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Poor Intel. Last year was pretty rough for the 55-year-old semiconductor firm, as it accrued just $54.2 billion in revenue, 14% less than the year before. After paying all its bills for manufacturing, research and development, and biscuits, there was just $1.7 billion left over in net income. Poor Intel. 

So when the US administration announced the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022, with a total of $280 billion up for grabs, Intel jumped right in to get some of that golden booty. Only now it’s asking for a further $10 billion, at the very least, to ensure Intel’s US developments can continue.

This news of Intel’s re-enactment of Oliver Twist (via Wccftech) isn’t in the least bit surprising and not because of the company’s recent financial results. Cutting-edge semiconductor…

MachineGames gave us our first real look at its long-awaited Indiana Jones game at today’s Developer Direct showcase, confirming the title—Indiana Jones and the Great Circle—and revealing details on the setting and story, and—this is the important part—a release target of later in 2024.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was first announced in early 2021, albeit as just ‘a new Indiana Jones game’ until the title leaked last week. It’s been silence since then except for confirmation that the game will tell an original story, and that Todd Howard has been eager to make one for a really long time. 

Now we’ve got a proper idea of what’s coming, and it looks like both a proper Indiana Jones game and a full-on MachineGames creation: The gameplay traile…

Something has smelled a little off about this year’s Call of Duty since the earliest rumors of its development. For the first time in series history, CoD is going back to the sequel well after just one year with a new Modern Warfare 3. In another break in tradition, all multiplayer guns, cosmetics, and progression from Modern Warfare 2 (2022) will carry over into MW3.

You could look at the unconventional, Call of Duty smorgasbord-like makeup of Modern Warfare 3 and determine this is simply Activision tinkering with the CoD formula. Viewed under the lens of a 2022 Bloomberg report claiming a new Call of Duty game wouldn’t be done in time for 2023, the new Modern Warfare 3 takes on a new light. At the time, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier said the plan was to release more MW2 content to …

Last month, the MultiVersus rumour mill span itself into a frenzy over some stickers plastered in Belgian McDonalds, which appeared early—like some kind of hallucination you experience when you’re severely dehydrated, only the water in this case is a platform fighter most people had a good time with that randomly shut down for months.

As I mentioned back then, the fan community has been… coping. Back in December, I pointed out that there was a Josh Hutcherson fancam to ‘blow my whistle’ headlining the game’s subreddit with over 500 upvotes. Normal! 

Well, turns out that the promotion is, in fact, real (thanks, TheGamer). If you go over to the McDonalds Belgium website, there’s an honest-to-god promotion conspicuously missing a “find out more” button. Clicki…

Nvidia socialled up an image on its official GeForce X account earlier in the week that got tongues wagging. A large monolith-style graphics card obscuring the sun and tagged ‘Eclipse2024’? That’s clearly a portentous teaser for the RTX 5090 coming later this year, right?

No wait, it’s an RTX 4090 Ti, isn’t it? Or should that be an RTX 4090 Super? I mean, it’s definitely something that’s just about to launch and is so incredibly exciting it will literally eclipse the sun. And yet, almost certainly, it’s none of the above.

For starters, it’s a still image from a teaser video posted back in January and in the lead up to the roll out of the then new RTX 40 Super series cards, including the RTX 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super and RTX 4080 Super.

So, it’s almost certainly not…

Free-to-play survival game Once Human launched on Steam today, and after playing the NetEase production for an hour, my main observation is that the feeling of uncertainty and discovery that the survival genre used to be all about has lately been replaced with tutorial screens and boring exposition—the price of popularity, I guess! It’s possible that Once Human opens up after you get past the copper ingot crafting lessons, and I’ve seen some cool monster designs so far, so that’s a positive. Some of them were even of my own making.

Character creators are such a wild card: Story-driven RPGs that are all about the characters sometimes give you a few dull presets and unattractive hairstyles, but then a game like Once Human comes along and lets you customize “mid lower-lip thick…

Hot on the heels of reports that Nvidia could be working on a 16GB variant of the imminent RTX 4060 Ti comes news that the RTX 4070 could be getting a reworking, too.

This time, however, it’s not the VRAM allocation but the RTX 4070’s GPU die itself that’s rumoured to be the target of the changes. Long-time GPU soothsayer kopite7kimi (via Videocardz) says that Nvidia could release a new RTX 4070 variant based on the AD103 die.

That GPU, of course, is the chip you’ll find in the much more powerful RTX 4080 board. The RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Ti currently use the smaller, cheaper AD104 GPU.

Currently, the RTX 4070 runs 5,888 CUDA cores. However, the AD103 chip has fully 10,240 cores. That means Nvidia could disable nearly half the cores, allowing for chips with multiple man…

May 4 is Star Wars day: It’s May the fourth, you see, a groan-inducing play on the famous Star Wars invocation, “May the Force be with you.” That date doesn’t actually get here until next week—one week from today, in fact—but that’s not stopping Steam and GOG from kicking off the Star Wars sales action right now.

The May the 4th 2023 Sale on Steam has an array of Star Wars games marked down, some of them quite deeply. Star Wars: Squadrons is down to $6/£5/€6 (85% off), Battlefront 2 is $10/£9/€10 (75% off), and Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens is $5/£6/€5 (75%), or a little bit more if you want the deluxe edition, which includes the season pass. The KOTOR games, Dark Forces, X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, and The Force Unleashed are all marked…

FSR 3 Frame Generation isn’t officially recommended for use on Nvidia GeForce GTX 10-series graphics cards but it turns out not does it work, it runs exactly as intended.

When AMD first announced FSR 3 back in November 2022, during the RDNA 3 architecture launch, there was plenty of gossip as to what it would all entail. Most people assumed it would be an entirely shader-based frame generation and, of course, that’s exactly what it turned out to be.

FSR 3 Frame Generation is currently only available in two games (Immortals of Aveum and Forespoken) but it works well in both of them. There are caveats to using it, though, such as it works best when the game is already running at 60 fps or faster.

The technology will increase the latency between frames updated by…

You know, there comes a time when you wonder if the Old School RuneScape community isn’t just making fun of you. Like maybe they have a wheel of fortune somewhere they spin that spits out a collection of nouns, adjectives, and spurious reasons: “Player pickpockets half a million NPCs to get nothing much of value,” or “Player spends 149 hours obtaining a raccoon,” or even “Player catches a million terrible fish for reasons of inner peace.” Then they all agree to act like these acts of lunacy actually happened to intimidate newcomers who might ruin their favourite game.

Anyway, meet Limpwurt. Limpwurt just emerged from a 2,500-hour gardening scheme with a maxed construction skill and an abducted baby mole, having waged a near-ceaseless, Groundhog Day-style war against its parent whi…

• Monitor: Asus TUF | 27-inch | 1080p | $199.99 $139.99
• Monitor: Acer Nitro | 27-inch | 1440p | $249.99 $169.99
• Keyboard: Roccat Magma | $49.99 $29.99
• Mouse: Logitech G203 | $39.99 $19.99
• Headset: Razer BlackShark V2 X  | Wired | $59.99 $39.99
• Logitech G435 LIGHTSPEED | Wireless | $79.99 $47.49

So you’ve just grabbed yourself a great Cyber Monday deal, saving hundreds of dollars on your first ever budget gaming PC. Now you just need to finish off the whole setup …

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s hyper-intense hardcore mode is set to stage a return in the game’s upcoming season 2 update, scheduled for February 15. In a tweet posted yesterday, Infinity Ward confirmed the return of the much-missed mode in a sparse tweet, announcing “No HUD? No problem. Hardcore is back!” before encouraging players to keep an eye on the studio’s blog for more season 2 details in the future.

Hardcore mode is exactly what it sounds like: A variant of Modern Warfare’s multiplayer that cuts out all that namby-pamby nonsense like ‘a HUD’ and makes bullets act like bullets—killing your enemies and friends stone-dead with only a shot or two. It’s certainly not for everyone, but it’s irreplaceable for players who like to live an inch from death at all times. It’…

Apple has announced a new tool to translate games coded for Windows onto MacOS. It sounds a lot like Proton, Valve’s compatibility layer for the Steam Deck, or more generally Wine for Linux, and it’s already been used to run Diablo 4 and Cyberpunk 2077 on Apple’s in-house silicon.

Sure, Cyberpunk ran at 14fps, which isn’t particularly playable. But Diablo 4 worked great, and it’s all good progress.

A way to port games over to MacOS without actually porting games over to MacOS could be a big development for the macOS gaming scene, or what there is of one. Outside of mobile games and Apple Arcade, gaming has not been much of a focus for Apple. If anything, Apple’s recent shift to specialised ARM hardware of its own design in its machines has made gaming even more of a…

Diablo 4’s pre-Season 1 patch is live now, and it makes some big balance changes (sorry, Sorcerers) ahead of Thursday’s addition of the first seasonal realm and its new post-campaign questline and Malignant Hearts system.

Along with those nerfs and buffs and a big list of bug fixes, the patch adds some treats for players in any realm: Six new Uniques and seven new Legendary Aspects. We’ll updating our guides to getting every Diablo 4 Unique item and the best Legendary Aspects soon, but for now, I’ve pasted the raw list of new items and Aspects below. (Find the full patch notes here.)

The first of the Unique items, the Ahavarion Spear of Lycander, is another one of the ultra rare “Uber Uniques” players have been chasing. 

“We wish you luck in recovering it from the…

Clippy was the worst. The little Office assistant would obnoxiously appear at the side of your screen while you were writing a Word document and have the gall to ask to help you out. Get a life, mate. Thankfully, Microsoft murdered Clippy in cold blood early on in the new Millennium.

Since then we’ve had Clippy unleashed on the desktop, known as Cortana, Microsoft’s attempt at a smarter assistant, and I loathed that nearly as much. At least you could mostly disable it. And even though that brand has largely been swept under the rug now, it’s seemingly being replaced by a new assistant, and this one is powered by AI.

Microsoft has announced a new thing called Windows Copilot, an AI assistant that lives on the desktop and will answer questions about Windows features and…

Music’s at the heart of Final Fantasy 14—the game brims with bangers, sure, but it’s also an irreplaceable part of the game’s story. 

I’ve teared up to the hopeful swells of Dynamis while playing Endwalker, been pumped up by the guitar riffs of Shadowbringers during its roaring climax. Countless leitmotifs course through the game’s soundscape like blood runs through a body’s veins. Don’t just take my word for it, though. Here’s over 200 musicians—organised by youtuber Husky by the Geek—playing the game’s greatest hits for 10 solid minutes.

This medley is a journey through each expansion, kicking off with the ripping Primal themes from A Realm Reborn before swooping into Heavensward, its mighty chanting replaced with electric guitar. “Brute Justice”&mda…

Layers of Fears was announced in 2022 as “a psychological horror chronicle built upon the foundations of the original Layers of Fear.” The title was kind of a play on words: The ‘new’ game is actually an updated and expanded compilation of Layers of Fear, the Inheritance DLC, Layers of Fear 2, and a new Final Note DLC—four Layers of Fear, thus Layers of Fears. 

That was my assumption, anyway, but it doesn’t matter now because Bloober Team announced over the weekend that it has changed the name back to Layers of Fear, and that it will be out in June.

Why the name change? We described the Layers of Fears title not long after it was revealed as “ridiculous and good but not very search friendly,” and it seems that we were onto something—it was maybe just a bit t…

You may have heard of various projects to back up the Earth’s best bits should anything catastrophic happen. The Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, for example, keeps a ‘backup’ of over a million seeds to prevent any from being eradicated. Just down the road lies another all-important backup: every active GitHub repository up to 2020, buried deep down in the permafrost.

Inspired by the Global Seed Vault, the Arctic World Archive (AWA) is a collection of containers stuffed with data in a decommissioned coal mine—between 250 and 300 metres down. Each container is stuffed with reels upon reels of data—like reels of film in an old theatre in appearance.

GitHub has 188 hardened film reels down the mine in what it calls the Arctic Code Vault. This contains every active rep…

The plague of layoffs that’s gripped the videogame industry since the start of 2023 continued today as Ubisoft confirmed that 33 employees at its Toronto studio have been let go.

“Ubisoft Toronto has decided to conduct a targeted realignment to ensure it can deliver on its ambitious roadmap,” a company representative said in a statement provided to PC Gamer. “Unfortunately, this will impact the roles of 33 team members who will be leaving Ubisoft. We are committed to providing comprehensive support to them, including severance and career assistance, to help through this transition.”

The pursuit of “growth” or future ambitions is an unfortunate oxymoron that’s also become a common justification for putting people out of work. Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two Interactive de…

Activision have truly let the dogs out with the reveal of their new operator, Arthur, who arrives to Warzone 2 and Modern Warfare 2 with the release of Season 5. He’s a gritty “warrior to the core” with no face, whose mysterious past is classified intel. I don’t care about Arthur, though, I care about the canonically indestructible dog he wears like a fanny pack on his belt.

Merlin, Arthur’s personal K9 unit, is a part of a new animal companion system coming to both Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2, as outlined in a news post on the official Call of Duty website. 

“Operators will have the option to bring companions alongside them in Multiplayer, Battle Royale, and DMZ modes. This provides the unparalleled benefit of companionship along with a devastating Finishing Move.” …

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File this under “things we already knew but which are nice to have confirmed.” In a recent video for Fall Damage, Doug Cockle, the voice of Geralt in all of CD Projekt Red’s games, explained our favorite gruff monster-slaying dad guy will be back for the next game in the series.

“Witcher 4 has been announced,” he said. “I can’t say anything about it. What we know is that Geralt will be part of the game, we just don’t know how much, and the game won’t focus on Geralt. So it’s not about him this time. We don’t know who it’s about. I’m excited to find out. I want to know! I have not seen any script yet—I mean, I couldn’t tell you if I did. This is the thing, so I could be lying through my teeth. But I’m not. Or am I?”

Back in 2013 when CD Projekt Red was talking …

A few days ago we reported on news that Nvidia and MediaTek are set to release a new Arm-based chip for laptop PCs designed to cash in on the AI boom and compete with everything from traditional Intel and AMD APUs right through to the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. Well, now there’s a rumour that Nvidia and MediaTek are also cooking up a chip specifically designed for handheld gaming PCs.

Potentially, this is epic news. There’s absolutely no doubting the Arm instruction set makes for more efficient chips. Some recent leaked data from Dell indicates that its new laptops with the Arm-based Qualcomm X Plus chip will offer nearly double the battery life of their traditional x86 equivalents.

Without a doubt, one of the weakest aspects of current gaming handhelds is poor battery…

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I’ve been carefully tempering my expectations of Avowed—an upcoming RPG made by Obsidian, the creators of Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and The Outer Worlds.

I’m a fan of all of those games, though The Outer Worlds felt like it fell a smidge short of the studio’s usual CRPG pedigree—failing to get its hooks in me with its worldbuilding, characters, or RPG mechanics in the same way that Pillars did. I remember Aloth and Durance pretty vividly, but I couldn’t tell you a single thing about The Outer Worlds’ cast and crew from memory.

From what we’ve seen about Avowed, I was worried it might stumble into the same forgettable pitfalls. However, after seeing what Obsidian’s been working on during a 25-minute deep-dive that took place after the Xbox …

Nvidia socialled up an image on its official GeForce X account earlier in the week that got tongues wagging. A large monolith-style graphics card obscuring the sun and tagged ‘Eclipse2024’? That’s clearly a portentous teaser for the RTX 5090 coming later this year, right?

No wait, it’s an RTX 4090 Ti, isn’t it? Or should that be an RTX 4090 Super? I mean, it’s definitely something that’s just about to launch and is so incredibly exciting it will literally eclipse the sun. And yet, almost certainly, it’s none of the above.

For starters, it’s a still image from a teaser video posted back in January and in the lead up to the roll out of the then new RTX 40 Super series cards, including the RTX 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super and RTX 4080 Super.

So, it’s almost certainly not…

If you’re looking to get comfy on a Prime Day gaming chair deal, we can certainly recommend the Corsair TC100 Relaxed, which is now on sale at Newegg for $239. This isn’t the best deal we’ve ever seen for this chair, but it’s our favorite budget gaming chair and we think it’s well worth its non-discounted MSRP anyway, so the discount is just a nice bonus. 

• We’re curating the best Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.

Sure, a new gaming mouse or graphics card might make more of an immediate impact on your gaming experience, but spend all your gaming sessions on an awful gaming chair and you’ll quickly long for the comfort of a solid chair like this one.

And make no mistake, comfort is what you get with t…

I’ll be honest, Best Buy has kinda broken my heart. Just a few days ago it had the mother of all 14-inch gaming laptop deals, with the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 OLED—our absolute favorite compact gaming laptop—on sale for just $1,100. Sadly, by Monday the Zephyrus G14 was back up to $1,600. That’s still not bad for such a gorgeous gaming laptop, one with a full unibody aluminum chassis, great performance, and striking looks. But it’s not great.

What is pretty great, however, is the number of other 14-inch Prime Day gaming laptop deals there are. The compact gaming laptop is the ultimate portable notebook that will still deliver high-end frame rates, and without any truly tangible downsides. 

• We’re curating the best…
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