PC Gamer News, Tips, Tricks, Ideas

HBO's The Last of Us has finally unveiled its Abby and it's Kaitlyn Dever, the actor known for her roles in Booksmart, No One Will Save You, and that other Naughty Dog game you may have heard of, Uncharted 4.

Small form factor PCs have been a thing seemingly forever now, and I've always been something of a fan. After all, a regular ATX case can be quite an awkward space hog on your desk, so fitting your components into a small and efficient chassis instead seems like a sensible thing to do. Cooler Master seems to have forgotten the whole «small and efficient» part of that principle, however, as it's just unveiled a mini ITX case at CES 2024 that, well, isn't. 

If you're rocking a handheld gaming PC that isn't the Steam Deck, then I've got some good news for you to start the new year: AMD has released a new preview driver enabling its software-based frame generation tech on any system running an RDNA 3-based integrated graphics chip. 

I just had a conversation with an in-game NPC that could easily appear scripted. Except it wasn't, at all. I asked a question, the NPC answered, and all thanks to Nvidia's ACE technology and Convai.

It's been seven months since Apple announced its Vision Pro augmented reality headset. The initial reception was rather mixed and no doubt not helped in the least bit by the typically enormous Apple price tag. But on February 2nd 2024, you'll finally be able to buy one and try it out for yourself, provided you have $3,499 spare.

Alongside the RTX 40-series Super cards and RTX Remix launch at this year's CES 2024 event, Nvidia has also announced another AI feature heading to its GeForce RTX drivers later this month. Joining RTX Video Super Resolution, which upscales low resolution video streams in a browser, is RTX Video HDR: A deep learning algorithm that will automatically convert an SDR video stream into a HDR one.

Outside of a brief internet cafe dalliance back in the early 2000s, I haven't played much RuneScape, either in its modern or old-school forms. But maybe I should, because Old School RuneScape continues to generate tales of triumph, tragedy, fantasy cop-befuddlement, and jaw-dropping luck.

Dear readers, we, or more precisely, I, have made a mistake. When I wrote my article about Lenovo's solar and mechanical energy harvesting keeb and mouse combo, I assumed that these devices must somehow gather its mechanical energy charge by the power of typing or the movement of daily use, as this would make some degree of sense.  No-one, least of all me, could have predicted that these prototype peripherals harvest energy by using what are essentially integrated fidget spinners.

Last week, Baldur's Gate 3 players on Xbox Series X-S were caught off-guard when their uploaded clips of romance scenes—which include full nudity—were causing them to get banned, something Larian's said it's currently working with Microsoft on.

Last month the streamer and YouTuber JoCat—known for his Monster Hunter, D&D, and Final Fantasy 14 videos like 'A Crap Guide to X'—announced an indefinite hiatus.

Penicillin. The Moon landing. Wireless telecommunications. These are just a few of the mad grasps for god's power that humanity has attempted in the last couple of centuries, and now their pantheon is joined by another ludicrous, transcendent venture. A heroic modder has slotted a ladder the height of the actual, genuine, real-life Empire State Building into FromSoft classic Demon's Souls. Then they climbed it. Then they died.

Can I make a confession? It took me about a month to get through the third act of Baldur's Gate 3. Not because it was particularly challenging or—relative to the acts that preceded it—especially long, but because the second I arrived in Rivington I felt compelled to put the game down and go do something else for a while.

This year's CES event has been utterly dominated by the constant talk and promotion of AI, and Intel's Client Computing keynote meeting was no different. However, executive vice president Michelle Holthaus did say that Intel's next CPU architecture for desktop PCs, codenamed Arrow Lake, is on target to hit the market in the second half of 2024. Oh, and it's the 'world's first gaming processor with an AI accelerator'.

Along with the promise that its next generation Arrow Lake desktop CPUs will be coming to market in the second half of 2024, Intel also announced that another new architecture will arrive this year, too. Lunar Lake will be an evolution of Meteor Lake and, although it's squarely aimed to be as low-power as possible, Intel is also claiming significant improvements to the CPU core's IPC (instruction per cycle) and up to three times more AI performance in the GPU and NPU.

AI is most definitely the buzzword of CES 2024, and it seems that no piece of hardware is immune from the coming integration of a whole host of AI features, some with rather dubious usefulness. However, MSI has been showing off its upcoming MEG 321URX QD-OLED display at its demo suite at the Las Vega show, and its new AI-powered SkySight feature appears to be capable of detecting incoming enemies in League of Legends and giving away their position with an onscreen icon. Call me old-fashioned, but that seems…more than slightly unfair.

Intel's performance-enhancing Application Optimizer software is set to be supported on some 12th and 13th Gen processors, in a complete reverse of the company's previous position on the matter.

Nvidia came ready for CES 2024. Alongside the expected focus on its hot-ticket items including AI, robotics and tools for professionals, it announced The RTX 40 Super graphics card series. But there's more. Its G-Sync variable refresh rate technology and GeForce Now streaming service are also getting some updates.

One way to prevent motion blur from occurring on a gaming monitor is to speed up how fast a pixel is able to transition to another value. Us PC gamers know that—we're always chasing lower response times and higher refresh rates. However, Nvidia tells me there's another important factor in causing motion blur in monitors: our eyes. They hold onto information as it flashes in front of our eyes, causing blur, and the only way to get rid of that is to strobe a monitor's backlight.

Need some Wordle help? Keep your win streak safe with our daily dose of hints and tips. There's a fresh clue for today's game waiting below if you need a bit of guidance, some general tips if you'd like to improve your guesses, and of course, the answer to the January 9 (934) puzzle if you need it.

Just a couple weeks after being sued by the New York Times over allegations that it copied and used «millions» of copyrighted news articles to train its large-language models, OpenAI has told the UK's House of Lords communications and digital select committee (via The Guardian) that it has to use copyrighted materials to build its systems because otherwise, they just won't work.

I knew I was in for a stomach-churning time with Divine Frequency's demo after I finally acquired my first weapon. I came up to a fenced hallway in the game's vast industrial underbelly and spied an ominous figure looming way down the hall. The light above it cut out, I turned around, and there it was: a horrible faceless mannequin an eyelash's length away.

Razer has announced its new lineup of Blade gaming laptops for the coming year, sporting sparkling new screens, new Intel and AMD processors… and one notable absentee. This looks like it might be the end of the line for the Blade 15, the erstwhile best gaming laptop and an object of tech desire for an absolute age.

We knew it was coming, but it's still exciting to see Alienware announce its new 32-inch 4K OLED gaming panel, the Alienware 32 AW3225QF. Alienware has also pulled the wraps off a new 27-inch 1440p OLED monitor running at fully 360Hz.

Amongst all the laptop refreshes, monitor reveals and general CES 2024 tomfoolery, occasionally a product stands out as something a little bit different. Lenovo might be known more for its laptops and pre-built desktop machines than its peripherals, but today it announced a new proof of concept keyboard and mouse that may well be an indicator of how our wireless accessories might work in the very near future. 

While the list of games like Stardew Valley just keeps growing, the list of games made by Stardew's creator is still percolating. Eric «ConcernedApe» Barone's own next game Haunted Chocolatier is still deep in development, but it turns out that a former Stardew contributor is also working on a new life sim that may even arrive this year. The as-yet-untitled game definitely looks like a Stardew descendant, but this one's set in a city and has a lot of its own neat ideas on expanding the typical life sim script.

While X continues to spiral in relevancy, its owner Elon Musk spent the holidays grinding Diablo 4's hardest dungeon and even teamed up with its most popular streamers for some help.

The big CPU and GPU announcements at CES like Nvidia's new RTX Super GPUs and AMD's new 7600 XT don't tend to come as a huge surprise, what with the endless rumours and leaks. However, screen tech at the show does tend to throw up some genuine news and CES 2024 is no exception.

Thanks to the popularity of the Steam Deck, it's no surprise that we've seen a multitude of manufacturers jump on the handheld gaming PC bandwagon. They have all released competing devices, each with their own take on the form factor and each hoping to carve out its own segment of this new emerging market. Now it's MSI's turn to show off its new handheld gaming device, and well, it's called the Claw.

Intel just announced the rest of the Raptor Lake Refresh lineup. In addition to the K-series processors launched last year, the 14th Gen now includes the Core i5 14500, 14400, and Core i3 14100, alongside new low power variants of most chips.

After laying off 600 people and closing multiple offices earlier in the year, engine maker Unity warned in November 2023 that further layoffs were likely. In an SEC filing made today, the company confirmed that it is cutting roughly 25% of its current workforce in order to «position itself for long-term and profitable growth.»

Alienware has always had a reputation as a brand that leans towards some of the more aesthetically interesting choices in gaming hardware design, but its new Alienware x16 R2 gaming laptop announced at CES 2024 might just take the cake. While the chassis design may look familiar, nestled underneath that per-key backlit keyboard on the higher spec models is an RGB multi-touch trackpad, and it's twisting my melon, man.

After a long period of development, the Wi-Fi Alliance has officially begun certifying Wi-Fi 7 devices. This paves the way for mass adoption of the new standard, providing more seamless interoperability. Until the next standard comes along, we can expect Wi-Fi networking to dramatically improve, with faster, more reliable connections and reduced latency. The latter is something gamers will appreciate.

Remember when Valve made an ingenious pair of puzzle games about portals and then failed to count to three? Nothing new there, but it's a shame Portal remains one of Valve's forgotten children while the company aims to keep exploring Half-Life. These days, the hallowed halls of Aperture Labs only make an appearance when Valve needs a quick and quirky tutorial for its latest VR hardware or PC handheld. But the Portal community never stopped testing. They've been at it for years uploading new test chambers, original stories, and entire fan campaigns to the Steam Workshop.

Some of the greatest stories about games are simply about how developers made the thing work. Ask any developer for their favourite workarounds and you'll get a full evening's worth of entertainment about how a giant tram is actually an NPC with a hat on, or how rabbits are actually what makes Azeroth work, and so on.

Acer has announced a slew of new gaming monitors for CES, including a 57-inch dual-4K monster. Other models include 34-inch and 39-inch OLEDs, plus a 34-inch mini-LED panel.

Baldur's Gate 3 is the big, world-changing isometric party-based RPG that everyone's still talking about, but I've always felt that Pillars of Eternity is the game that really first started turning that engine over. The OG Infinity Engine vibes were strong, but it stood well on its own merits too: We called it «a deep, rich, and wonderfully written RPG that lives up to the towering legacy of the games that inspired it» in our 92% review. 

A couple months after bringing diminutive psycho-stabber Chucky to the multiplayer survival horror game Dead by Daylight, Behaviour Interactive is teasing something new—and a lot of fans are convinced that an Alan Wake crossover is on the way.

Nvidia really cannot keep a secret, can it? Yes, in a surprise to absolutely no-one, CES brings us the new GeForce RTX 40-series Super cards. The Ada Lovelace architecture refresh has been rumoured for a long while now, and here it is, either offering a little more performance for either the same sticker price, or in one particular case a fairly significant decrease.

CES 2024 is finally here and the hardware announcements are beginning to roll in thick and fast. However, even if you're not in the market for some new tech, those of you of a streaming persuasion and an Nvidia GPU may have some reason to celebrate today, as the company announced a raft of streaming features and Twitch integrations to be rolled out in the new Twitch Enhanced Broadcasting beta as part of today's Nvidia special address.

We originally reported on Nvidia's RTX Remix modding platform back in September 2022 and, at last, Nvidia says the full creator toolkit is being released on January 22 in open beta form. This raises the prospect of a whole slew of legacy games being updated with ray-traced visuals, AI enhanced textures, and more.

Handheld gaming PCs have quite specific needs, when it comes to storage. It needs to be very compact, with low power consumption, but offer fast transfers at the same time. SSD controller wizards Phison has launched three new chips at this year's CES event and one of them is the perfect match for SSDs designed for the Steam Deck and other portable PCs.

As power requirements grow ever higher for powerful gaming components, so too does the wattage of the PSUs built to feed them. However, more power often means more heat, more fans, and potentially more distracting fan noise. Cooler Master seems keen to buck that trend with the announcement of its X Silent family of PSUs, two of which use no fans at all.

Over at CES 2024 I was handed a couple hours to do with as I pleased with an MSI Prestige 16 laptop. On the surface, that might not sound too exciting for a PC gamer, as the Prestige line isn't explicitly built for gaming, but this laptop had inside it Intel's latest Core Ultra 165H processor. That's a 55W version of Meteor Lake with six P-cores, eight E-cores, two Low Power E-cores, and eight Xe-cores—a whole lot for a small mobile chip.

Ray tracing is coming to Diablo 4 this March. Announced during Nvidia's CES 2024 Special Address, the update will offer ray-traced reflections and shadows to better show off the carnage you leave in your wake.

Game developer veterans from RPG companies like Obsidian and Bioware say that the temporary death of the CRPG in the early 2000s was down to retailer meddling, as outlined in a series of tweets made just before the holidays.

Valve's omnipresent games platform Steam has started off 2024 with a bang, registering both its highest-ever number of concurrent users and also its highest-ever number of users actively playing a game. Over the last weekend 33,675,229 concurrent users were logged-in to Steam, which beats the previous record of 33,598,520 set in March 2023.

AMD is going first out of the big PC gaming tech companies in rolling out its plans for 2024, with its CES livestream kicking off today at 7am PT/10am ET, and 3pm UK time. The general information on the event is pretty vague, and as the «Advancing AI PCs» title suggests, it's leaning heavily into the buzz initialism of the show: AI.

You know what wireless headsets need? That's right, near infinite battery life, and we're one step closer to that goal with 3M's solar powered comms headset which has just been announced at CES this week.

Final Fantasy 14's third and final Fan Festival of the Endwalker expansion just took place in Tokyo over the weekend. While there was a surprise lack of release date for upcoming expansion Dawntrail, we did get to see tons of neat stuff: female hrothgar, artsy class Pictomancer, and a bizarro cyberpunk world that has me wondering just what the hell the Warrior of Light is getting up to on his summer vacation.

Activision-Blizzard has been the centre of a lot of controversy over these past few years. After a lawsuit went public, detailing «numerous complaints about unlawful harassment, discrimination, and retaliation» and a «frat boy» culture, plus claims from former CEO Bobby Kotick that the whole thing was just an «aggressive labour movement,»  the company finally settled last year.

Nvidia is going after AMD with its own CES 2024 event, but at least it's not wrapping the entire thing up in a cloak of AI-ness. Instead, it's calling this a «Special Address» in which we are being told it will «focus on consumer technologies and robotics.»

It's been nearly three years since AMD launched its last desktop APU series, but now the all-in-one CPU+budget GPU chips are back with a bang in the form of the 8000G series. The new range covers four models, all of them using the Zen 4 CPU and RDNA 3 GPU architectures. The best GPU is unfortunately only in the most expensive one, but for many gamers looking to build a compact PC this year, it may well be the perfect APU.

AMD has kicked off 2024 for its Radeon line-up of graphics cards with the RX 7600 XT, sporting 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM and minor boosts to the GPU's clock speed. It's still using the same Navi 33 graphics chip as in the original Radeon RX 7600, so there are no additional shaders or memory controllers, though.

Hewlett Packard is kicking off 2024 with all new Spectre x360 14- and 16-inch, and Omen Transcend 14-inch laptops. And since they're all powered by Intel's latest Meteor Lake processors, AI is a major feature in every model. But that won't mean Windows Copilot is in charge of it all, as HP feels cloud-based AI isn't the best solution for privacy or power efficiency.

Swen Vincke, the CEO and founder of Larian Studio (developer of Baldur's Gate 3) has taken to Twitter to share some progress on his next game—namely, he thinks he's got a solid draft going.

Kickstart your Wordle week with an easy win—just click your way straight through to the January 8 (933) answer if you like. Would you rather take your time, but would still like a little help? No problem. There's a helpful clue for today's Wordle waiting just below, and plenty of general tips for the daily game too.

A listing for Samsung's upcoming 990 Evo SSD has appeared online. Though the release of a 990 Evo series SSD is not at all unexpected, its PCIe lane configuration is surprising, and it's an interesting configuration at that.

After sharp-eyed Magic: The Gathering fans cried foul over a recent promotional image's seeming use of generative AI, Wizards of the Coast initially asserted that it was fully human-made. However, just two days on Wizards has deleted the offending marketing post and acknowledged that generative tools were used in the image.

To my mind, the aesthetic of Games Workshop's original tabletop wargame Warhammer Fantasy Battle can be summed best by a Monty Python quote. It's the bit in Holy Grail where a commoner says he can tell Arthur must be a king because «he hasn't got shit all over him.»

The starting village is a classic fantasy RPG cliché. From Hommlet in The Temple of Elemental Evil to Riverwood in Skyrim, it's no surprise when we start our adventuring career dealing with small problems in a small town. Icewind Dale, the D&D game Black Isle developed in 2000, was no exception, beginning in the frozen village of Easthaven. Now we can go back there thanks to a Skyrim mod of the same name.

Final Fantasy 14 producer Naoki «Yoshi-P» Yoshida has said that the reason there's no firmer release date for expansion Dawntrail than summer 2024 is because he would rather not give one than give one that has to be delayed. Fans were expecting a release date at the Japanese Final Fantasy 14 Fan Fest 2024 this weekend, as has become tradition.

Square Enix has debuted a full trailer for Final Fantasy 14's upcoming expansion Dawntrail at Final Fantasy Fan Festival 2024. The trailer shows off a look at the new world continent and its inhabitants interacting with a diverse lineup of FF14 classics.

We seriously dug 2022's headbanging shooter Metal: Hellsinger, and that rhythm based FPS just got some love from its boomer shooter brethren by way of a free DLC featuring nine tracks from Andrew Hulshult's excellent Dusk soundtrack.

Final Fantasy 14's annual fan event was in full swing yesterday, and the announcements of new features—and trailers—from the Dawntrail expansion were coming pretty fast. The new Pictomancer was on display, the mystical painter joining FF14 as a magical ranged damage job.

Looking for today's Wordle answer? Keep your win streak safe and sound with our help. Give every guess a boost with our handy tips, find focus with a fresh hint for the January 7 (932) puzzle, or go grab yourself a win with the solution to today's game. However you want to play, we've got it covered.

An upcoming farming sim will take place in a magical world of spirits and monsters where you restore a deteriorating countryside inn and explore the town and region populated by people, monsters, and more.  The game plans to launch with cooperative play, and it'll also have a neat-looking twist: By wearing ancient masks, you can use the power of creatures and monsters—one example is using the rooting power of a boar to till fields.

If you're used to looking at system requirements with a feeling of «am I going to have to replace my GPU already» dread, you'll be happy to know that Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown won't demand a high-end rig. That cartoony art style was never going to be a real resource hog, but it's still nice to see system requirements where ultra isn't out of reach. You'll probably be able to run this one on a laptop.

Character-based historical 4X Old World will release a fourth DLC on January 11th, Wonders and Dynasties, bringing a whole, whole lot of new historical characters to the dynastic politics of your ancient empires. Something like 120 new characters, in fact, ranging from Hannibal and Caesar to Khufu and Stateira. That alongside 21 new character traits for those historicals and 100-some new events related to the politics of your imperial dynasty.

I've never had the space in my life or my house for a VR setup, but the promise of having an all-time favorite like Resident Evil 4 or Jedi Academy transformed by the tech always gives me pause. The DXU24 mod project for the original Deus Ex seems set to offer that and more.

Humble's come out of the gate swinging with its first Choice Bundle⁠—available through the charity-focused initiative's $12 subscription service⁠—of the year. Marvel's Midnight Suns, alongside a collection of seven other games, are available to keep for subscribers at no additional cost.

As the CES techfest thunders towards us with unstoppable momentum, Dell has pulled the wraps off its latest XPS laptops and the new 16-inch model looks almost irresistible. It's not an out-and-out gaming laptop. But it is available with an Nvidia RTX 4070 GPU and it's also drop dead gorgeous.

There's a hint for today's Wordle waiting below if you need it, designed to give you a helpful nudge in the right direction without completely giving the game away. And if you would like someone to completely give the game away, you're in luck. Just click or scroll your way down to the January 6 (931) Wordle answer.

InfoWars host Alex Jones now has a game on Steam⁠—the same Alex Jones who fundraised for and attended the January 6 protests that led to the storming of the US Capitol building and who owes $1.5 billion to the families of murdered children over defamation.

When new guns appear in Call of Duty, it's an occurrence so regular that you'd be forgiven for not even noticing. When Valorant gets a new gun, it's the biggest thing to happen in Riot's competitive FPS since launch. After almost four years, a new sniper rifle is on the block: the Outlaw, a double-barreled sniper that can two-shot enemies to the chest. It costs 2,400 credits, placing it between the economical Marshal (950)  and the one-shot-kill Operator (4,700).

In December, Wizards of the Coast committed to not using AI art in Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, saying it requires its artists, writers, and other creative contributors «to refrain from using AI generative tools» to create its products. Despite that, MtG fans are accusing the company of using AI to create the backdrop for a promotional image of new cards—something WotC flatly denies.

The Association for Computing Machinery has reported that Niklaus Wirth, the Swiss computer scientist known as the creator of the programming language Pascal, has died at age 89.

The Guardian Australia published an investigation several months ago into a crypto scheme-slash-scam called HyperVerse, a fund that used major celebrity endorsements to attract millions of dollars from small investors before collapsing. Blockchain Global went bust owing $58 million USD in 2021, but now there's a rather classic fraudster sting in the tail: The CEO who promoted this scheme doesn't seem to be a real person.

UK-based Bossa Studios, the developer of games including Surgeon Simulator, I Am Bread, and I Am Fish, has confirmed the layoff of 19 people at the end of 2023. According to a GamesIndustry report, the cuts represent roughly one-third of Bossa's total number of employees.