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To call the state of the games industry "turbulent" is a drastic understatement in July 2026, with layoffs, studio closures, and game cancelations showing no signs of slowing down, but even in that dire context, Destiny 2 and Marathon developer Bungie is having a rough go of it lately.

After seemingly putting all of its eggs into Marathon's basket, Bungie's new sci-fi FPS – although critically well-received – hasn't reached the commercial success needed to supplant the enduring popularity of Destiny 2, which ended active development last month . Meanwhile, massive layoffs at Bungie have impacted "most" of the Destiny team as well as a portion of the Marathon crew, with the studio admitting the MMO "fell short of expectations these past several years."

That said, Destiny 2 is still playable and presumably will be for the foreseeable future – and in fact experienced a post-mortem surge in players last month – which of course means players continue to report issues with performance and bugs. Although the feedback isn't falling on deaf ears, the skeleton crew at Bungie working on Destiny is scrambling to push out updates at a comparable cadence to before the mass layoffs.

Shortly after news of Bungie's downsizing broke last week, the developer took to Twitter to announce the delay of Destiny 2's new patch, originally scheduled to go live this week. "We will provide more information when we can," the studio said. The Destiny community reacted with skepticism on Reddit, with the top comment reading: "I have a rather unfortunate suspicion that this will be one of those 'delays' that last forever."

However, in a response from the official Destiny 2 Team Reddit account, Bungie assures the patch will eventually be released and asks for grace as some members of the dev team who were working on it have since been laid off.

(Image credit: Bungie) "Not a forever delay. We will get this out when possible. Handful of fixes in this delayed patch were from impacted team members.

"When this ships, please show love to the team, past and present," the studio implores fans.

In a separate Reddit thread reporting issues with PC performance, the Destiny account responds by requesting "videos or examples" of specific problems, adding, "While we can't promise a fix, we'll see what we can do."

Cyberpunk 2 lead says "some days I feel our industry is imploding" as Destiny 2 studio Bungie is hit with mass layoffs: "Teams and game projects are getting slaughtered"

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Nvidia's RTX 5090 is a uniquely capable GPU - the company's highest-end consumer-grade GPU to date features a whopping 21,760 CUDA cores and 32GB of GDDR7 memory in its cut-down GB202 configuration.

It also happens to be one of the most expensive GPUs retail consumers can buy in 2026, going for as much as two times its stated MSRP of $2,000 for the Founders Edition at launch, leaving many cost-sensitive AI builders turning to older Nvidia GPUs equipped with 24GB of VRAM such as the RTX 4090, 3090Ti and 3090.

As AI models continue to advance in complexity (and memory requirements), a DRAM crisis is making it impossible for many to secure a capable GPU for their local AI needs, even as one option seems largely ignored: Intel's Arc Pro B70.

A mid-range GPU with oodles of VRAM

Most consumers do not consider Intel a GPU maker, associating it instead with consumer- and enterprise-grade CPUs. This is despite the chipmaker offering some of the best value-for-money option s in the mid-range segment it currently competes in.

Intel's Arc Pro offerings, however, are unapologetically different; They focus exclusively on professional-grade, or rather, AI-centric workloads while skipping any pretense of catering to gaming consumers, even as they remain capable of running most titles one can throw at them.

The Intel Arc Pro B70 is its highest-end offering and commands a reference price of $950, with most retailers and OEM partners selling SKUs at around $1,000. With 32GB of GDDR6 memory in tow and a price that is effectively a quarter of most RTX 5090 SKUs on sale at the time of writing, it holds its own as a value-centric alternative to Nvidia's Blackwell-based behemoth.

It leverages Intel's BMG-G31 "Big Battlemage" chip that was originally slated to show on its since-canceled Arc B770 GPU , as it aims to address a vacuum in the local AI space that both AMD and Nvidia are not willing to address given their focus on maximizing profits at the highest end of the spectrum with enterprise consumers.

(Image credit: Intel) For those interested in looking at setting up 4 of the Arc Pro B70, Puget Systems has gone ahead and done the necessary testing , even drawing a direct comparison with the RTX 5090, which it finds 4-5x faster in decode tasks thanks to a significantly larger amount of memory bandwidth in play (1792 GB/s vs 608 GB/s)

The observations also pointed out a slightly obvious caveat in the comparisons, however: models that require more compute and bandwidth versus memory will lean toward the RTX 5090, which offers a significant advantage even versus multiple Arc Pro B70 GPUs, but those that require a large amount of memory for their parameters would find a B70 configuration a much more cost-efficient play with access to more memory than a corresponding RTX 5090-based offering.

Nvidia's value proposition, however, runs deeper than the silicon itself, and it is where Intel struggles to find a willing buyer, thanks to better software support on various OSes, CUDA-based software stacks that the Arc Pro cannot emulate, and Nvidia-coded libraries that will not function on Intel's hardware.

Intel's own offerings (oneAPI, OpenVINO, and IPEX) are improving but are widely considered to be behind even AMD's ROCm stack, which in turn lags behind Nvidia's ecosystem. Despite this, the Arc Pro B70, as noted above, benefits from the lack of a real high-VRAM alternative and remains available close to its stated MSRP, making it a formidable and scalable alternative to Nvidia's heavyweight GPU.

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Audi says the one-size-fits-all global car is no longer the way forward.

Its SAIC China brand now builds models tailored only for local buyers.

This approach also lets the company bring new models to market faster.

Audi has decided the global car is a dead idea. Building a single vehicle engineered to satisfy every market at once no longer adds up, and the company now argues the sharper play is designing separate models for its biggest markets, each shaped around what those buyers actually want.

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Rouven Mohr, Audi’s chief technical officer, says no one model can win over shoppers in North America, Europe , and China all at once, which explains why the brand stood up the new AUDI marque in China with SAIC to build cars made specifically for that market. Tastes have simply drifted too far apart for a one-size answer to hold.

Read: Audi’s China Brand Is Cutting Prices And Losing Sales, So It’s Building A Sporty Limo

“I think the idea of the global car – so one car that fits the world – this is gone, to be honest, because it’s not fitting anymore in the US (and) in China,” Mohr told Go Auto . “You need this kind of local-for-local pillar.”

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In China , the AUDI brand helps meet the needs of many local consumers who want tech-focused cars akin to smartphones on wheels, while offering the most advanced self-driving systems. By comparison, buyers in Europe appreciate less emphasis on screens and like tactile controls, buttons, and switches. Despite this, Audi continues to roll out its curved digital dashboards across an increasing number of its European models .

Slashing Development Times

AUDI E5 Sportback

No longer focusing on global cars is also allowing Audi to speed up the development of its cars . The automaker says it’s now developing vehicles at “China speed” by establishing “project houses” where development teams have direct access to the board, making approvals much quicker.

This approach has already helped Audi launch the limited-run Nuvolari supercar, created as a spiritual successor to the Audi R8 and launching with the same basic twin-turbo V8 hybrid powertrain as the Lamborghini Temerario. Soon, the company’s fast new development cycles will allow it to launch a production version of the Concept C sports car, which will replace the Audi TT.

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Audi Nuvolari

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U.S. Air Force B-52 Stratofortress bombers departed from RAF Fairford in the U.K . today, marking the end of a deployment to support the war against Iran . The flights come as the U.S. and Iran are still working toward a peace deal amid a shaky ceasefire occasionally marred by flare-ups of tit-for-tat attacks . However, there has been no mass bombardment of Iran since the April 8 ceasefire .

The departure was captured in video and still images by local aviation photographers, two of whom shared their work with us. Andy Riddle told us that six B-52s left RAF Fairford today in two waves of three. The first left at 10:15 a.m. local time and the second at about 2:20 p.m., noted Riddle, whose work can be found on his @Andyyyyrrrr X account .

(Andy Riddle)

(Andy Riddle)

As we noted at the time , at least three of the bombers arrived at Fairford on March 8. It’s unclear when the others arrived. Both U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC) declined comment.

In our previous reporting , we pointed out that during their time at Fairford, the B-52s operated at a high tempo, striking targets inside Iran. All told, the U.S. claims it struck 13,000 targets, though there is no way for us to know how many involved B-52s from Fairford.

You can see one of those jets leaded with stealthy JASSM cruise missiles in a photo shared with us by another local aviation photographer, who uses the @Saint1Mil X account .

B-52H Stratofortress at RAF Fairford during Epic Fury. (@Saint1Mil photo)

Meanwhile, a dozen B-1 Lancer bombers remain at the base, according to @Saint1Mil.

Since the military won’t comment, we can’t say for sure why the BUFFs left Fairford, but the move comes after both the U.S. and Iran promised to hold off on further tit-for-tat strikes after the latest round that threatened the fragile ceasefire.

The flights also took place on a day when the U.S. and Iran concluded a round of indirect talks . However, there were no signs that the parties made headway toward a lasting peace. Instead, they focused “on issues that they had supposedly resolved two weeks ago,” Reuters reported .

“Sources said negotiators for the two countries spent two days in Doha discussing maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz and financial incentives for Iran, two pillars of the initial agreement ​they signed in June, rather than more difficult topics that framework was supposed to tee up.”

The most difficult of these are the future of Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its stockpile of enriched uranium.

US President Donald Trump says indirect talks with Iran in Qatar are making progress, offering a tentative sign that diplomacy is holding after recent exchanges of fire threatened efforts to end the Middle East war

https://t.co/z9d9KfHtE9 pic.twitter.com/JQmtYqOYQ5

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) July 1, 2026

Despite the ongoing talks, President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to resume bombing Iran . He also has “weighed a return to all-out war with Iran, holding multiple conversations in recent days with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine on more strikes, but has decided to stick with diplomatic talks for now,” The Wall Street Journal reported , citing U.S. officials familiar with the discussion.

NEW: President Trump has weighed a return to all-out war with Iran, holding multiple conversations in recent days with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine on more strikes, but has decided to stick with diplomatic talks for now,…

— Lara Seligman (@laraseligman) June 30, 2026

The departure of the B-52s won’t preclude Trump from ordering a new round of strategic aviation attacks. Aside from the remaining B-1s, the Air Force can launch B-52s, as well as B-2 and B-1 bombers from the U.S. to strike Iran as it did during Epic Fury. However, having the B-52s stationed at a base like Fairford much closer to the action helps to cut down on flight times, wear and tear on the aircraft and crews, and increases the generation of sorties.

As we have frequently reported , given that the U.S. began building up forces in the region in January , many of the ships, aircraft and troops will have to ‘retrograde’ out of the CENTCOM area of responsibility in the coming weeks and months. We’ve already seen aircraft like A-10 Thunderbolt II close attack jets , F-22s, F-15Es and other assets return from the region. As a result, the future of the American footprint there remains a question mark even as negotiations continue. Reinstating a large force once it has been even partially drawn down, assuming there is the will to do so, would take time and would put extreme stress on a force structure that has seen constant surges of deployments over the last year.

Contact the author: howard@twz.com

The post B-52 Stratofortress Bombers Leave England After Iran War Deployment appeared first on TWZ .