PC Gaming

Bogus Intel & AMD CPU incidents have been reported several times, with most of them involving tampering either with the branding on the IHS (Integrated Heat Spreader) or with the actual CPU packaging. We have highlighted such incidents several times, but an average consumer often becomes a victim of such scams, mainly due to knowledge disparity.

A Reddit user, “Much_Designer_8417,” reportedly ordered the Intel Core i9-13900K from Amazon in hopes of harnessing the power of Intel's flagship processor, but in return, he got Intel's Core i7-13700K. This was another incident of IHS tampering since the pictures shared by Redditor clearly show the Core i9-13900K. Still, upon further investigation through benchmarking software, it was revealed that he got a much inferior variant.

Hogwarts Legacy lovers, keep your eyes open as it is now being reported that a sequel is in development, which will take the franchise to new heights.

The news comes from the reputable movie insider MyTimeToShineHello, who has an excellent track record for unveiling content about the movie industry. While the leaker didn't disclose many specifics, it can be presumed that the leaker has sources within Warner Bros since he has leaked out several content from the studio in the past.

Sources confirmed that a Hogwarts Legacy sequel is in the works pic.twitter.com/LQEKFmUpO9
— MyTimeToShineHello (@MyTimeToShineH) September 2, 2023

Japanese gamers have continued to embrace the PC as a platform at staggering rates, jumping up 43% from 131.3 billion yen to 189.2 billion yen in 2022. That's a total size of about $1.3 billion US. The data comes from the latest report by Kadokawa ASCII Research Laboratories, an industry think tank which compiles yearly material about the performance of the gaming industry in Japan and abroad.

For comparison various analysts peg growth rates in the US PC Gaming market at between 1-2% in 2022, on a market of something like $9-10 billion, as growth stabilizes following a boom during the pandemic. The global gaming market as a whole actually shrunk in 2022—for the same reason.

A post-pandemic drop that, it should be noted, didn't slow down Japanese PC gaming much at all. It's another year of data proving that though conventional wisdom once said PC Gaming in Japan was niche, it ain't niche anymore. Japanese gamers are joining the rest of Asia demographically, where PC gaming is by far the largest segment of the hardcore or hobby gaming market. (Mobile gaming, of course, outstrips everything else everywhere.)

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 will release in late 2024 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X.

The game – which tells "a vampire story set in modern Seattle reimagined for World of Darkness" – is in development with celebrated indie studio, The Chinese Room.

As it's still early days, we don't yet have a gameplay trailer – although the teaser above gives us a flavour of what's to come – but The Chinese Room says it'll have gameplay to reveal in January 2024, and the game is expected to release in the fall/autumn that same year (that's Q3 for our friends in the southern hemisphere).

While Baldur’s Gate 3 takes place in the land of Faerûn, Dungeons and Dragons is home to a whole multiverse of lands, characters, and history. This means that the Baldur’s Gate 3 races you can play as focus on the Sword Coast, but not anymore, as a colossal mod for the RPG game gives you over 50 races to choose from across the DnD multiverse, and it’s incredible. With many players coming to the end of their first Baldur’s Gate 3 playthrough, now’s the perfect time to emerge as a completely different character thanks to this mod.

One Baldur’s Gate 3 mod already lets you play as an honest-to-goodness skeleton in Larian’s excellent adventure, but this is next level. Fantastical Multiverse from modder ‘DungeonsAndSouls’ has seen a 1.0 update now that BG3 is out of early access, and it includes a staggering 54 races from across the DnD multiverse and beyond.

“Playable races from Legacy, Grim Hollow, and my Homebrew have been adapted to be relevant for any class in any world in the multiverse,” DungeonsAndSouls writes. “All races are revised or made compatible with the new era of DnD if they are not officially updated to the One DnD format or Monster’s of Multiverse Fantastical Race already.

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Mod Link

1. Elf (Revised Unearthed Arcana 2024 PHB) 3 Subraces
2. Pallid Elf
3. Sea Elf
4. Shadar-kai
5. Avariel
6. Grugach
7. Tiefling(Revised Unearthed Arcana 2024 PHB) 9 Subraces
8. Githyanki (MoTM)
9. Dwarf (Revised Unearthed Arcana 2024 PHB)
10. Duergar (MoTM)
11. Half-Elf(Mark of Detection)
12. Half-Elf(Mark of the Storm)
13. Gnome(Revised Unearthed Arcana 2024 PHB)
14. Dragonborn(Revised Unearthed Arcana 2024 PHB)
15. Dragonborn (Gem Dragonborn (FIZBAN'S))
16. Half-Orc (Mark of Finding)
17. Goliath(Revised Unearthed Arcana 2024 PHB + MoTM)
18. Orc(Revised Unearthed Arcana 2024 PHB)
19. Aasimar(MoTM)
20. Genasi(Air, Earth, Fire, Water)(MoTM)
21. Bugbear(MoTM)
22. Changeling(MoTM)
23. Firbolg(MoTM)
24. Githzerai(MoTM)
25. Goblin(MoTM)
26. Kobold(VGTM + MoTM)
27. Minotaur(MoTM)
28. Shifter(MoTM)
29. Triton(MoTM)
30. Yuan-ti(Pureblood + MoTM)
31. Kender
32. Astral Elf
33. Lineages(Dhampir, Hexblood, Reborn)
34. Kalashtar
35. Verdan
36. Vedalken
37. Locathah
38. Laneshi(Grim Hollow)
39. Ogresh(Grim Hollow)
40. Downcast(Grim Hollow)
41. Dreamers(Grim Hollow)
42. The Disembodied(Grim Hollow)
43. Krsnik(D&S)
44. Moroi(D&S)
45. Mušḫuššu (D&S)
46. Tydelvian(D&S)
47. Lunari(Hemato-Kai + Crepusriel) (D&S)
48. Gwŷddpāla(D&S)
49. Nephilim(D&S)
50. Malformed(D&S)
51. Hyur(FFXIV x D&S)
52. Elezen(FFXIV x D&S)
53. Roegadyn(FFXIV x D&S)
54. Garlean(FFXIV x D&S)

Mortal Kombat 1 will be playable five days early for players who buy the fighting game's Premium Edition.

That's according to modder and reverse engineer Thethiny, who noticed that Steam has updated its Mortal Kombat 1 store listing to confirm that for those prepared to pay for the fancy edition, they'll get playable character Shang Tsung and five days early access, starting from 14th September.

"Smurfing is not welcome in Dota," say Valve, as they ban 90,000 alt accounts and say they've traced the main accounts …

During PAX West 2023's 'Voices from Valisthea' panel, Square Enix debuted a new message from Final Fantasy XVI producer Naoki Yoshida.

The main news shared by Yoshida-san is that, following the positive fan reaction to the PS5 launch in late June, the developers are now working on two paid DLCs and the PC version. Yoshida said he hopes to be able to provide more information on DLCs and the PC port before the end of the year.

The game may not land on PC exactly when the six-month PS5 exclusivity ends, then, but it could still be available on the platform before its first anniversary.

Yoshida also announced the launch of Final Fantasy XVI update 1.10. This patch adds the weapon transmogrification feature (you may change your weapon's skin to that of any in your possession while retaining the stats of the currently equipped weapon) and alternate outfits for Clive, Jill, Torgal, Ambrosia, and Joshua.

The latest benchmarks of Intel's next-gen Core i9-14900K Desktop CPU have leaked and show a nice performance boost over the 13900K.

The Intel Core i9-14900K Desktop CPU is going to be the fastest chip within the 14th Gen stack. It will feature similar specifications as the existing Core i9-13900K but will be tuned for higher clocks and power limits, allowing for a performance boost that is well within the expected range of any refreshed chip because that's what the 14th Gen Raptor Lake Refresh family is at the end of the day.

Starfield: 32 GPU Benchmark, 1080p, 1440p, 4K / Ultra, High, Medium

Today we're taking a look at GPU performance in Starfield by testing 32
GPUs using three quality presets and three resolutions so there's a lot to go over.

If you want to know what all the various quality settings do and how best to optimize the game for either performance or visuals then be sure to check out yesterday's GPU optimization guide video I made. This video is less about analysis of visuals and all about FPS numbers and for this we will be using the built-in presets though with fsr2 manually disables at least for the majority of the testing.

Now the first step was to work out how we should go about testing such a vast title where's the best location to Benchmark Starfield after a little over
an hour of gameplay we found that the forest of Jemisin were the most
demanding section of the game we'd come across. Initially, we did start testing in New Atlantis which will be a great area of the game for CPU testing, but for GPU testing the forests were more demanding.
This is why you might see that our numbers are a bit lower than other
testers these forests are seriously demanding, and we wanted to show
performance there as the baseline minimum you can achieve when poo hits
the fan.

Other areas of the game do perform a bit better, so as always, in addition to looking at raw FPS numbers, margins between products is a good guide
if you want to compare what you currently have to an upgrade option listed in the charts now for testing we're focused on the medium, high, and
Ultra presets. Though, please note while all of them enable FSR2 we've manually disabled upscaling for the bulk of our testing as we wish to show you native performance. That said we also have some FSR2 results for you as well.

Starfield NVIDIA DLSS 3.5.0 Quality vs AMD FSR 2.2 Quality at 1440p, 4K and Ultra settings on i7 10700F + RTX 4080

How to install NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution Mod for Starfield:
https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/m...

1. Download the StarfieldUpscaler archive.
2. Extract the archive into the Starfield folder.
3. Download the UpscalerBasePlugin archive:
   https://www.nexusmods.com/site/mods/5...
4. Extract the PDPerfplugin.dll into mods/UpscalerBasePlugin folder.
5. Download the DLSS 3.5 file:
   https://www.techpowerup.com/download/...
6. Extract the nvngx_dlss.dll into mods/UpscalerBasePlugin folder.
7. Launch the game and press END in the game to open the menu for the upscaler, and you can select DLSS.
8. You need to turn on FSR2 in the game's settings, cuz this mod replaces FSR 2.2 with DLSS/XeSS.
9. There's no quality levels anymore, you simply change the render scaling ratio in the game's settings (67% = Quality mode, 50% = Performance mode).
10. Play the game with DLSS 3.5.

Upscaler base plugin
Upscaler for dlss/xess
DLSS dll link at techpowerup

The game director for League of Legends Wild Rift has been let go by Riot Games amid layoffs, after his work on the mobile spin-off and FPS game Valorant.

League of Legends Wild Rift game director Jared Berbach announces that he’s no longer with Riot Games. The director of the mobile spin-off to the hugely popular MOBA says his role was cut amid a “reduction in force” by the League of Legends developer. Despite this news, he gives his thanks to his coworkers and praises Riot’s goal “to be the most player-focused game company in the world.”

From Software has confirmed it is "investigating" a save issue that is affecting Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon's PC players.

In a tweet posted to the studio's Japanese language player support X/Twitter account, the team confirmed the issue was affecting players who put their PCs to sleep whilst the game was still running. Consequently, it's now urging players to save and properly shut down Armored Core 6 before their PCs slip into sleep mode.

"In the PC version of 'Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon', there is a problem that save data is not saved properly under certain circumstances," the developer explained, as translated by Google Translate.

According to Paradox, a grand total of 50,159,539 murder schemes have been successfully carried out since Crusader Kings 3's arrival back in 2020. That's nearly 16m more murder plots than wedding celebrations, which currently sit at 34,480,042. And, of course, more than a few chaotic sorts have thoroughly muddied the waters between the two, with Paradox reporting a total of 7,790 bloody weddings have been msaterminded by players who cleary weren't going to let a bit of murder get in the way of anyone's big day - or possiby vice versa.

Starfield unlocked on August 31 for Premium and Constellation Edition owners. The game is categorized as playable on Steam Deck, however, it is not yet Steam Deck Verified, the highest stamp of approval from Valve that designates games that play well on Deck "right out of the box."

Starfield's "playable" status on Steam Deck, in other words, means that you might have to do a couple of things to get it working well. I had to do a handful of tweaks to get it running on the handheld PC, and even then, I struggled to play at more than 25 fps most of the time (see more detail on Steam Deck settings for Starfield below).

Once I finished tweaking the settings, Starfield did run reasonably well on my Steam Deck: The text is mostly readable, the controls work, and the battery life isn't as bad as I thought it would be.

This video explores GPU performance in Starfield using cards like the RTX 4090, RX 7900 XTX, GTX 1070, 1080 Ti, RTX 3080, RX 7600, and plenty more. We ran all of these through the game's early access in about 16 hours, so there's still plenty more to come for Starfield content. Our immediate plans include testing Arc (once it works -- currently, Intel Arc doesn't launch Starfield) and re-running numbers as new drivers and patches continue to roll-out. It's very likely this will make its way into permanent placement in our GPU games test suite to replace some older titles. Our testing for Bethesda's Starfield focuses on 1080p, 1440p, and 4K, with a mix of low, medium, high, and ultra benchmarks. We did not use any FSR or dynamic resolution scaling for our tests (and also disabled variable rate shading and Vsync); however, if there's interest, we might visit FSR tests specifically as we have more time to work on the game -- particularly after its official launch.

This testing looks at the best GPUs for Starfield, max graphics settings, and more.

One correction in here: The line item for the RX 7900 XT should show 20GB of memory, not 24GB.

A lot of cool releases and updates this week. What are folks playing? Starfield? Trine 5? Sea of Stars? Armoured Core 6? No Man's Sky

Today, we are launching Voyagers, our eleventh community expedition for No Man’s Sky. Voyagers is a relaxing journey of exploration, encouraging Travellers to seek out remarkable worlds, reach planetary summits and oceanbeds, and catalogue their findings.

Travellers will begin the expedition aboard their freighter in the Oishida system, ready to deploy their ship into space. Plot a route through the stars to discover exotic creatures, venture to extreme worlds, excavate ancient treasures, dive through a black hole, and much more!

After completing Voyagers, or when the expedition concludes, you will have the option to convert your progress to a Normal Mode save.

The exclusive rewards detailed below are registered at the Space Anomaly’s Quicksilver Synthesis Companion, and any earnt rewards may be redeemed across all save games.

The Voyagers expedition begins today, and will run for approximately two months.

...

As most PC gamers will have noticed right away when launching the game, there is no Starfield FOV (Field of View) slider in the game's settings. This is unfortunate since the default setting appears to be 75, which is lower than preferable, especially for those who experience motion sickness when playing in first-person view.

Thankfully, several mods are already starting to appear on Nexus, including some that allow players to increase the Starfield FOV value. User Hellstorm102 provided a downloadable StarfieldCustom.ini file that needs to be placed in the Documents/MyGames/Starfield folder to enable the increased Field of View. The provided file sets FOV to 100 for both first-person and third-person view, though any user can modify the .ini with different values as desired.

Likely, Bethesda will eventually add an in-game Starfield FOV slider at some point, but mods will have to do in the meantime.

...

After playing some Starfield, I wish it was less like Fallout with a dash of No Man's Sky and more like Starflight.

starflight

Starflight did three things right:

1. Made space travel meaningful and dangerous: Running into baddies, dangers or simply out of fuel was always possible, but the further you went it was possible to gain better resources.
   Flying was also challenging (but fun) when you had to consider gravity and the fact that the ship won't break unless something stops it. So fuel conservation was juggling between all these things.

In fact, landing in a high-gravity planet was not only hard, but in some cases gave one ticket to Pancake'd town.

navigation

In Starfield, ships are only there as fast travel vehicles. In No Man's Sky, they are more meaningful, though it still feels like a magic plane in a vacuum.

1. Resource gathering felt like an adventure: In most of these games resource gathering is a chore, something I need to do to build X or buy Y. Starfield had resource-rich planets that were actively dangerous, be it by creatures or by natural phenomena, the buggy would start to take damage and it was a gamble with knowing when to pack up and leave.
   NMS gets close but if I spent more time inventory sorting, pressing X for mining a resource and scanning for further resources, I'm not enjoying my time with it.

resources

1. Alien encounters were tense: The first time I met an alien in Starflight, it was as nerve wrecking, as I could "raise shields" and start combat, but also try figuring out if I could understand them. The crew may (or not) speak partially their language, so they may seem helpful but actually be plotting to shoot you down while your shields are down.

The crew could help these cases when simpathetic aliens were found, or the oposite when they scanned the ship and found their foes.

encounters

But most importantly, all three were part of discovering clues by conversation or exploration, and figure out the mystery before space went boom.

ship

The problem I have with new games is the lack of urgency, I can't believe the main quest if the game invites me to play looter simulator or yet spend another hour mining iron.

It is also 30 years old.

#PCGaming

Starfield Premium owners now have access to the game in full and are testing their internet download limits with its massive 120 GB file size, but a few hopeful gamers are going to have to wait regardless of how much they paid in advance. Intel Arc GPUs currently cannot play Starfield, with varying symptoms ranging from the game not starting to it taking 30-40 minutes before presenting the player with a jumbled cacophany of texture mayhem. Users report that the executable does launch in the background, and that during the half-hour that it's visible in Task Manager it can consume as much as 30 GB of system memory, before either crashing or finally presenting the game menu.

Lenovo is unveiling the Lenovo Legion Go, the company's first Windows gaming handheld device, to give gamers more freedom to game however—and wherever—they want. The Lenovo Legion Go is designed for gamers who will settle for nothing less than top-tier specs and visuals on their handheld device. Along with the micro-OLED-equipped new Lenovo Legion Glasses and new Lenovo Legion E510 7.1 RGB Gaming In-Ear Headphones, the debut of the Lenovo Legion Go is a marked expansion of the Lenovo Legion ecosystem of gaming devices, monitors, accessories, software, and services that empower gamers to immerse themselves in their games.

• The new Lenovo Legion Go brings Windows PC gaming power to a handheld mobile form factor, powered by AMD Ryzen Z1 Series processors that bring games to life on its 8.8-inch Lenovo PureSight Gaming Display.
• For gamers who want to take their Lenovo Legion Go portable gaming experience to the next level, the new Lenovo Legion Glasses leverage micro-OLED technology to provide a large screen viewing experience that fits in the pocket.
• For a truly immersive gaming experience, the new Lenovo Legion E510 7.1 RGB Gaming In-Ear Headphones offer hi-res 7.1 surround sound audio with a multifunction inline controller.

YouTube Trailer

Crossgeposted von: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/2615454

Counter-Strike 2 will give players a rank for each individual map. Players will also receive a single rank based on the Premiere mode (pick-and-ban maps for each match).

It's a stormy night. The lights are off. The doors are locked. Somewhere, a woman is singing. Somewhere else, a phone is ringing. The sinks are full of gunk and there are children hiding in the cupboards. Oh, and the darker stretches of floor are covered with writhing tentacles. This is Holstin, a Polish survival horror experience in which you merrily rove an isolated town that, based on 14 minutes of fumbling around in exactly one very unwelcoming house, already seems a match for Silent Hill in terms of existential squalor. A public playtest is underway, and I've got a trailer for you through the jump.

Among Holstin's highlights, if you can call them that, is its clever not-as-throwback-as-it-looks visual direction. At first you might take it for a 2D isometric pixelart game, but then you rotate the view and realise that these are 3D sets, with dynamic lighting and interactive objects sometimes hidden behind corners. Get into a shootout, and the view plunges to a nifty over-the-shoulder perspective.

Youtube Trailer