: Thank you for your patience. We are aware of reports of performance sensitivity in some games when paired with older generation processors. We have increased our platform coverage to include more configurations in our validation process, and we are continuing to investigate optimizations. From the statement, it looks as if Intel knew it but didn't take its time for optimize the performance. Intel says that it will expand the optimizations to more configurations and one should expect this issue to be resolved in the near future. However, it didn't explicity state any time frame as to when one can expect the new update. Intel will have to make updates on the driver side as its hardware is already on par with its rivals from the previous gen in the latest titles. We didn't see any performance throttle on the Arc B580 or B570 with the latest Intel and AMD CPUs and seeing lackluster performance with Intel's own previous-gen CPUs was indeed surprising. Hopefully, with the new patches, Intel will be able to compete with AMD and NVIDIA GPUs but this won't necessarily mean that Intel will start to gain any traction in the GPU market. Intel Arc Battlemage GPUs are mostly absent from the market and its poor availability has resulted in its exit from the current GPU competition in the budget segment. News Source: Intel Subscribe to get an everyday digest of the latest technology news in your inbox Follow us on Topics Sections Company Some posts on wccftech.com may contain affiliate links. We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com © 2025 WCCF TECH INC. 700 - 401 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 $50 for PS5 & Xbox | Save $10 on PC Preorder at Amazon Preorder at Walmart Preorder at Target Preorder at GameStop Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Digital Deluxe Edition $60 on PS5 & Xbox | Save $12 on PC Save $12 on Steam key Preorder on Xbox Store Preorder on PSN Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Lumiere Edition | GameStop Exclusive $70 | Releases April 24 Preorder at GameStop Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Collector's Edition (PS5 Exclusive) $150 | Releases April 24 Preorder at GameStop Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 releases on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S on April 24. If you haven't preordered a copy yet and want to play the new turn-based RPG on Steam, Fanatical is offering a great preorder deal on the standard and Digital Deluxe Editions. You can save 20% on either edition, which equates to a $10-$12 discount. Console players can still preorder a copy of the standard physical edition for $50, but the pair of GameStop-exclusive premium editions are currently sold out.Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Preorder DealsStandard Edition -- $40 ($50)Digital Deluxe Edition -- $48 ($60)It's worth noting that Clair Obscur will also be added to the Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass libraries at launch. It's an Xbox Play Anywhere title, so Game Pass Ultimate subscribers will have access to both the Xbox Series X|S and PC edition from the Microsoft Store.Continue Reading at GameSpot

Recent datamining has revealed that Infinity Nikki is introducing Revived Outfits in Version 1.5, as this new Evolution could potentially be tied to the upcoming dye system. While Infinity Nikki launched in December 2024 as a complete open-world experience, players have been excited about two post-launch features in particular: housing and dyes. The former is expected to arrive in Summer 2025, while the latter is set to make its debut in Version 1.5.

Baldur’s Gate 3 recently received its final major patch, adding features like cross-play, photo mode, and new subclasses in addition to myriad bug fixes. While there may be future updates to address undiscovered bugs, Larian Studios has capped off its support for Baldur’s Gate 3 in spectacular fashion. To mark the occasion, Steam and GOG have discounted copies of Baldur’s Gate 3 for PC to just $47.99 (was $59.99), while the Xbox version is available digitally for $55.99 (was $69.99). This deal is available through April 24 and is the perfect opportunity to pick up one of the best CRPGs of the last decade, or pick up a copy for a friend if you’re planning to get up to some co-op shenanigans. Whether you’re new to the world of Dungeons & Dragons, or a seasoned adventurer of the Forgotten Realms, Baldur’s Gate 3 offers a virtually endless number of ways to experience its engaging story, which is brought to life by some truly memorable characters and performances.

This week, OpenAI announced its latest models: o3 and o4-mini. These are reasoning models, which break down a prompt into multiple parts that are then addressed one at a time. The goal is for the bot to “think” through a request more deeply than other models might, and arrive at a deeper, more accurate result. While there are many possible functions for OpenAI’s “most powerful” reasoning model, one use that has blown up a bit on social media is for geoguessing—the act of identifying a location by analyzing only what you can see in an image. As TechCrunch reported, users on X are posting about their experiences asking o3 to pinpoint locations from random photos, and showing glowing results. The bot will guess where in the world it thinks the photo was taken, and break down its reasons for thinking so. For example, it might say it zeroed-in on a certain color license plate that denotes a particular country, or that it noticed a particular language or writing style on a sign.According to some of these users, ChatGPT isn’t using any metadata hidden in the images to help it identify the locations: Some testers are stripping that data out of the photos before sharing them with the model, so, theoretically, it’s working off of reasoning and web search alone. On the one hand, this is a fun task to put ChatGPT through. Geoguessing is all the rage online, so making the practice more accessible could be a good thing. On the other, there are clear privacy and security implications here: Someone with access to ChatGPT’s o3 model could use the reasoning model to identify where someone lives or is staying based on an otherwise anonymous image of theirs. I decided to test out o3’s geoguessing capabilities with some stills from Google Street View, to see whether the internet hype was up to snuff. The good news is that, from my own experience, this is far from a perfect tool. In fact, it doesn’t seem like it’s much better at the task than OpenAI’s non-reasoning models, like 4o.Testing o3’s geoguessing skillso3 can handle clear landmarks with relative ease: I first tested a view from a highway in Minnesota, facing the skyline of Minneapolis in the foreground. It only took the bot a minute and six seconds to identify the city, and got that we were looking down I-35W. It also instantly identified the Panthéon in Paris, noting that the screenshot was from the time it was under renovation in 2015. (I didn't know that when I submitted it!) Credit: Lifehacker Next, I wanted to try non-famous landmarks and locations. I found a random street corner in Springfield, Illinois, featuring the city’s Central Baptist Church—a red brick building with a steeple. This is when things started to get interesting: o3 cropped the image in multiple parts, looking for identifying characteristics in each. Since this is a reasoning model, you can see what it’s looking for in certain crops, too. Like other times I've tested out reasoning models, it's weird to see the bot "thinking" with human-like interjections. (e.g. "Hmm," "but wait," and "I remember.") It's also interesting to see how it picks out specific details, like noting the architectural style of a section of a building, or where in the world a certain park bench is most commonly seen. Depending on where the bot is in its thinking process, it may start to search the web for more information, and you can click those links to investigate what it's referencing yourself.Despite all this reasoning, this location stumped the bot, and it wasn’t able to complete the analysis. After three minutes and 47 seconds, the bot seemed like it was getting close to figuring it out, saying: “The location at 400 E Jackson Street in Springfield, IL could be near the Cathedral Church of St. Paul. My crop didn’t capture the whole board, so I need to adjust the coordinates and test the bounding box. Alternatively, the architecture might help identify it—a red brick Greek Revival with a white steeple, combined with a high-rise that could be 'Embassy Plaza.' The term 'Redeemer' could relate to 'Redeemer Lutheran Church.' I'll search my memory for more details about landmarks near this address.” Credit: Lifehacker The bot correctly identified the street, but more impressively, the city itself. I was also impressed by its analysis of the church. While it was struggling to identify the specific church, it was able to analyze its style, which could have put it on the right path. However, the analysis quickly fell apart. The next “thought” was about how the location might be in Springfield, Missouri or Kansas City. This is the first time I saw anything about Missouri, which made me wonder whether the bot hallucinated between the two Springfields. From here, the bot lost the plot, wondering if the church was in Omaha, or maybe that it was the Topeka Governor’s Mansion (which doesn’t really look anything like the church).It kept thinking for another couple minutes, speculating about other locations the block could be in, before pausing the analysis altogether. This tracked with a subsequent experience I had testing a random town in Kansas: After three minutes of thinking, the bot thought my image was from Fulton, Illinois—though, to its credit, it was pretty sure the picture was from somewhere in the midwest. I asked it to try again, and it thought for a while, again guessing wildly different cities in various states, before pausing the analysis for good.Now is not the time for fearThe thing is, GPT-4o seems to be about even with o3 when it comes to location recognition. It was able to instantly identify that skyline of Minneapolis and immediately guessed that the Kansas photo was actually in Iowa. (It was incorrect, of course, but it was quick about it.) That seems to align with others’ experiences with the models: TechCrunch was able to get o3 to identify one location 4o couldn’t, but the models were matched evenly other than that. While there are certainly some privacy and security concerns with AI in general, I don't think o3 in particular needs to be singled out as a specific threat. It can be used to correctly guess where an image was taken, sure, but it can also easily get it wrong—or crash out entirely. Seeing as 4o is capable of a similar level of accuracy, I'd say there's as much concern today as there was over the past year or so. It's not great, but it's also not dire. I'd save the panic for an AI model that gets it right almost every time, especially when the image is obscure.In regards to the privacy and security concerns, OpenAI shared the following with TechCrunch: “OpenAI o3 and o4-mini bring visual reasoning to ChatGPT, making it more helpful in areas like accessibility, research, or identifying locations in emergency response. We’ve worked to train our models to refuse requests for private or sensitive information, added safeguards intended to prohibit the model from identifying private individuals in images, and actively monitor for and take action against abuse of our usage policies on privacy."

Blizzard has finally shared how hero bans will work in competitive Overwatch 2. The new step will let teams ban heroes they think are overpowered or annoying to play against, without letting them game out who their opposing team might want to play. The feature is a common part of other competitive games like League of Legends, and is a meta-game in its own right. For Overwatch 2, Blizzard hopes to use the "Ban Phase" mostly to let players remove heroes they find frustrating, and gather data to use when the game is rebalanced. When you first launch into a competitive match, you'll get the option to select your "Preferred Hero," which signals to your team who you don't want to ban. Then you'll rank three heroes you want to remove from the match, with your first choice given the most weight, and your last choice, the least. Blizzard says all teams and players vote simultaneously, but chat will be blocked off between opposing teams until voting ends. Blizzard Once all the votes are in, they get tallied using the following guidelines: The team with the most votes for a specific hero will be considered the “first” team, and will guarantee that their chosen hero is banned. In the case of a tie, the first team is decided randomly. Then, the other team becomes the “second" team. If the heroes they voted to ban were not the first team's banned hero, then their most and second most voted heroes are banned. If the second team's most or second most voted pick was also the first team's, then the second team's third most voted hero is removed instead.  And finally, the second most voted hero on the first team is banned, with the same caveat the second team had. When the number of votes for a hero is tied, the game picks the hero voted by the most players in the lobby (and not the total amount of votes). Ties beyond that are broken randomly, and regardless of how the votes shake out, there's a limit of two bans per role. If you don't want to ban any heroes or don't know who to ban, you can also skip voting and let your teammates decide for you. Blizzard first announced it would add hero bans to Overwatch 2 with its Season 15 announcement, which introduced a perks system to the game. Hero bans are set to arrive with Season 16 on April 22, which will also include the new Stadium mode, five-on-five matches where players earn currency to spend on upgrades between rounds, and have the option to play in third-person. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/blizzard-explains-hero-bans-ahead-of-their-introduction-in-competitive-overwatch-210319297.html?src=rss

A new report puts our smartphone battery concerns in perspective and we have some tips to make it through the day.

The dramatic school bus fight in ‘In the Lost Lands’. An excerpt from befores & afters magazine. In The Lost Lands is full of many spectacular set pieces. Here, the team from Herne Hill break down the designs for The Rift, and also that tense moment where the characters must cross the cable car across the gorge. Mark O. Hammond (visual effects supervisor): The Rift is a brutal environment of a city that has been split in half by centuries of earthquakes. This environment was originally built in Unreal Engine for previs and used on set for the backgrounds. We reworked it afterwards in the traditional pipeline for some shots, but both assets are used in the final film. David Roby (CG supervisor): For The Rift’s design influences, in addition to the obvious urban destruction, Paul wanted to include some focal points of Art Deco architecture to help keep the geography legible. This primarily took shape in The Rift train station and the skyscraper that breaks the bus-cable-car’s fall. We also looked at a bunch of reference of geothermal vents to help get the feel right for the large emissions of noxious gases from the bottom of The Rift. In terms of construction, we used some hand layout for areas where we needed more precise, art-directed control such as near the seam-up with set or near action, as well as procedural workflows for volume. The linchpin of the procedural stuff was a really amazing city generator that CG supervisor Ben King got working for The Rift. You could paint, to camera, where you wanted roads, low-rise areas, etc. for a pleasing composition, and then cook out several point clouds which fed into the main environment. Mark O. Hammond (visual effects supervisor): For the cable-car scene, the live-action portion was filmed on a custom-built rotating platform for the bus. Mo-Sys rigged up a node that allowed us to track the speed of the rotation of the platform. This allowed us to solve for the camera’s rotation on set. Milla and the stunt performers handled the fight on top of the bus, which we then enhanced with digital doubles for more dangerous moves and to help with continuity. David Roby (CG supervisor): The biggest artistic challenge was to make sure that we felt the motion of the bus across the gorge during the fight. To make sure the bus felt like it was moving through space we made sure our gas plumes passed close enough to the bus to really feel the parallax as well as introducing a slight shift to the photographed elements in frame as if suspended from the cables above. Then there was the bus’ fall which we worked on to keep the speed and weight of both the bus and its cables feeling plausible within the movie’s vibe. From a technical side, the cable unwinding as it breaks was an interesting challenge. Allowing the sim to twist on itself in a way that still felt metallic was a delicate balance to find. In addition, the sequence had a fair number of relatively hero digidoubles for the monks. We had to add some to make sure the number they leave the station with feels plausible as they keep climbing out of the woodwork to fight. The post Across The Rift appeared first on befores & afters.

When Twitter cofounder and Medium founder Evan “Ev” Williams was planning his 50th birthday party, he didn’t know who to invite. Having spent more of his life building and scaling tech companies, he found himself feeling disconnected from friends. That’s why he started Mozi last year with Molly DeWolf Swenson, a marketer and producer. Swenson, who serves as CEO of the company, says that the app—which lets users check in to certain locations where other contacts can join them and vice-versa—is intended to facilitate spontaneous, in-person interactions.  Launched in December 2024, Mozi raised $6 million in seed funding from Williams’ Obvious Ventures—which he cofounded with Vishal Vasishth and James Joaquin—and is live in 135 countries.  During South by Southwest, Swenson and Williams joined Most Innovative Companies host Yasmin Gagne to discuss what inspired the app, how it works, and how they plan to make money off of it. This interview has been edited and condensed. How does Mozi work? MDS: You set up a basic profile. The only information we require is what city is your home base, a photo, your phone number, and your name. Then you sync your contacts so that we know which of them are on Mozi.  Then you can decide whether you want them to be able to see your plans or not. Then as you go, you input your travel plans or your local plans. The idea is that you open up Mozi and you see where your friends are and the things that they’re doing that you could join them for, whether that’s coworking at a coffee shop, or going to a show that night. Those are the kinds of things we’re trying to drop people into. It’s not something where you’re spending a bunch of time on your phone. You’re actually getting together in person. Molly, what attracted you to the business? MDS: I had a spreadsheet of 450 people that I started at my first company, Riot, which was a media company. We’d be traveling back and forth to New York a lot and I’d be like, ‘I’ve got to remember to reach out to these people when I’m in New York.’ So it just started with ‘Who are the important people I need to remember to reach out to that live in New York?’. And then that expanded to ‘Who’s in San Francisco?’ and ‘Who’s in these other cities?’ Then that list ended up expanding to potential clients, people with audiences, people who are single so I could set them up. It wasn’t very accurate for very long because it takes a lot of effort to keep something like that up to date. So when Evan and I came together to talk about Mozi for the first time, I described the spreadsheet to him. Do you worry about the app promoting behavior like stalking? MDS: It’s encrypted as fuck in terms of personal information. We’ve been really, I’d say conservative on making sure that privacy is protected for you and your contacts.  EW: We don’t just broadcast your location to everyone. We only tell people the plans you share with a subset of your contacts. Nothing in Mozi is public. Can’t you just text your friends to make plans? EW: But through Mozi you could share plans with people who you want to know better as well. How are you going to make money through the app? MDW: Premium features. There’s dating apps now that people will pay for, there’s health tracker apps that people pay for. There’s tons and tons of utilities on our phones that people are willing to pay some amount for. you We have a thesis that people would be willing to pay for an app that is purpose-built for maintaining and strengthening their friendships and relationships. People write to us saying, “I’d be willing to pay for a product like this, just don’t bring ads into it.” A lot of our users initially—Mozers, as we call them—are in an older demographic. They’re in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. They’re less price-sensitive than some of the [users of] social platforms that are targeting younger users. EW: Mozi is really in the category of utilities. The types of apps Molly was mentioning are utilities; they can charge a subscription because people don’t spend all day on them. You kind of need people to spend all day on the app if you’re going to make an ad model work. We’re not focusing on monetization right now. We need to grow the network. But it seems very likely to us that this can provide such value in life as a utility. What would a premium feature look like? MDS: We prototyped a map view with a slider into the future. You could, at the city level, see where your friends are, then you slide into the future with your finger and all those little bubbles move to different cities where they will be. That could be one. I’ve also talked about this feature of being able to sort my contacts by who is single so I can set them up. EW: Another cool feature idea is an intro feature where if you see two people who don’t know each other who are going to be in the same place, you can introduce them. Normally that would take a good six text messages, but in the app you could do it like boom, boom, if they both opt in. MDS: We actually had a cool Mozi moment yesterday. Two people connected at the Mozi event and they realized they had the same birthday– they just happened to see each other’s profiles. We should have just popped that information up when they connected on the app. There’s things like that where you connect and it’s like…here’s your common ground. How do you figure out you have the same birthday that fast? Evan, you cofounded X (formerly Twitter). What is your relationship like to social media now?  EW: I don’t spend much time on it at all. I just think for mental health and for ROI on time invested, I like to do other things. Twitter is still an amazing source of tech information if you want to know what’s happening. If you want to recruit people, LinkedIn is social media. But now I’m just enjoying my time reading books and hanging out with friends. Have you made any friends through Mozi? MDS: We found out a friend was in Kyoto and went out to drinks with her and her brother because of Mozi. I heard from someone yesterday who was like, “I ran into someone because of Mozi in Dubai. We hadn’t seen each other in four years.” It feels like we’re delivering on something important. We want to increase the surface area of that social serendipity.