Did you know the Steam Deck downloads pre-cached shaders from Valve’s servers so games launch faster? It’s awesome — but they can take up a bunch of room on your SSD. Hear this: PCGamer confirmed with Valve (via Phoronix) that those caches are about to shrink by 60 percent.
It won’t shrink cutscenes and intro videos that Valve has to transcode for legal and technical reasons, though.
It looks like Sultim Tsyrendashiev, whose Half-Life: Ray Traced mod we just covered in February, now has a job at Nvidia!
You don’t have to wait for Nvidia to add RT to games like Portal, Quake, or Minecraft anymore — RTX Remix lets modders do it themselves, and now it’s open-source. You’ll find the runtime, toolkit and instructions at Nvidia’s GitHub. Let there be light.
Intel announced two years ago that it would happily begin manufacturing Arm chips for other chipmakers, so it’s no surprise that it will begin doing so on its upcoming low-power 18A process coming late 2024. But Intel couldn’t tell me if it actually has any interested customers lined up.
Apple and AMD are sticking with TSMC for now.
We put the PS5’s stalwart gamepad into Lumafield’s CT scanner — a teardown-free way to see how its amazing adaptive triggers work. Should we do an Xbox gamepad next? Or a Nintendo Switch Joy-Con, perhaps? More like this at our TikTok and Instagram.
If you’ve got an Nvidia RTX 30 or 40-series card, you can turn on “RTX Super Resolution” in the Nvidia Control Panel, and VLC 3.0.19 or later will automatically tweak your videos.
Just know the effect was extremely subtle when I could see it at all — it’s nothing like what Topaz Video Enhance AI and co can do.
Every Star Trek feature film is finally available in 4K with HDR, now that Generations (Kirk meets Picard!), First Contact, Insurrection and Nemesis have officially hit 4K Blu-Ray and streaming services.
For Deep Space Nine and Voyager, you’ll still have to do your own AI upscaling at home.
(Note: we might get a commission if you buy through that “4K Blu-Ray” link.)
