DLSS 5, RX 9070 XT and iPhone Duo: the week's big gaming and mobile roundup

The Tak Calistir crew met across three continents this week, with one host on the ground in San Francisco for the Apple launch and the others joining from Tokyo and Turkiye. The agenda was packed: DLSS 5 going official, GPU market shifts, a surprise Framework discount, the LG-GamersNexus clash, a leap in PS5 emulation, and Apple's chip, phone, watch and earbuds news in a single show.

DLSS 5 is now officially live with NBA 2K27 after the leaks, bringing Nvidia's 3D-guided neural rendering to a wide audience for the first time. According to the show, the technology sits inside the game like a graphics mode and looks clean in its official form. Modders, however, carried the DLL into other games with tools like OptScaler and pushed the strength slider to 100 percent, producing ugly 5x-10x exaggerations.

The technology was misunderstood at first, as if it were swapping textures and inventing faces. The picture described on the show is different: it mainly works on ambient light and reflections, shaping how light reads on a scene rather than rebuilding characters. In photorealistic racers like Forza a single profile can feel like jumping between quality presets, and a Street Fighter test is compared to a generational leap.

Testers of photorealistic games such as Cyberpunk reportedly no longer want to switch it off. Some indie developers of 2D and side-scrolling games pushed back with real-art statements. The verdict on the show is clear: DLSS 5 exists to make realism-targeted titles like Forza Horizon 6, Cyberpunk and NBA 2K27 shine; mods can force it anywhere, but its fate depends on the sliders developers expose.

The cost side hurts: frame-rate drops of up to 50 percent are mentioned even on the 5000 series. The modding scene claims that adding an RTX 5060 as a second card absorbs the load and removes the drop, feeding speculation about a dual-card comeback and a dedicated DLSS 5 unit in the 6000 series. The same logic is said to largely run on AMD cards too. Owners of older cards get a warning: enabling frame generation below the 60 FPS threshold does not improve the experience and increases latency.

AMD had a landmark moment in the Steam hardware survey: the RX 9070 XT passed the budget 6600 series to become the most popular card among AMD users, at about 1.46 percent share. Where AMD cards used to be tolerated as part of a prebuilt, buyers now actively choose this card, according to the show. Stable drivers, FSR support and fixed AV1 and H264 encoders are cited as the reasons for that trust.

On the Nvidia side, a GB203-based variant of the RTX 5070 is rumored; that silicon normally serves the 5080 and 5070 Ti. Surplus dies, or units that missed the higher bins, could be cut down into the 5070 with no expected performance change. The hosts see possible thermal and overclocking benefits from higher-binned silicon. Behind it sits a VRAM scarcity thesis: 16 and 32 GB memory flows toward AI products, thinning out the 80 and 90 class cards, so leftover silicon moves to the 5070; custom 32 GB experiments in Brazil and China feed the same curiosity.

Framework delivered rare good news: 32 and 64 GB LPCAMM2 memory kits got cheaper, with retroactive refunds for waiting orders. The company had earlier passed cost increases through transparently; now it says it found thin-memory stock at a good price and shares it with users. The hosts say they have not seen a RAM discount in years, praise the move and hope rivals follow.

The LG-GamersNexus fight was the week's toughest story: the claim says LG TVs scan and log home-network devices even in standby, listen to the room, and buffer data offline to upload later. LG denied the claims, saying network discovery is part of smart features and voice audio is processed only for voice commands as written in the agreement. The hosts find the discovery claims overblown, cite remote battery life and the lack of a local voice engine, yet stress that a single one-hour file needs independent verification.

On PS5 emulation, KytyPS5 reportedly runs GTA V at up to 60 FPS with crashes continuing. On ShadPS5 only momentary frames of Demon Souls appear, at around 1 FPS even on flagship hardware. The show explains that emulators are layered, trial-and-error projects close to machine-level coding, so high performance is hard. AI agents are speeding up decompilation work, with Pokemon and Super Smash Bros examples; still, each game needs per-game tuning, and the PC port may arrive before GTA 6 becomes playable.

The host in San Francisco calls the A20 Pro a turning point in the AI race. The chip carries a 7-core GPU with neural accelerators on each unit, a doubled 32-core neural engine, 50 percent more memory bandwidth and nearly double FP8 throughput. The M5 leap and the MLX software stack are cited as supporting evidence. The performance gate for on-device language models, after memory, may move to the A20 Pro and above.

Siri is a split picture: in English a locally running assistant experience is described, drafting mail from inbox and notes with tone control and exclusions. It is framed as the fruit of seeds planted two years ago with Apple Intelligence. But there is no date for Turkish, while Japanese and Spanish were announced. The hardware is seen as ready while the software, especially Siri, is still awaited.

The Pro camera gains an adjustable aperture with four mechanical steps for professional flexibility. The gap between the Pro 18 and the foldable Duo is harsh: the Duo and Air stay near the base lineup without telephoto, and users hooked on 4x zoom will struggle to go back. The Duo brings a landscape-first interface language: a side navigation bar, automatic app adaptation, a dedicated Netflix flex-mode interface and a much-discussed closing animation.

The watch's ambient intelligence transcribes speech into text instead of recording audio, keeps it on-device and promises end-of-day summaries from meetings and classes. Turkish support may take over a year with regulations. The privacy reply is pragmatic: anyone with listening intent already has the phone. On AirPods, noise cancellation and personal EQ improve, translation tested near 90 percent from Japanese to English in a theater works offline after downloading languages; locking a small swipe gesture behind the upper tier for an extra fee is criticized.