PC Gaming

In this review, we benchmark the new AMD RX 7800 XT GPU and test it against the RX 6800 XT, NVIDIA RTX 4070, RTX 4070 Ti, RX 7900 XT, RX 6700 XT, and more. The GPU market still has last-gen options available, complicating the decision-making process for the RX 7800 XT. In some ways, compared against NVIDIA in particular (like the 4070 or horridly positioned 4060 Ti 16GB), the 7800 XT looks strong. In others, mostly against AMD's own products (like the 6800 XT), the 7800 XT still reflects the modern trend of up-naming cards to force a repositioning of market expectations for what a $500 card should do.

Eric Barone says he has lots more images from his new game to share, but right now he's focused on Stardew Valley 1.6.

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"Here's a Haunted Chocolatier screen": That's what you say if you're ConcernedApe, aka Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone, and it's apparently a slow Tuesday and you want to wind things up a little bit. And then you post the screen in question, and all your followers immediately go bananas.

That's literally it: A flex from the man responsible for the biggest indie game sensation since Minecraft, and a reminder of the awesome, terrible power he wields:

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original tweet

Argentina's HD Tecnología site has obtained and published AMD's official data outlining the performance prowess of the soon-to-be released Radeon RX 7800 XT & RX 7700 XT GPUs, when stacked up against their closest rivals—NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB and RTX 4070 12 GB. Team Red could have "cherry-picked" some of this information, and presented resultant performance charts during the grand unveiling of their mid-range RDNA 3 cards at last month's Gamescom press event. HD Tecnología claims that the fuzzy batch of screengrabs were obtained from an official review guide, they chose to not share pages containing precise details of system specifications. An embargo imposed on media outlets is set to be lifted tomorrow, which coincides with the launch of AMD's Navi 32-based contenders.

(OP Comment: Marking this as rumor for now, so take with a massive grain of salt)

The upcoming reimagining of Alone in the Dark is skipping Halloween this year. Instead of inviting players back to Derceto on October 25, the survival horror adventure will now arrive on January 16.

In a press release, developer Pieces Interactive offers a candid explanation for the move: it doesn’t want the game to compete with October’s heavy hitters like Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and another big horror game, Alan Wake 2.

“Our intention is to avoid competing with the wake of Alan's epic release and to evade the dazzling skyline of cities adorned by the graceful swings of Spider-Man," Pieces writes. "We aim to truly remain as Alone in the Dark as possible. To honor this, the spine-chilling horror game has been rescheduled to unveil its horrors on January 16th, 2024. This extension will serve a dual purpose: not only will it permit us to meticulously perfect the gaming experience, but it will also grant us the opportunity to fully immerse ourselves in the remarkable releases of October.”

The new official WRC series comes from the makers of the Colin McRae and Dirt Rally series.

EA has today formally revealed EA Sports WRC, a new series officially licensed by the FIA World Rally Championship.

EA Sports WRC is developed by veteran UK racing studio Codemasters, the team behind the Colin McRae and Dirt Rally series, and arrives on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC on November 3, 2023 (or October 31, 2023 for players who pre-order).

“EA Sports WRC is the purest form of motorsport where every stage is a fight against the clock, the terrain, and yourself,” said Codemasters senior creative director Ross Gowing. “This is the rally game we’ve always wanted to make, combining our studio’s deep knowledge and expertise with the power of the official WRC license representing the pinnacle of rally motorsport. The game’s new engine has enabled us to push rally to the edge of what’s deemed possible, and the additional features, including Builder and Moments, give players even more ways to interact with the sport they love.”

Youtube Trailer

Payday 3 will hold an open beta on Steam and Xbox from September 8 to 11, Deep Silver and Starbreeze have announced.

Starbreeze said the open beta is designed to stress test servers for the co-op heist shooter ahead of the launch on September 21.

The open beta requires no key access and includes the same content as the recent technical closed beta test. Starbreeze mentioned the open beta build is based on a build from April 2023 and is not a final representation of Payday 3, but it will let the studio identify potential issues with the servers before launch.

Last month, MSI rolled out the new and improved AGESA 1.0.0.7c BIOS which offers enhanced and better support for higher-frequency DDR5 memory. This new BIOS update not only improved DDR5 memory performance but also added various compatibility fixes and new features such as the High Efficiency Mode which boosts gaming performance by up to 12%.

Now, MSI has rolled out a full list of updated DDR5 frequencies that its AM5 motherboard lineup can support. Starting with the top of the lineup, we have the flagship MEG offerings, the X670E GODLIKE and the X670E ACE which now support up to DDR5-8000 memory. Previously, both of these boards supported DDR5-6666+ and DDR5-6600+ memory so the new speeds mark a major improvement.

Gigabyte has released a new BIOS firmware for its Intel 600 & 700 series motherboard to address various DDR5 memory corruption issues.

The firmware update specifically addresses a bug that disrupts SPD (serial presence detect) data within the DDR5 memory that's responsible for XMP/EXPO profiles which leads to Gigabyte's 600 and 700-series motherboards not recognizing memory modules properly.

Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment have today issued Patch No. 7 for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, arriving roughly two and a half months after the last batch of fixes and improvements. The most significant update for PC gamers running NVIDIA GPUs is the addition of official DLSS support, likely ...

Official Patch Notes

This time we're looking at CPU performance across 44 different
processors at 1080p using three different quality settings this gives us
a comprehensive look at how Starfield performs while CPU limited across a wide variety of Hardware so you'll know what to expect and how to plan for an upgrade.

It's fair to say that Starfield is a highly demanding game on both GPU and
CPU Hardware. We've found many areas in the game so far that are either brutal on GPUs, brutal on CPUs, or brutal on both gpus and CPUs at the same time. If you want the Ultimate Experience in the game, you'll need some pretty powerful hardware and we've already seen how only the very top-end GPUs are capable of above 60 FPS using high quality settings
at decent resolutions. Similar can be said about CPU performance if you have older or mid-range CPU Hardware. It's likely that in CPU demanding areas you won't achieve amazing performance.

This benchmark looks at #Starfield for isolated CPU performance to compare the best CPUs for Starfield, including both Intel and AMD options. We stretch back to the AMD R7 2700 and go forward to the AMD 7800X3D, and for Intel, we're testing the 13900K down to lower-end CPUs, like the 13100F, with some 12th Gen benchmarks as well. Additional comparisons include memory benchmarking / RAM bottlenecks, overclocking scalability for frequency limitations, and more. This follows-up our prior Starfield GPU benchmark comparison, which is already published on the channel.

Watch our Starfield GPU Benchmark video: Starfield GPU Benchmarks & Comparison

Learn more about GPU Busy: Intel's Major Overhaul for CPU & GPU

I can't stand this anymore and I'm wondering if someone has anything that could help.

I play with controllers a lot these days, and I am noticing that with my PC, the range and stability of the BT connection is just absolute fucking garbage. I can be sitting literally only 2 feet from the adapter, and it will still often spaz out and delay my inputs or hold them too long. Like I am turning right, let go of the stick and it continues to turn right for another full second after I am not longer giving any input, or it just doesn't register I'm giving any input when I am pressing keys or moving the stick.

I know it ain't the controller or the distance, and doubtful of it being interference because my PS5 is right next to my PC and I don't even have my controller disconnect going into the furthest room in the apartment away from the console, but when I am connected to the computer, damn thing can disconnect when I set the controller down on top of the desktop.

The adapter I use was recommended to me by over 100 different users on the PC Gaming subreddit Reddit long before the exodus, and it's supposed to have a 30ft range.

My only other idea is that it's Windows itself. I've dealt with similar bullshit back in XP with the wifi polling. It would poll the availability of connections every 30 seconds, which resulted in huge lag spikes every 30 seconds. Used to use a utility to just kill the process in Windows and never again got those horrible lag spikes everyone always associated with wifi. Is this what's going on with the BT? Is there a way to fix this crap?

If you e like me and you want to play Saints Row but don want to pay full price, well now is your chance to do so. The game has been updated since its launch, perfect pick for a Second wind in this game cycle in my opinion because the game was very glitchy and a total mess.

It's coming soon.

How an unlikely crew of inexperienced game developers created one of gaming’s stealth icons.

We spent an hour playing Mina the Hollower, the new game from Shovel Knight developer Yacht Club Games. Check out why this was one of the highlights of our time at PAX West 2023.

Early in my interview with Alx Preston, founder and creative director at Heart Machine, he corrects me on an important detail about Hyper Light Breaker. I’d spent the first few minutes referring to it as a sequel, but he clarifies, "It’s not Hyper Light Drifter 2. It’s a follow-up, meaning that it’s an installment in the franchise of Hyper Light. So it’s a different game, different protagonists, different gameplay." After getting the chance to learn more about the game and see it in action, this distinction makes a lot of sense. For me to call it a sequel was misleading, given how different the games look and play.

Breaker is a 3D rogue-lite with a strong emphasis on multiplayer. Players explore an area called the Overgrowth, collect weapons and gear, and fight off monsters. And though the first Hyper Light game had a fixed protagonist with a focused narrative, Breaker allows players to create and customize their own warrior, known in this world as Breakers. It’s a completely new direction – one the team is clearly excited about.

Dungeons of Hinterberg's announcement at Summer Game Fest 2023 didn't garner a ton of fanfare in the midst of massive games like Starfield, Fable, Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2, and Forza Motorsport, but it sticks out as one of the more promising indies highlighted during the Xbox Games Showcase. That same week, I witnessed a behind-closed-doors demo, which showed off the gameplay loop and some more of the beautiful visuals, so when I had the chance to play this unique hybrid action/RPG this week, I jumped at the chance.

Ascendant Studios and Electronic Arts announced the availability of the second Immortals of Aveum patch, which improves frame drops and more.

The new 101.4672 Beta drivers do not appear to bring any further improvements or fixes and appear mostly focused on supporting the Starfield game. There are still plenty of issues with Starfield but Intel notes that further fixes are coming in future driver updates.

Sapphire is so far the only AMD add-in-board (AIB) partner to show a reference design for the upcoming Radeon RX 7800 XT graphics card. Sapphire has previously revealed a couple of models, including those in its NITRO, PURE, and PULSE series, for both the Radeon RX 7800 XT and the Radeon RX 7700 XT....

XFX has revealed its own Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7700 XT lineup, showing off a total of three SKUs. These include the Radeon RX 7800 XT QICK 319 Core Edition, the Radeon RX 7800 XT MERC 319 Black Edition, and the Radeon RX 7700 XT QICK 319 Black Edition. Interestingly, XFX is skipping AMD's ...

The Republic of Gamers (ROG) department at ASUS started to tease its lineup of official Evangelion tie-in products in late July, with a ROG Strix customized NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 card attracting some attention thanks to its very prominent red and black aesthetic. The marketing spiel revealed that:...

The latest retail batch of Noctua's NH-U12A single-tower CPU coolers has been photographed sporting updated packaging and containing a new set of mounting brackets. Japan's Akiba PC Watch reported on new stock of Noctua's popular (and well reviewed) NH-U12A cooler sitting on shelves at Tsukumo Compu...

Gamers wanting the ultimate experience will need strong hardware in all areas today we're going to be looking at a couple of things. Firstly, how does Starfield run on the minimum spec CPU for the game AMD's
Ryzen 5 2600x, and what sort of experience you can expect from that five-year-old processor. Then we're going to explore what in-game settings can be tweaked to improve performance in CPU limited scenarios and finally we'll wrap things up with a discussion on what can be done about the CPU limit.