PC Gaming

Digital Sun thanked Steam players for signing up for a first playtest of an upcoming game called ReVamp, but said that:

I’ve spent the past week testing Asus laptop instead of Asus handheld, so my X20 review got pre-empted. But since you can buy it for $1,300 today, here’s my insta-review: it’s not necessarily the new champ. It’s so refined, but I want to play Star Wars Zero Company right now. That game looks terrible here, but runs fine with the extra power of my Claw EX review unit.

The first expansion DLC for post-post-apocalyptic roguelike Caves of Qud — one of my all-time favorite games — will let you play as a mutated plant or animal, among other new features.

The $199.99 Barracuda V2 Pro is $50 cheaper than its predecessor, yet contains quite a few improvements. Notably, the ANC-ready headset ships with a USB-C wireless dongle hidden within the left ear cup. It supports simultaneous 2.4GHz and Bluetooth 6 audio, as opposed to making you swap between them, and includes a detachable mic for better voice capture than its beamforming mics. It’s available now at Razer’s site.

The collection celebrating Xbox’s 25th anniversary includes games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition, Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, Minecraft Dungeons, and Gears of War: Reloaded. Microsoft says you can also play some of the free games on Xbox Series X/S with Xbox Play Anywhere.

As spotted by Kotaku, some people are posting videos showing strange visual issues with the updated launcher that agents wrote code for. Right now, the launcher is in preview.

Steam Frame Hub reports that the Steam Frame kernel source code includes branches referencing a “Plano” device and says the headset will have a resolution of 3552 × 3840 per eye (higher than the Frame) and a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip (same as the Frame). Valve watcher Brad Lynch speculates that it could be Valve “just trying to prototype headsets with this optical stack based on what’s already lying around.”

There’s a huge changelog, including the screensaver feature with a bouncing Steam logo and support for an experimental video codec called Pyrowave that “allows high bandwidth, low latency video streaming” for Remote Play. Lots to dig into.

“For gamers, DLSS 5 is a simple on-or-off toggle,” Nvidia told us in September, claiming DLSS 5 would “preserve artistic intent” behind games instead of just aging characters’ faces. But modders will have access to the same tools as developers, Nvidia now says — on October 23rd, it’s adding DLSS 5 to its RTX Remix tool for modding older DX8 and DX9 games. Used properly, it doesn’t look bad?

GamesBeat is reporting the timeline, citing “four industry sources familiar with the studio’s plans.” That would be much quicker than the PC launch for GTA V, which came out more than a year and a half after the game’s console release.

The new flagship is available now for $169.99 with improvements that include two additional customizable buttons bringing the total to 14, an upgraded four-way tilting scroll wheel, a 50,000 DPI sensor, and an 8,000Hz polling rate in wireless and wired modes. Battery life is estimated to max out at up to 275 hours on Bluetooth, or up to 200 hours with a wireless HyperSpeed connection.

I might be The Verge’s part-time PC handheld reviewer… but I don’t actually have any modern Android ones! Now there’s software that easily makes an Android handheld act like a Steam Deck, I should probably try again. Or should I wait for one with the new 6th-gen Snapdragon Elite?

The video game decompilation movement has done it again. Not only do we have 128 player Halo across Windows, Linux, and Android , you can also just fire it up in a web browser thanks to OpenHaloCE and immediately start campaign or a huge multiplayer match. It’s not just one dev: lots of people made this happen.

Buying used PC parts to dodge price hikes could come with a catch, like the hardware ban a Reddit user claims they got stuck with after trying to run Valorant with a pre-owned Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The CPU was reportedly already blacklisted in the Vanguard anti-cheat system because its previous owner was flagged for cheating.

As of September, 42.2 percent of Steam users have 32GB of memory, with 16GB now trailing at 37.8 percent, down from 41 percent in August. It looks like some Steam users may still be upgrading their RAM, despite months-long shortages and price hikes.

Is Valve suing gamers!? Not exactly:

The classic game decompilation movement has produced yet another amazing feat: 1999’s Lego Racers isn’t just back, the excellent Mario-Kart-meets-Lego game is anywhere you want it to be. NavigatorSharp’s fan recreation Step On It works in a web browser on desktop or phone, and you can find builds for Android, Mac, Windows PC and Linux (including the Steam Deck) right here too.

The new feature is designed to automatically reduce Discord visual effects to help whatever game you’re playing to run smoother. Discord already has similar performance saving options, as noted by TechRadar, but the platform still faces complaints about desktop resource usage impacting gamers.

It may not benefit every setup, the company warns, but Pyrowave is a new Steam Remote Play high bandwidth, low latency video codec now available in Steam beta on macOS, Windows, and Linux. It uses “5-10 times the amount of bandwidth of other streaming codecs,” but leverages your PC’s GPU to “encode and decode frames to achieve extremely low end to end latency with a good network.”

Nvidia is releasing a new Game Ready driver today, in preparation for the release of AION 2, Control Resonant, Gears of War: E-Day, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Remastered. The driver includes optimizations for all four games, as well as enabling DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction in Control Resonant.

I didn’t just review Valve’s Steam Frame last week — I spent a whole lot of time talking about the headset with fellow reviewers. I interviewed CNET’s Scott Stein about his review on The Vergecast, then Aftermath’s Chris Person turned the tables on me for Aftermath Hours, too!