PC Gaming

At 22.5 x 9 x 3 cm, the Ayaneo Air 1S is more like a Nintendo Switch than a Steam Deck. In fact, it's a touch smaller than the Switch. Or slightly bigger than a medium-large banana. The retro model I've got in for review weighs only ~405g on my scales, which is a little heavier than my Switch at around ~400g but far lighter than my Steam Deck at ~650g. There's even a thinner and lighter model, the Air 1S Thin, though that's a limited edition.

Point is, it's a handheld gaming PC that feels more like a handheld gaming device of old than any other I've used. It's a powerful GameBoy Advance, and boy, is it powerful.

The Ayaneo Air 1S may look like it needs a downgrade to stuff all its parts into that tiny shell. But, no. It comes with the same AMD Ryzen 7 7840U chip found within the AOKZOE A1 Pro or the OneXPlayer OneXFly. That's a full eight-core, 16-thread Zen 4 processor. I still can't really believe that sort of spec comes in a compact PC at all. It's paired up with a Radeon 780M integrated graphics, powered by 12 RDNA 3 CUs—four more CUs than the Steam Deck's RDNA 2 chip.

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A cosy new hobbit-based Lord of the Rings spinoff game has been teased by Wētā Workshop and Private Division. Yes, it is actually happening.

Tales of the Shire was announced to celebrate Hobbit Day, and promises to provide a snuggly "heart-warming" experience set in Tolkein's Middle-earth universe. It's coming from Wētā Workshop and Private Division and will arrive sometime next year. Needless to say, I am more than a little bit excited.

To accompany this announcement, a small teaser was also released. It is short and suitably charming, showing a young person humming as she sits at a table strewn with flora and art supplies. There are also modern bits and pieces, such as headphones. She is painting in a book, and while I have nothing to base this on other than my hunch, she looks to be painting herself as a hobbit. Could this be Tales of the Shire's soon to be pint-sized protagonist?
Reveal Trailer with no gameplay

The third major patch for Baldur's Gate 3 is now being rolled out, and it includes the long-awaited Magic Mirror feature.

Players can now change their character's appearance by finding the Magic Mirror in camp. Everything other than race and subrace of your character can be altered - though it also can't be used to get rid of any "cosmetic modifications that are a consequence of your gameplay choices". Also, origin characters, hirelings and full illithids can't use the Magic Mirror.

Patch three has also added full support for the game on Mac, with Larian Studios recommending any players on Mac remove any mods and reinstall the game fresh before playing.

Recently at the Tokyo Game Show Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais spoke to CNBC about PC gaming and Steam Deck, here's what was said during the interview.

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• When talking about the power of SteamOS - "we would like to work with other hardware manufacturers, so they can adopt SteamOS in the future".
• On VR: "for Steam Deck we don't really have a VR story to it, but it's definitely something we want to explore more in the future".
• For the future: "we're not really seeing growth stop after COVID, so for us it's really important to keep working on the current version of the Steam Deck, put together software updates we just released a big SteamOS 3.5 update that's added new features we're going to keep doing that - but also work on the hardware side supply chain, retail presence, work with distributors to get the Deck available worldwide and expand its audience so we're going to be focusing on that short term - in the future we're looking at the PC market and where technology is going and see if there's any interesting opportunities there".
• When asked about console cycles, games being higher-end and Steam Deck upgrades: "right now we're looking at this performance target that we have as a stable target for a couple years, we think that it's a pretty sweet spot in terms of being able to play all the experiences from this new generation and so far the new releases coming out have been great experiences on Steam Deck. We're working with developers on future releases and we're monitoring the feedback there but so far it's been pretty good on the horsepower front".

Twitter Thread

Five and a half years and endless requests from the community later, Rare has announced it'll finally be adding private servers to Sea of Thieves - meaning a single crew of up to four players can explore the world without fear of PvP encounters - starting this December, as part of the multiplayer pirate adventure's Season 10.

Season 10 itself gets underway on 19th October, and will introduce a major new feature each month ahead of 2024 - essentially meaning all content originally planned for 2023 will arrive before the end of the year, despite a painfully protracted, seven-month-long Season 9.

First up, on 19th October, Sea of Thieves will introduce Guilds, described as a "new way for players to form meaningful bonds beyond their immediate crew". Essentially, any player that's reached Captain status and has their own ship can start a guild - picking a name, logo, and emblem when then do so - which can then support up to 24 invited players.

I figured I was going to have to uninstall my Cyberpunk 2077 mods before checking out Phantom Liberty and update 2.0⁠. Most of the mods I went for on my last playthrough were difficulty and loot adjustments that'd clash with 2.0's big changes, and for the rest, mod authors would likely need to update their files to play nice with the patch. What I wasn't expecting was needing to do a clean reinstall⁠—complete with deleting some leftover files⁠—to clear up a persistent crash on startup.

I'm not sure exactly what borked my game, but big, foundational mod projects like Cyber Engine Tweaks need to be updated with each major patch in turn, and some users in the past have reported similar crash on startup issues to what I experienced. Mod author yamashi has noted on the mod's page that they will be working on a patch 2.0 version of Cyber Engine Tweaks in the coming days.

In the meantime, if you're a returning player, you may want to preemptively pull the nuclear option and do a clean install of Cyberpunk 2077 following CD Projekt's own instructions. The developer recommends:

• First, backup your save files in user/Saved Games/CD Projekt Red/Cyberpunk 2077
• Disable Steam or GOG's cloud save feature for the game (I forgot to do this but still cleared up my issue)
• Uninstall Cyberpunk and delete the following folders:
• The Cyberpunk 2077 folder in your Steam or GOG directory (ex: Seam/steamapps/common/Cyberpunk 2077)
• user/Saved Games/CD Projekt Red/Cyberpunk 2077
• user/AppData/Local/REDEngine
• user/AppData/Local/CD Projekt Red
• Restart your PC, reinstall the game, restore your saves, then reactivate cloud saves if you disabled them.

Star Wars Outlaws creative director Julian Gerighty will take a new role at Ubisoft once that game is done: executive producer of everything Tom Clancy's The Division. That includes oversight of all the Division-branded games: The Division 2, The Division Heartland, mobile game The Division Resurgence, and, what's this? The Division 3, which Ubisoft casually announced in the press release about Gerighty's new job.

Star Wars Outlaws and The Division 2 studio Massive Entertainment is "actively building a team" for The Division 3 right now, the press release says. As for Gerighty's current project, open world Star Wars game Outlaws, Ubisoft says he "remains fully committed" to it and that he'll "remain on the project through launch" before starting his new role.

The Division 3 is very early in development then, which helps explain the lowkey announcement—there's no trailer or even artwork to share. We've seen similarly concise, early game announcements from other big developers in recent years. Blizzard, for instance, announced last year that it's working on a survival game without giving it a name, a move we interpreted as an effort to recruit talent.

The fallout from the big Unity mess continues, with the MonoGame team jumping in to present a new plan for the future of this open-source and cross-platform framework for game developers.

If you've not actually heard of MonoGame you've likely still played something originally created with it including the likes of Bastion, Streets of Rage 4, Chasm, FEZ, Axiom Verge, Stardew Valley, Tooth and Tail and a great many more (although some moved to FNA). That's just a few taking from their limited showcase page.

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The best part is that DLSS 3.5 not only brings Ray Reconstruction support but is supported across all RTX GPUs and also supports the latest DLSS Super Resolution AI framework for much better image reconstruction.

The elimination of these denoisers also means that the engine is less crammed up and has more room to breathe which as a result opens up room for better performance too. We will get to the performance aspect in a bit but for now, let's talk about how to enable DLSS 3.5 within Cyberpunk 2077.

(OP - here's some related video links)
Gamers Nexus Cyberpunk 2.0 Ray Reconstruction COmparison
Hardware Unboxed- Better Ray Tracing, (Almost) No Cost -

The 4X strategy genre has a new upstart – with Paradox’s Interactive’s Millenia taking aim at Civilization’s crown.

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Enter Millenia, a new IP from Paradox Interactive, developed by independent developer C Prompt Games. You won’t know C Prompt – they’re new – but core members of their team have worked on titles like Age of Mythology, Age of Empires, Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo. The strategy pedigree is there.

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Announcement Trailer

While most of us whiled away the many days of pandemic-induced lockdown in 2020 binge-watching Netflix and baking our own bread for some reason, acclaimed anime screenwriter Gen Urobochi (Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Psycho-Pass) went ahead and built his own video game. That game, a rough demo that featured a rabbit in a mechanical suit blasting his way through piles of junk in a post-apocalyptic world, would eventually serve as the jumping off point for Rusty Rabbit, the new 2.5D Metroidvania from developer Nitro Plus announced this week at Tokyo Game Show.

This Metroidvania with roguelike elements takes place thousands of years after humanity has abandoned the Earth, and rabbits have taken over. Stamp, the long-eared main character, spends his days piloting his mech suit ‘Junkster’ through the giant ruins of a giant space elevator in search of valuable scrap. When one day he stumbles upon clues to the whereabouts of his missing daughter on an abandoned ‘D-Tam’ computer terminal, it sends Stamp on a search for more of these computer terminals buried throughout Rusty Rabbit’s Metroidvania-style maze. All the while battling enemies and hunting for treasures, then subsequently making return trips to his base camp at the surface in order to upgrade his suit.

YouTube Video

These new drivers don't promise much by way of specifics. Though Nvidia does say they provide "the best gaming experience for the latest new games supporting DLSS 3.5 technology and DLSS Ray Reconstruction including Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty."

That's probably reason enough to go out and download this driver package. Cyberpunk is chocked full of the latest graphics features, including Ray Reconstruction. Our Dave has been playing around with Ray Reconstruction in Cyberpunk 2077 ahead of time, and he's quite smitten with it already.

Driver link

Build A Rocket Boy, the studio founded by former Rockstar exec Leslie Benzies, has announced plans for an imminent PC closed alpha test of its ambitious-looking game creation platform Everywhere.

This closed alpha will be accessible to players who sign up for an account at Everywhere.game.

A new trailer for Everywhere, released today, shows some of the biomes you can explore and play around with in the game, as well as some swooping camera pans through its Ready Player One-style hub. There's also a glimpse at some of the types of mini-games you can build and a brief look at the game's editor mode, which lets you tweak creations you've made on the fly.

YouTube Trailer

Some time into figuring out Fantastic Haven's UI and menu options, I received a notification that a gryphon—who I'd so nicely made a little patch of grassland for—had gone rogue. Tabbing back to my settlement, I watched the little rascal sprint for my quarantine building and smack it before my helpful golems came along to calm the poor blighter down.

These charming little vignettes give the creatures of Fantastic Haven a whole lot of personality, even if they're only in your enclosures for a short period of time. Fantastic Haven is a Fantasy Management builder—meaning you'll be making adjustments to your clinic for wondrous beasts from a top-down view, plonking down buildings, assigning your wizards to tasks, navigating a research tree, that sort of thing.

YouTube Trailer
Steam Page

Looking to dust off Cyberpunk 2077 for the new 2.0 update? If you want the game looking, and running, like Johnny Silverhand's Porsche 911 Turbo, you should enable one of the game's many available upscaling technologies. You have a few to choose from: DLSS, FSR, and XeSS.

You can take your pick of the lot with a modern GeForce graphics card installed in your PC, though I would stick with Nvidia's own DLSS. Cyberpunk 2077 has become the poster child for new DLSS versions, including DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction, and it looks real good. But those with AMD or Intel cards, or older Nvidia GPUs, don't have that option available to them.

(OP: Article has some comparison shots with sliders)

After a draining day's reportage upon the thoroughly alien doings of vast corporate publishers, I like nothing better than to flee, blabbing and weeping, into the arms of a micro-RPG. Scumhead's Franzen - released a few days ago on Steam and Itch - has a couple of big draws, straight off the bat. Firstly and least importantly, it's free, which it really shouldn't be. Secondly and more significantly, it's one of those rare RPG miniatures that is both richly imagined and snappy, with a busy and befuddling world in which you have immediate clear motivations that escalate rapidly and breed Dire Implications. It also looks like a 16-bit Pathologic, so consider me firmly on board.

YouTube Trailer
Steam Page
Itch Page

A new version of Stardock's cosmic empire wrangler Galactic Civilizations IV, titled Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Edition, will release out of early access on Steam and the Epic Games Store on 19th October - which also happens to be Stardock's 30th anniversary. It's "by far the biggest expansion Stardock has ever made", according to company founder Brad Wardell, who claims this latest dollop of interstellar tyranny will "transform the gameplay in ways not seen in a 4X game before". By which he chiefly means that the Supernova Edition uses large language learning models to generate civ backstories on demand. Let's dig in!

There's a catch, though. Because of the lightweight and portable design of this thing, there isn't much space for super high-performance computing. If you were hoping to max out all of your games in a device that fits in your backpack, your best bet is still going to be one of the best gaming laptops. However, where the ROG Ally shines – much like the Steam Deck – is in playing the indie games that make PC gaming so magical in the first place.

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The Asus ROG Ally Z1 is equipped with a 7-inch FHD display, which is much better than the 800p display on the Steam Deck. However, while the ROG Ally Z1 has a slightly more powerful APU, the extra resolution is going to cause some performance problems if you're not careful – more on that later.

The problem here is that you're going to want to take full advantage of this display. It's a 7-inch IPS beauty rated at 500 nits of brightness and can theoretically reproduce 100% of the sRGB color spectrum. It's absolutely stunning, especially when the brightness is turned up.

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Star Citizen’s long-running development has inched forward yet again, this time to the Alpha 3.20 stage. The latest update, dubbed “Fully Loaded”, overhauls the Arena Commander mode, adds new PvP modes, maps, and racetracks, and adds new missions and ships to the Persistent Universe portion of the space sim.

This is the largest update to Arena Commander since its introduction in 2014, developer Cloud Imperium Games said, and delivers “more focused, bite-sized gameplay with diverse content for racers, fighters, and competitors climbing the leaderboards”.

The update also adds the MISC Hull C ship, the “titan of the cargo hauling profession with room for a crew of up to four players”, and the Fury LX, a racing variant of the recently added Mirai Fury snub fighter. New features include automatic cargo loading and unloading at space stations to support the Hull C’s expansive cargo capacity.

YouTube Trailer

... The First Descendant, whose open cross-play beta is currently enjoying a healthy spot on Steam's most played games list. At the time of this writing, The First Descendant has over 77,591 concurrent players, and that figure continues to rise. It's easy to imagine it landing into the top 10 by the end of the day.

So what is it? Well, The First Descendant is a free-to-play, sci-fi, third-person, co-op shooter that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world. But instead of one where rogue machines destroyed human civilization, you fight off monsters to ensure the survival of humanity's remains following an alien attack.

The First Descendant is developed by Nexon (Korea's Tencent, basically). The beta is live until September 25, but the full game doesn't have a release date. Even in these busy weeks for major video game releases, the game already has a sizeable audience. Obviously, it remains to be seen whether it can bring all those players back at launch.

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Steam Page

AMD has updated its Radeon Adrenalin driver with the latest edition, 23.9.2. The newest version brings unified driver support for AMD Radeon RX 7700 and RX 7800, which the previous driver lacked, and there was a separate download for these two SKUs. Besides merging into a single unified driver, the new update brings Lies of P, Party Animals, and The Crew Motorfest game support for AMD Radeon graphics. In this driver release, the AMD Radeon Anti-Lag+ feature is introduced for Starfield, Witcher 3, ELDEN RING, Immortal of Aveum, and an Anti-Lag+ screen overlay for system latency. AMD fixed some issues like application crashing while playing Baldur Gate 3 with Vulkan API on RX 7900 XTX, limited GPU clock tuning on RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT, application crash while playing SMITE on RX 7900 XTX, and application crash or driver timeout while playing F1 2023 on RX 7800 XT. There is no Cyberpunk 2077 update yet in this driver release.

You'll need just 40GB of storage to install Mirage, with a variety of CPUs and GPUs supported for running the game somewhere between 1080p 30fps and up to 4K and 60fps.

On the low end, you're looking at a Nvidia GeForce 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 570 with 8GB RAM. On the high end, you'll need a Nvidia GeForce 3080 or AMD Radeon 6900 with 16GB RAM.

Terraria developer Re-Logic is donating $100k to two open source engines in the wake of Unity's recent policy changes.

Re-Logic does not even use Unity, but in a statement via X (formerly Twitter) the developer said it felt it "cannot sit idly by as these predatory moves are made against studios everywhere".

Godot and FNA will receive $100k each, and Re-Logic will also continue sponsoring both with a further $1k per month. "All we ask in return is that they remain good people and keep doing all that they can to make these engines powerful and approachable for developers everywhere," said Re-Logic.

Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 is coming soon - the first showcase for DLSS 3.5 ray reconstruction, integrated into a full DLSS package including super resolution and frame generation, all combining to produce a state-of-the-art visual experience. In this roundtable discussion, we discuss how ray reconstruction works, how it was developed and its applications outside of path-traced games. We also talk about the evolution of the original DLSS, the success of DLSS in the modding community and the future of machine learning in PC graphics.

Many thanks to all participants in this roundtable chat: Bryan Catanzaro, Vice President Applied Deep Learning Research at Nvidia, Jakub Knapik VP Art and Global Art Director at CD Projekt RED, GeForce evangelist Jacob Freeman and Pedro Valadas of the PCMR sub-Reddit.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:10 When did the DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction project start and why?
00:04:16 How did you get DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction up and running?
00:06:17 What was it like to integrate DLSS 3.5 for Cyberpunk 2077?
00:10:21 What are the new game inputs for DLSS 3.5?
00:11:25 Can DLSS 3.5 be used for hybrid ray tracing titles and not just path traced ones?
00:12:41 What is the target performance budget for DLSS 3.5?
00:14:10 Is DLSS a crutch for bad performance optimisation in PC games?
00:20:19 What makes machine learning specifically useful for denoising?
00:24:00 Why is DLSS naming kind of confusing?
00:27:03 What did the new denoising enable for Cyberpunk 2077's graphical vision?
00:32:10 Will Nvidia still focus on performance without DLSS at native resolutions?
00:38:26 What prompted the change internally at Nvidia to move away from DLSS 1.0 and pursue DLSS 2.0?
00:43:43 What do you think about DLSS mods for games that lack DLSS?
00:49:52 Where can machine learning go in the future for games beyond DLSS 3.5?