Equipment

The question of when Baldur’s Gate 3 would release on Xbox, if ever, was uncertain until this week, not because of messy console exclusivity politics, but because of console gaming’s gradual transformation into a wonky kind of PC gaming. 

The problem was that Microsoft requires Xbox games run on the Xbox Series S, a cheaper version of its flagship Xbox Series X with less-powerful hardware and no optical drive, and Larian was struggling to get Baldur’s Gate 3 split-screen co-op working to its standards on the console. The studio previously said that although it was working on a Baldur’s Gate 3 Xbox version, it wasn’t “confident enough” that it could solve the technical problem to announce it.

Today, however, Larian boss Swen Vincke announced that, after speaking to Xbox …

A Pokémon that has been absent from the Pokémon TCG for over two decades is finally returning, after illusionist Uri Geller (who claimed the Pokémon was based on his likeness) seemingly got a new perspective on life. Geller first sued Nintendo in 2000 after seeing an image of the Kadabra cards in Japan, which has the name “Yungerer” or “Yungeller”(a clear reference says Geller to his own name), demanding $60 million in damages. While the suit was dismissed in 2003 in America, Geller continued to pursue it in other regions.

Nintendo remained tight-lipped about the matter, though fans noted that Kadabra began to be used more sparingly outside of the games and, in the case of the cards, eventually not at all. The Pokémon was removed from the trading card g…

The developers of Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu entered a surprise settlement with Nintendo on Monday, agreeing to pay the game company $2.4 million in damages and cease development and distribution of the emulator. Now, as a result of that settlement, Citra—a 3DS emulator that shared developers with Yuzu—has also been taken offline.

The Citra Twitter account posted a message that was originally shared in the Yuzu Discord, addressed to “Yuz-ers and Citra fans,” stating that “Yuzu and Yuzu’s support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately.”

The Github repository holding Citra’s code has been shut down. In Yuzu’s settlement with Nintendo, the emulator developers agreed to “surrender, and permanently cease to use… any other website or system th…

Analyst outfit IDC has just dropped a blinding thermonuclear glimpse of the blatantly obvious by predicting that 60% of PCs will have AI hardware by 2027.

The new IDC report forecasts that 167 million PCs containing hardware specifically designed to run generative AI will be sold in 2027, representing that 60% market share. Given that it’s expected pretty much all current-gen CPUs and APUs being sold by Intel and AMD at that point will contain some kind of NPU or Neural Processing Unit, the prediction isn’t much of a reach. Indeed it feels like kind of a low-ball figure if anything.

Of course, you could argue that any PC with a modern discrete GPU has AI hardware. Indeed, if you’re serious about running AI image generation locally on your PC, you’re going to want access to a…

This year Razer will be bringing us its first ever 18-inch gaming laptop, or desktop replacement to be more accurate, packing one of Intel’s 13th Gen Core i9 HX-series chips, along with Nvidia’s RTX 4090 mobile GPU. Razer has also announced that the new Razer Blade 16 will be packed into a much smaller chassis than anticipated. A little bit of min-maxing going on with these next-gen gaming laptops, then, and from what I’ve seen it’s an impressive feat at both ends of the spectrum.

Razer’s first installation to their 2023 gaming laptop lineup comes in the form of the Blade 16. Not only has Razer has managed to jam a 16-inch panel into a chassis that’s only a smidge bigger than the current Blade 15—alongside a 13th Gen Intel Core i9 HX-series CPU and Nvidia RTX 40-series mobil…

The best thing about watching speedrunners is seeing just how far they’ll go to break their favourite games. No matter how old a game is, no matter how ‘solved’ its speedrun may seem, there’ll always be new surprises just around the corner.

Super Mario 64 has long been a favourite of the speedrunning community, and it’s just had another massive tech discovery that’ll likely be a part of any 120-star world records going forward, shaving off close to a minute of playtime. 

That might not sound like a lot, but the more perfected a speedrun gets, the more impressive saves like this get. Even a few seconds is huge when you get to the big leagues, but a whole minute? That makes this tech basically mandatory.

There’s a level in Mario 64 called Rainbow Ride, whic…

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.

Take, for example, the player who just became the second confirmed person ever (after someone named enneUni) to obtain the game’s rarest drop. As confirmed by GamesRadar, a player named Coti managed to get their hands on an uncut onyx from one of OSRS’ bags full of gems, essentially grab-bags of 40 assorted gems that players can purchase from certain in-game vendors. 

Uncut Onyx from Bag Full of Gems! from r/2007scape

They work prett…

Endless Space and Humankind studio Amplitude is marking its 13th birthday, and to celebrate it’s giving out free Steam copies of Endless Legend, its underrated fantasy 4X that apparently released all the way back in 2014. So there’s a Friday morning confrontation with mortality for you.

You can pick the game up by heading over to the Amplitude Studios community website and then, well, going through a little bit of a rigamarole. You’ll need to make an account, verify your email, then head into your account settings and link the thing up with Steam. Once you’ve done that, just return to that page linked above and click on the Endless Legend image halfway down the page to get your free Steam key.

It’s a bit long-winded, or at least it was for me when I tried it out, but Endless…

The benefits of AI can be debated. But one thing we’re all sure about is that massive server farms packed full of hundreds or thousands of high-end AI GPUs, each consuming hundreds of watts, soak up a lot of power. Right?

Not Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia whose catchphrase has become “the more you buy, the more you save”, in reference to his company’s stratospherically expensive AI chips. Perhaps inevitably, Huang has a similar take when it comes to the power consumption associated with the latest AI models, which mostly run on Nvidia hardware.

Speaking in a Q&A following his Computex keynote, Huang’s point is firstly that Nvidia’s GPUs do computations much faster and more efficiently than any alternative. As he puts it, you want to “accelerate everything”. That saves …

AMD’s new Radeon RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT graphics cards haven’t quite gone on sale. But they’re already having an impact on the graphics card market.

As we write these words, you can take your choice between at least two versions of the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti 16GB for $449 from Newegg. Both the ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB Advanced Edition and the MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 4060 Ti are yours for this new lower price.

That’s $50 down on the $499 launch price of the 16GB version of the 4060 Ti. For starters, that now puts the 16GB 4060 Ti within $50 of the plain old RTX 4060 Ti 8GB card. More importantly, it also puts it bang on the launch price of the new AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT.

That makes for a very interesting comparison. The 7700 XT only has 12GB of VRAM, of course, but …

Look, sometimes words just get in the way. So before I start waffling, here’s a video—spotted by GamesRadar—of one of the most buck wild strokes of luck I’ve ever seen happen in a videogame.

AWP 5k – 1 bullet from r/GlobalOffensive

That’s wild, right? Tell me that’s not wild. If you’re not sure what you just watched, here’s a breakdown: A CS:GO player named sp1cay managed to pull off a one-in-a-million shot with the AWP sniper rifle, managing to kill every single enemy player on the opposing team—who had all lined up in just the right way—with one bullet, winning the game with a single squeeze of the trigger. 

It’s a bit like pulling off the water bottle flip challenge on your first go, except …

Obsidian (the studio behind Pillars of Eternity, Fallout: New Vegas, and The Outer Worlds) released an extended gameplay trailer diving into its first-person RPG Avowed last week. PC Gamer’s own Ted Litchfield sat down with both the game’s director Carrie Patel and the gameplay director Gabe Paramo to talk shop.

First-person melee combat is hard to design. In any third-person action game, you have all kinds of tools at your disposal—bespoke animations, the situational awareness of bird’s-eye view, cool flips—things that are much harder to execute on when you’re in your protagonist’s skull. Especially the cool flips thing, that’ll just get you motion sick. 

Luckily, Obsidian is looking to a dev studio that’s basically perfected it over the years: Fatshark, de…

Palworld has absolutely taken the real, non-pal world by storm, but no matter how big the survival crafting Pokémon brutality engine gets, I’m staying in my bunker to play crusty CRPGs from 1998 until the storm clears. Studio Pocketpair’s next game, Never Grave: The Witch and the Curse, might be a little bit more my speed though.

My first thought was “damn, that looks a lot like Hollow Knight,” and there’s an easy temptation to lambast the studio for a repeated derivative quality to its games. Like with Palworld’s Pokémon DNA, though, Never Grave’s Hollow Knightness seems mostly superficial, and the game looks set to bring some innovations of a similar scope to Palworld’s world beating “what if survival crafting games let you have little guys to do the boring stuff a…

Ten months after the first RDNA 3-powered laptop GPUs appeared, AMD has finally got around to using its premier Navi 31 processor in a mobile configuration. The new Radeon RX 7900M is being touted as being 7% faster on average than Nvidia’s RTX 4080 Laptop, so fans of high-end gaming on the go might end up going all Team Red.

In terms of specs, just think Radeon RX 7900 GRE, but a little bit slower. Like all of the Radeon RX 7900-series models that use the RDNA 3-based Navi 31, this new GPU is a medium-sized lump of silicon, containing all of the graphics circuitry (called the GCD), surrounded by a number of tiny chiplets that house the L3 cache and memory interfaces (MCDs).

Something else that’s common to them all is that the MCD is pretty much identical. In fact, the only …

Rainbow Six Siege has been an ongoing success for Ubisoft for nearly a decade now, and shows no sign of slowing down—it was just in March, in fact, that the game set a new all-time concurrent player record on Steam of more than 201,000. But not everyone is thrilled with the weekend announcement of a new subscription service for Siege called R6 Membership, which promises exclusive content drops, animated skins, and premium battle pass access for $10 per month.

Siege’s upcoming year 9 season 2 will feature a “complete remaster” of the Recruit, the game’s original operator, which will get a new look and new attacker and defender archetypes that will enable two different gadgets to be selected depending on the chosen role. In lieu of a new operator, premium battle pass owners wi…

Qualcomm has announced a new range of chips aimed squarely at gaming handhelds. The highest spec model, the Qualcomm Snapdragon G3x Gen 2, is said to be over twice as fast as its predecessor. So, can it take the fight to the Steam Deck or even AMD’s awesome Phoenix APU in handheld’s like the Asus ROG Ally?

The new Snapdragon range for gaming handhelds comprises three chips. Along with the aforementioned G3x Gen 2 are the G1 and the G2. The G1 is an ultra-low power item designed to support game streaming on a handheld rather than running games locally, while the G2 is a mid-tier item analogous to a smartphone processor.

So, we can ultimately dispence with the G1 and G2, they don’t move the needle for performance. But what about that Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 beast? How does it com…

I’m not a war sim enthusiast but I do respect Wargaming for its often bonkers crossovers. For example, Korn appeared in World of Tanks Blitz a few years ago, and even further back, The Offspring did. But if long-in-the-tooth ’90s pop culture isn’t your thing, perhaps something from the (checks Wikipedia) 1930s will work? Here you go then: Popeye the Sailor Man is coming to World of Warships.

ICYMI: Popeye is a gruff cartoon sailor whose every muscle bulges with the consumption of tinned spinach. He started life as a comic strip, before appearing in a series of his own cartoons throughout the ’60s and ’70s. In 1980 Robert Altman directed a Popeye movie starring Robin Williams as Popeye, and Shelley Duvall as Popeye’s perennial love interest Olive Oyl. He’s even had a …

Seagate has agreed to pay the US Department of Commerce $300 million in total over the next five years for selling Huawei some hard drives. 

The US government’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) alleged that Seagate broke rules on exporting to the China-headquartered company when it sold some hard drives to it over the course of 13 months from August 2020 to September 2021. 

Some hard drives being “more than 7.4 million”, valued at approximately $1,104,732,205, according to the BIS press release [PDF]. The Bureau claims Seagate became the sole source supplier of HDDs to Huawei during this time.

In terms of the timeline here, these sales occurred after the US government updated its rules for companies trading with Huawei to include fresh …

Remedy’s latest annual report contains, among a great many other things, a very brief new look at Condor, the codename for the multiplayer spinoff game based on Control.

Condor was announced in 2021 as a four-player PvE game set in the very strange world of Control. At the time, it was being developed in partnership with publisher 505 Games, but that situation changed earlier this year when Remedy reacquired control of Control from 505 in a deal worth €17 million.

We haven’t heard much about it since, except that work is continuing, but the new financial report (via RPS) sheds a bit more light on what players can look forward to.

“After the Hiss Invasion, the Oldest House is under lockdown: a boiling pot of volatile and dangerous supernatural forces. Trapped withi…

Palworld deserves kudos for actually following up on its success with bug fixes—Pocketpair now has the unenviable task of matching the sudden, unanticipated expectations that come with an indie breakout success with further support. The team’s stated mission goal on its roadmap—primarily a focus on squashing game-breaking bugs—is getting done.

Patch v.0.1.4.0 aims to fix some major issues. For starters, your mates can no longer steal your pals if they’re below 30% HP with a pal sphere—which is a relief, especially the targeting on those things is a touch wonky, making accidental pal napping (or in my case, pissing off a big mammoth that kills you) a real possibility.

There’s been a whole Paldeck of attempts to curb game crashes, including one save-mel…

A very strange thing happened during the recently-concluded 2024 Steam Summer Sale: Almost 700,000 copies of Bohemia Interactive’s military simulator Arma 3 were sold, an astounding figure that includes the game’s biggest single-day sales figure ever.

The runaway sales success was first reported by Bohemia on July 16. “Welcome to the over 500,000 new recruits that have joined the Arma 3 community during the Steam Summer Sale 2024!” the studio wrote in a welcome-to-the-club message on Steam. “Close to 100,000 of you joined us during the sale’s first day—the highest number of copies sold in a single day dating all the way back to the initial Arma 3 Alpha release in March 2013!”

And that’s what makes the sales number so unexpected: Arma 3 has been around for more than 10 …

The PlayStation Network doesn’t have public player numbers, so it’s hard to say what the complete picture is, but things don’t look great for Concord on PC. The $40 hero shooter is sitting at mostly positive reviews on Steam, but according to SteamDB, has so far hit a high water mark of just 697 PC players on its opening weekend.

Reviewers on Steam are praising its graphics and gunplay, which is in line with PC Gamer staff writer Morgan Park’s preview of Concord. The game seems to have the opposite balance of Valve’s finally-public Deadlock: It’s more of a pure shooter than ability-focused, hewing closer to Call of Duty or Destiny’s Crucible than Overwatch.

It’s also a quite pretty game, with a Guardians of the Galaxy-inspired aesthetic and some aspirations to continued seas…

The origin of the Backrooms, a photo of a liminal space deemed so eerie it earned internet and gaming stardom, has been uncovered by four image-savvy detectives scrubbing 4chan, and a chance encounter with an archived internet page from 2003. 

In case you’re unfamiliar with what the Backrooms are, here’s the rundown. In 2019, an image was posted to 4chan displaying an eerie set of rooms devoid of natural light—capturing people’s imaginations so vividly that it spawned its own lore. 

It’s considered a liminal space, which is loosely defined as an area that’s not quite surreal, but getting close. It’s the manmade equivalent of the uncanny valley, a building or a space crafted from normal parts, but arranged in an abnormal and unsettling way. Hallways t…

Give it up for the good ship DRAM, the latest component to set sail and fall off the world’s edge at the end of 2022. According to TrendForce, DRAM sales revenue fell 32.5% between the third, fourth, and final quarter in 2022.

That means DRAM has now joined CPUs, which dropped 21% year-on-year, and GPUs, down 50%, in nose diving into the new year. TrendForce says the fall in revenue in this case doesn’t reflect a drop in unit sales so much as average selling prices plummeting.

Of the big three DRAM producers, it was Micron that was hit hardest, with revenues dropping by a painful 41.2%. The biggest vendor, Samsung, experienced a 25.1% drop, while number two incumbent SK Hynix saw revenues fall by 35.2%.

Apparently Samsung cut prices most aggressively, leading to its ma…

The hands on the doomsday clock are closer to midnight than ever now that Amazon has announced that, actually, it’s gonna put its upcoming Fallout TV show out even earlier than it promised. That means all eight episodes will drop tomorrow, April 10, at 6 pm PT / 9 pm EST / 2 am BST. That’s still technically April 11 for those of us in Europe, but why split hairs? None of us will be up anyway.

The news was announced via a short trailer featuring Fallout actor Walton Goggins, who announced that—as a “thank you” to the fans—the full 8-episode run of the show would be dropping on Prime a day early.

That’s a full day earlier than the April 11 date it was previously sticking to, which was itself a full day earlier than the April 12 date it originally a…

After attracting nearly $35 million in an initial round of funding and another $2.3 million on Kickstarter, Stormgate developer Frost Giant Studios is looking to raise even more money, this time by inviting supporters to invest in the company in an upcoming “crowd-equity campaign.”

The investment campaign isn’t set to kick off in full until March, but Frost Giant has launched a “Test the Waters” page on StartEngine, where eager supporters can reserve a spot in advance. That presumably gives the studio an idea of the level of interest from potential investors (the whole “testing the waters” thing), while reservation holders will get an extra 5% share bonus for signing up now.

This is very different from a Kickstarter campaign, where supporters throw down a certain amount of m…

Starfield has now been in the wild for a month and, yep, turns out it’s a Bethesda game. I don’t know why anyone’s surprised really, and surely that’s what we were all secretly hoping for: where’s the joy in a vast, polished galaxy where everything works as intended? Far better to have a cosmos where something like a mop can accidentally trigger a mini-genocide.

This is what player lkl34 discovered when tootling around in Neon and deciding, flagrantly, to pick up a cleaning mop. The reaction of NPCs immediately around them is to shout “thief!” and start running like headless chickens, which is amusing enough, but in that way of bad logic piling upon bad logic, things begin to escalate… and soon enough we’ve got a bunch of NPCs in their underwear, seemingly non-aggroed, just…

In 1946, computer science pioneer Grace Hopper used the word “bug” to refer to a malfunction in a computer at the Harvard Computation Laboratory, which was caused by a moth trapped inside a relay. Engineers were already calling defects bugs at the time, building on the word’s connection to the same root as “bugbear” in the sense of an annoyance, but it’s a fun fact that the first computer bug was an actual literal insect. And so was the one recently found by YouTuber northwestrepair in an RTX 4090 Founders Edition.

The GPU was apparently bought at resale and so didn’t have a warranty, which is how it ended up in the hands of northwestrepair, AKA Tony, when it didn’t work. On testing it he found that the fan blew, though there was no picture. After thoroughly checking the card for …

While we wait for official word from either AMD or Bethesda on whether Starfield is going to be open to benefiting from DLSS support, professional modder, PureDark, has seemingly announced their intention to get it into the game before it’s even fully released.

With AMD announcing its partnership with Bethesda for Starfield there has been quite the reaction from the gaming community over a perceived block on the developers adding in DLSS support for Nvidia users. The suggestion is that part of the partnership requires the exclusive use of AMD’s own FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), blocking the likes of DLSS and Intel’s XeSS from being added to partner games.

This is something AMD has avoided questioning about—and most recently when we’ve specifically asked for commen…

It’s just another normal day in Helldivers 2. Players, regrettably, appear to have failed the major order to liberate Fori Prime and Zagon Prime. While the galactic map shows Fori Prime as safe and sound, Zagon Prime is regrettably at zero percent liberation. We lost, folks. As a consequence of our collective inability to manage our democracy at acceptable levels, Arrowhead Games has hit players with the worst punishment of all.

“The expansion of our citizens to new planets will be reduced in-line with the reduction of expected Element 710 to be produced,” the major order failed dispatch reads. “Further procreation applications will be denied until further notice.” In case you’re wondering what a procreation application is, patriots have to fill in a C-01 permit before any action …

Stormgate was unveiled in 2022 and it’s come a long way since then: It was the biggest videogame Kickstarter of 2023, earning $2 million on top of $35 million already raised through an initial funding round, and even managed to attract some celebrity voice acting from Simu Liu and Chris Metzen. It also made a big impression on online editor and PC Gamer strategysmith Fraser Brown, who declared that “for the first time in a while, I’m excited to dip my toes into the competitive side of real-time strategy again.”

The early access launch for Kickstarter backers hasn’t gone smoothly, however. Since its debut on July 30, Stormgate has earned a “mixed” rating on Steam across just over 2,000 user reviews: Common complaints include an incomplete story and unremarkable unit interactions, s…

In the wake of E3’s demise, Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest has emerged as its self-appointed heir. SGF livestreams in years past have brought big reveals like 2021’s Elden Ring gameplay, and we should expect more of that kind of thing this year, according to Keighley: That is, trailers and announcements related to games we already know about, rather than earth-shattering reveals of unannounced games.

Keighley recently hopped onto a Twitch Q&A session for some “expectation setting” for this year’s presentation. According to Keighley, while the 2-hour showcase will have plenty of trailers to show, it’ll mostly consist of “existing games that have new updates for fans”—new content for released games, or trailers for games that have already been announced.

…

Mekuna holds the top rank in the world for Diablo 4’s new challenge dungeon, The Gauntlet, but he’s not done pushing for a better score.

Despite sitting firmly in rank 1 above every single Diablo 4 player in the world right now with a score of 1.1M, Mekuna is busy trying to push it to 1.2M. “I think there is always room for improvements/optimization,” he told PC Gamer. “Someone could optimize their path/gear better, and anything could happen.”

Blizzard released The Gauntlet yesterday and everyone is still working out the fastest way through the 8-minute dungeon. All the bosses and monsters in it are the same every run, but your character’s gear and build dictate your approach. Sorcerer players, like Mekuna, are all using Teleport to blast through the dungeon quickly, but the…

OLED gaming monitors have finally gone from wish list to gaming desk, and nowadays our pick for the best gaming monitor is an OLED panel. They’re oh so very nice to play on, trust us. Thankfully, there’s more on the way, and I’ve just had an early look at the new AOC 240Hz OLED monitor set to arrive later this year.

It’s called the AOC Agon Pro AG276QZD. Stuffed with a 1440p OLED panel, the main draw here is its 240Hz refresh rate. Though naturally these OLEDs tend to suit gaming with low response times, too, and this one is no different at 0.03ms GtG. It’s also G-Sync Compatible and will run Adaptive Sync, so smoothness should be the name of the game.

The eagle-eyed among you will notice this is a similar spec to the LG Ultragear 27GR95QE-B, which we reviewed last mo…

You know what makes a gaming keyboard great? Lubed switches. That might not have been what you thought I’d say, but when you get going on a board with such slick switches, it’s typing bliss. That’s why I love the Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless—it offers all the important features for a PC gamer with the added benefit of lubed switches. 

The Strix II 96 is also $144.99 over at Amazon for Black Friday right now.

I waxed lyrical about how great a set of finely lubed mechanical switches are in my Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless review, but I’ll give you the skinny here, too. A drop of lube inside each switch makes for a much smoother actuation and a satisfying clack. Each switch is responsive, smooth, and you can happily glide between them for work involving …