Video game horses tend to play a fairly uncomplicated role, at least in mainstream titles. Like semi-sentient meat bicycles, they often exist as little more than a way to make the player travel faster, jump farther or occasionally defy the laws of physics. With the exception of Red Dead Redemption 2, an outlier beloved for its equine verisimilitude and breadth of riding-related activities, horses in video games are generally emotionless props, notorious for janky animations and unnatural anatomy. That's fine for most players' needs, but for those who are drawn to certain games in part because they have horses, there's a lot to be desired. Especially since the alternatives -- dedicated horse games -- haven't proven to be much better.

Intel has tacked an additional dozen games to its Intel Application Optimization technology, meaning that several popular games will receive a higher framerate if you're using a supported processor and the technology is turned on. Better yet, it should work on older processors now, with a little legwork. Intel updated the technology in conjunction with the launch of the Core i9-14900KS -- which, at speeds of up to 6.2GHz, should already be exceptionally fast by itself. But IAO adds an even higher speed boost -- up to 11 percent faster performance in Metro: Exodus, according to an Intel presentation. Intel's IAO launched alongside the 14th-gen Core lineup with only support for Metro: Exodus and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege included, but the new updates has added World of Warcraft, Red Dead Redemption 2, Dirt 5, F1:22 and several additional titles.

When the epic open-world PlayStation 4 game Red Dead Redemption 2 was developed in 2013, it took 2,200 days to record the 1,200 voices in the game with 700 voice actors, who recited the 500,000 lines of dialogue. It was a massive feat that is nearly impossible for any other studio to replicate – let alone a games studio smaller than Rockstar Games. But with advances in artificial intelligence it is becoming easier and easier to recreate human voices to create automated real-time responses, near limitless dialogue options and speech tailored to a user's unique input. But the technology raises questions about the ethics of synthesising voices. The Australian software developer Replica Studios rolled out a voice synthesiser platform for games developers in 2019 – a tool used by Australian games developer PlaySide Studios in their game Age of Darkness: Final Stand.

In my previous Article about Generative AI, I tried to set up the basics by giving a definition of this new technology trend, explaining its use cases and how the underlying algorithms where working. Now I want to extend a little bit on which type of actors will emerge of this trends, what are the opportunities for entrepreneurs and what will be the challenges they will be facing. Most industries could be impacted by Generative AI, but some more than others. Here I'll discuss some of the most important ones from my point of view. Copywriting is the most obvious and notorious usage of Generative AI.

It's been a giant week for video game news. Nintendo announced a release date of 5 May 2023 for the next Legend of Zelda game (now titled Tears of the Kingdom, certainly not an intentional reference to the death of the Queen); we've seen a new God of War: Ragnarok trailer in which The West Wing's Toby Ziegler shouts at Kratos; and we learned that the beloved N64 shooter GoldenEye 007 is finally, finally coming back. But it was all overshadowed on Sunday, when a hacker posted more than 50 minutes of in-development footage from Grand Theft Auto VI, stolen from Rockstar's internal Slack channel. The hacker claims to have possession of the game's source code, too. This is, along with the theft of Half-Life 2's source code from Valve in 2003, one of the biggest data breaches in video game history.

Welcome to Pushing Buttons, the Guardian's gaming newsletter. If you'd like to receive it in your inbox every week, just pop your email in below – and check your inbox (and spam) for the confirmation email. I have a long, emotionally-significant history with Elden Ring's developer – I was the first person in the world to review Dark Souls, for heaven's sake – but I still haven't found time to play FromSoftware's latest title. I once flew to California to play Dark Souls for 24 straight hours on a live stream. These games are IMPORTANT to me!

The story of online cowboy posse the Grannies starts, as video games so often do, in a character creation menu. Having played through the single-player story of Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption 2, Kalonica Quigley and Marigold Bartlett, Melbourne-based friends and game developers, decided to try the online multiplayer portion of the game. On separate PlayStation 4s, and without one another's knowledge, they each created elderly women as their avatars. It was an opportunity, laughs Bartlett over a Discord call, to cosplay as themselves in the future. Not long after, friends and fellow game-makers Ian MacLarty and Andy Brophy, rendered as elderly men, joined them.

It's a comment I've seen hundreds of times, or variations of throughout my time here at Kotaku: internet complaints about the quality of reviews. "A bot can do better than this," some would cry. So let's put that to the test. I've run this test before, although last time I fed Kotaku Australia comments into the machine learning model. That was run using a free online version of the GPT-2 language model, although the more powerful GPT-3 model is available now if you're willing to pay to access the API. So I did that, specifically through a tool called Shortly. We got some fun responses last time the AI pretended to double as a commenter.

The Xbox Series X is an apology for the Xbox One in almost every way. Microsoft's last console was weighed down by being $100 more than the PlayStation 4 at launch -- even though it had less GPU power -- and it featured a bundled Kinect camera that wasn't very useful. The company tried to course-correct with mid-generation systems, the Xbox One S and One X, but by then the damage was done. As of this year, the PS4 is estimated to have sold more than twice as many units as the Xbox One. So with the Series X, Microsoft is trying to get everything right from the start. It's being positioned as the ultimate gaming console, with far more performance than its previous powerhouse, the Xbox One X. This new machine can deliver 4K gaming more reliably, push up to 120 frames per second, and load games far faster than ever before. It'll even play all of your old games with better performance and HDR! It's as if Microsoft is just begging gamers to love it.

There is only one entrance to the city of Solitude. Its gates are set in a colossal stone wall that lies across the summit of a steep stone path amid a forest of fir trees. Arriving this way suggests nothing of the grandeur beyond. If you approach via the Karst river to the south or its swampy delta to the east, a mandible of buildings is visible, stretching high across an arching stone bridge. To the right, flashes of sunlight reflect off the windows of the Blue Palace.