“DJI’s $199 Neo selfie drone is going to be everywhere,” we wrote in September — while noting that the budget self-flying drone did have two major weaknesses over the competing $350 Hover X1. First, DJI’s drone didn’t shoot vertical video (a dealbreaker for TikTok and Instagram Reels influencers) and second, it couldn’t track our movements nearly as quickly as the competition.

But DJI is now fixing both, adding vertical video and dramatically increasing the Neo’s flight speed while tracking. According to DC Rainmaker, it’s now so fast it can keep up with cyclists, and surprisingly flies faster in tracking mode than it does with a controller.

Before the firmware update, the drone wasn’t able to keep up with him cycling at even 13 miles...

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I’m hoping DJI’s affordable new FPV goggles will be the missing puzzle piece — a way to cheaply buy the “It feels like I’m flying!” experience I had with the DJI Avata for maybe $400 or $500 tops, rather than the current $800 to $1,000 you might have to pay.

See, the company announced its budget $199 Neo drone in September that works with goggles, and today it’s announcing the $229 DJI Goggles N3. Add a $99 RC Motion 3 controller and you get airplane-like flight, with first-person video that puts you in the virtual cockpit.

But I can’t quite confirm that it’s worth your money yet — because DJI says my unit likely shipped with a defect, and I’ll need a little more testing time. More on that below.

At $229, the Goggles N3 are definitely...

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Apex Legends is one of the only battle royale games that lets you play on a Steam Deck gaming handheld — Fortnite, Valorant, PUBG and more never supported it in the first place, citing concerns about anti-cheat. But today, Electronic Arts and Respawn are taking the game away for that very same reason.

“In our efforts to combat cheating in Apex, we’ve identified Linux OS as being a path for a variety of impactful exploits and cheats. As a result, we’ve decided to block Linux OS access to the game,” writes EA, in a blog post explaining the decision.

Apex Legends did have anti-cheat software that did run on the Steam Deck — specifically, the game uses Epic Games’ Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC), which has been compatible with the Linux gaming...

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AMD’s Q3 2024 earnings call today wasn’t bullish on gaming revenue overall, but it did confirm a hot new rumor on GPUs — specifically, the launch of AMD’s next-gen RDNA 4 parts early next year. “We are on track to launch the first RDNA4 GPUs in early 2025,” said AMD CEO Lisa Su, and the company confirmed to PCWorld that it’s the first time it’s shared those plans publicly.

“In addition to a strong increase in gaming performance, RDNA 4 delivers significantly higher ray tracing performance and adds new AI capabilities,” Su said on the call.

AMD’s confirmation of those chips might help lend credibility to other leaks, too. Earlier today, a Chiphell leaker rumored that AMD would announce its RDNA 4 graphics at CES 2025 in January,...

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When video game scholars want to study games that are no longer on sale, they sometimes have to drive many hours to do it legally — and that won’t be changing anytime soon. The US Copyright Office has just denied a request from video game preservationists to let libraries, archives and museums temporarily lend individuals some virtual, remotely accessible copies of those works.

Kendra Albert, who made the argument on behalf of the Software Preservation Network and the Library Copyright Alliance, says preservationists weren’t asking for a lot: “It was the thing that basically exists for all kinds of special collections in libraries: the library reviews the request, makes sure it’s not harmful, and allows access to the work.”

While the...

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