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What's the old saying? Three may keep an NDA if two of them are dead? Whatever it was, it's been proved right by the recent launch of the endgame beta for Diablo 4, whose playtesters rushed to Reddit to post about it almost as soon as they were invited, in clear contravention of the big bright letters spelling out "CONFIDENTIAL" right there in the email.
Blizzard sent out the beta invites exclusively to players who "recently spent significant amounts of time playing the end-game experiences of Diablo II: Resurrected, Diablo III, and Diablo Immortal," according to an update the company put out last month. The very same update also pointed out that the beta would be "confidential, meaning players invited will be unable to publicly talk about or share their gameplay experience". Oh well.
The Diablo 4 subreddit has already had to clamp down on posts from excited beta participants violating their NDAs, but the cat's out of the bag. The internet is already awash with takes, screenshots, and gameplay videos of Diablo 4's post-campaign. On the other hand, the takes mostly seem quite positive so far, which probably soothes Blizzard's wounded trust at least a little bit.
It's far from the first Diablo 4 leak. It was only last month that 40 minutes of gameplay footage leaked, showing a Barbarian character traipsing across a test build that was light on textures and heavy on combat. With so much footage and info about the game already floating around, Blizzard's insistence on telling testers to keep everything secret feels like slamming the barn door after the horse has bolted and uploaded its adventures to YouTube.
Well, even the pretence of secrecy won't last long. Diablo 4 will open up public testing early 2023, and the game itself will launch the same year. That's if it doesn't leak first.
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The Gotham Knights Batarangs are little collectibles that the Dark Knight left behind before his unfortunate departure. Now it's up to you to explore every nook and cranny in Gotham to collect all 60 of these lost little bats. The rewards aren't exactly spectacular, but it's a good way of getting XP, an ability point, and to tour Gotham's gloomy sights.
Unlike the Gotham Knights graffiti murals that are often several stories tall, Batarangs are a lot tougher to track down. They aren't marked on your map, and they don't even show up when you use your scanner, meaning you have to find them the old-fashioned way. To make matters worse, the game marks progress towards their completion in a really strange way, requiring you to collect 12 Batarangs for every big area, which consist of two separate city districts.
In this Gotham Knights Batarang guide, I'll share some tips for how best to find them, as well as the locations for every region I've managed to scout so far, namely, Downtown and Lower Gotham. If you're curious how the Arkham series sequel has shaped up up, see our Gotham Knights review.
How to spot Batarangs
You can often spy Batterangs glowing on distant rooftops (Image credit: Warner Bros)
If you've played any superhero games in the past, you've likely got plenty of experience traipsing across cities to track down collectibles. Batarangs are scattered all over Gotham, but there isn't really any solid way to locate them. The game suggests using your scanner, but since you can't see them through buildings—and Gotham is a maze of skyscrapers—this advice doesn't really help. That said, if you get close enough to one you can spot it by the pillar of blue light it gives out.
There are twelve Batarangs for each of Gotham's big regions, which means approximately six to find in each individual named district (West End, Southside, and so on). If you hover your cursor over an area on the map, you can tell if you've found every Batarang, as the bat symbol in the bottom right will have a green tick. My advice for finding them is to head to named locations, since they always seem to have a Batarang nearby. Out of all those I found, there also weren't any at street level, so be sure to search up high and keep an eye out for shiny blue pillars of light.
Downtown Batarang locations
(Image credit: Warner Bros)Downtown includes the Financial District and the West End areas, with twelve Batarangs to locate across both. Here's where to find each based on the numbers above:
1. On the radio pole at the top of the Belfry
2. On top of Quartz Labs by the water on the north side
3. Halfway up the Gotham City Shopping Centre
4. At the top of the clocktower above the Gotham City Ferry Company
5. Between the two halves of the Gotham City Towers Apartment building by the bridge
6. On a lower ledge on the north-west corner of the Elliot Building
7. On a rooftop near to the bridge, just to the south of a church.
8. On top of the Gotham City Gazette building.
9. Just to the east of the Chelsea Tunnel by a billboard
10. Stuck into a wooden board above an open window into a train station.
11. Inside the cages on the roof of the GCPD Major Crimes Unit.
12. On top of Gotham City General HospitalLower Gotham Batarang locations
(Image credit: Warner Bros)The region of Lower Gotham includes both The Cauldron and Southside. There are another twelve Batarangs to locate here. Here's where to find each one:
1. Stuck in the side of a water tower on top of a building
2. On a rooftop underneath The Cauldron's eastern bridge
3. On top of a building underneath some train tracks, near a Washer Dryer sign
4. By the Stagg sign at the top of the building
5. On top of a big railyard warehouse
6. The top of S.T.A.R labs, on a window cleaning box support strut
7. On the second to highest level at the front of Waynetech Tower
8. At the rear of the most easterly ship crane at Dixon Docks
9. In the industrial tower to the south-east of Cobblepot Steel
10. On top of a dock hook on a jetty to the east of Ocran Chemicals
11. Inside a shipping container underneath the bridge leading to Old Gotham.
12. The south-west gargoyle at the top of the Cobblepot Steel building -
Square Enix just shadow-dropped a trailer for Final Fantasy 16 and if I wasn't sold on the game before, I certainly am now. The stunning new video titled Ambition gives a better look at some key party members and the different kingdoms that'll be present in the game. It's a lovely lore dump filled with the usual Final Fantasy nonsense and I am all here for it.
As the narrator grimly states, the land of Valisthea is dying. The crystals—a good ol' staple of the series—are fading in power, the world becoming consumed by darkness. It's all very classic doom 'n' gloom, and it seems as though Valisthea's kingdoms are vying for what's left of the Mothercrystals' power. There are five of them in total: the traditional Grand Duchy of Rosaria, the sparkling Holy Empire of Sanbreque, the sandy dunes of the Dhalmekian Republic, the fiery Iron Kingdom and the dark Kingdom of Waloed.
The trailer gives us a closer look at some of these kingdoms' Dominants—humans who possess the power of an Eikon, this game's version of summons. Some kingdoms revere their Dominants, while others live in fear of them. There are glimpses of some classic Final Fantasy summons—there's what looks to be a man with the power of Titan, hints of thunder god Ramuh and a woman who blasts out icicles a la Shiva.
Here's the latest from #FF16 producer Naoki Yoshida and director Hiroshi Takai. pic.twitter.com/nGua2jDsyYOctober 20, 2022
See moreWhile the trailer focuses on world-building, there's a tiny bit of combat to peep too. You can see a battle between Clive and Benedikta, Garuda's chosen Dominant as she twirls mid-air and flings a wind spell with her wings. There's a brief look at Hugo, who I believe to be Titan's dominant, as his arm becomes giant and rock-like, swinging for an uppercut. I love the idea of these half-human, half-summons and seeing more of them in combat has got me well and truly hyped.
It's good news on the development front too after director Naoki Yoshida announced at the end of last year that the team was six months behind on development. "The team has turned the corner and entered the home stretch, and is currently concentrating its efforts on debugging, tweaking, polishing, and optimisation," he announced in a statement posted to the game's Twitter.
Sadly, it seems as though PC players will have to wait a little longer than the current Summer 2023 release date. Despite originally being announced (and then promptly unannounced) for PC, the game will be fully exclusive to PS5 for the first six months. Hopefully, we won't have to wait as long as we did for the Final Fantasy 7 Remake.
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DDR5 isn't hanging about. The memory standard may still be viewed as being new for the vast majority of us since its introduction to the PC market last year, but it's gaining speed quickly. And I mean that literally. The latest memory kits and specifications announced by G.Skill show DDR5-7800, DDR-7600, and DDR5-7400 kits are on the way.
(Image credit: G.Skill)The performance memory company also published a screenshot showing its Trident Z5 RAM clocked at a whopping 4,000MHz for an effective DDR5-8000 rating. The shot shows the memory running on an Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Apex motherboard with an Intel Core i9 13900K in the driving seat. The 2x 16GB kit has 38-48-48-125 timings, which is surprisingly speedy. You're looking at real-world latencies of 9.5ns, which is impressive given the frequency.
Incredible stuff when you consider that the memory standard launched just last year at what can now only be considered utterly pedestrian DDR-4800 speeds. While some of these new kits from G.Skill may take a while to come to market, there are plenty of DDR5 sticks out there that are close to or exceeding 6,000MT/s. And while you will pay a premium over slower kits, the push to go faster is clearly a driving force.
One of the reasons for this renewed push for DDR5 is because Intel's new Raptor Lake and AMD's Zen 4 processors support the standard, while at release only Intel's Alder Lake did. It's worth noting that Alder Lake and Raptor Lake support DDR5 as well as the more-affordable DDR4, while AMD's Ryzen 7000 chips only support DDR5.
Moar RAMThe good news for anyone looking to buy either of these new platforms is that pricing for DDR5 has continued to fall since launch and the initial scarcity over the last holiday period. While you're still paying more for DDR5 than for DDR4 there are at least now plenty of 16GB kits available for less than $100, such as this Kingston Fury Beast kit on Newegg for $93.
Admittedly you won't be looking at the sort of speeds that G.Skill has just announced at these sorts of prices, but as the market gets more competitive you can expect prices to drop further and for speeds to keep increasing.
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Greetings Inheritors!
We have discovered an issue relating to the Character Selection/Server Selection options which cause the game to freeze.
This is done by:
1: Entering a Server in game
2: Exiting to Character Selection
3: Going to Server Selection
4: Attempting to re-enter a server
5: The game will subsequently freeze
We are working with XL to resolve this as soon as possible, but please be aware that if you follow the steps above there may be issues and you will have to restart your game.
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A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.
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Microsoft has addressed the future of cloud gaming in its lengthy response to the UK Competition and Market Authority's (CMA) decision to launch an in-depth "Phase 2" investigation into the company's purchase of Activision Blizzard. It turns out that, away from the marketing for Microsoft's xCloud game streaming service, the company's outlook on cloud gaming is pretty bleak, at least for the short term.
Cloud gaming is a "new and immature technology which the CMA has recognized faces significant challenges," writes Microsoft, adding that consumer adoption of the technology "is not expected to be rapid as it requires a significant change in consumer behaviour". Rather than an imminent cloud revolution, Microsoft expects "that gamers on PC and console will continue to download the vast majority of the games they play" instead of adopting streaming alternatives.
It's a marked difference from the company's bullish public stance on its own xCloud streaming service. At an E3 event three years ago, Xbox boss Phil Spencer stood on stage and touted the service with characteristic enthusiasm, but it seems that Microsoft privately has far more muted expectations both for xCloud and game streaming as a whole.
Microsoft is talking down (or honestly describing) the near-term future of cloud gaming in order to counter the CMA's argument that it might use its purchase of Activision Blizzard to freeze out competitors in the game streaming market. Instead, Microsoft argues that, because adoption of the tech has been so sparse, "Harming or degrading rival services would significantly set-back adoption of this technology," which would only benefit "market-leading incumbents" like Sony on console, Google and Apple on mobile, and Steam on PC.
Rather than tightening its grip on cloud gaming, Microsoft argues that it would benefit much more from encouraging "the widespread adoption of cloud gaming technologies by as many providers as possible". That, says Microsoft, would help spark the "major shift in consumer behaviour required for cloud gaming to succeed".
So, in essence, Microsoft is arguing that it has no interest in monopolising cloud gaming because there's barely anything to monopolise. The technology is still so embryonic, and its adoption so minimal, that the main challenge in the foreseeable future is convincing players that the tech is worth their time at all, no matter who provides it. Considering the upcoming death of Google Stadia, it's hard to find fault with Microsoft's argument.
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There's a point in A Plague Tale: Requiem where Arnaud falls into a rats' nest and needs your help to get out safely. The area is pretty dark and the situation looks dire so you might be wondering how you're supposed to open the way for him.
Much like saving the herbalist, it's pretty tricky to figure out what you're supposed to do—especially when there are so many rats nearby waiting for you to make a mistake—so I'll explain everything you need to know in this guide. Here's how to open the way for Arnaud in A Plague Tale: Requiem.
A Plague Tale: Requiem Arnaud: How to open the way
The incident in question happens in Chapter 7 of A Plague Tale: Requiem. Amicia and Hugo have reluctantly teamed up with Arnaud and are making their way through a cave when Arnaud falls from a narrow ledge and lands among the rats below. The first thing you should do is light the brazier close to him with an Ignifer and your sling.
That's Arnaud safe for now but you need to find a way to get him out of there. Luckily, Hugo will point out the yellow crystals down in the rats' nest. These are Episanguis, and Amicia will ask Arnaud to throw her one. Once you have it in your possession you can craft Odoris which will draw the rats' attention for a short time. Fire the Odoris onto the ground below, attracting the rats and leaving enough room for Arnaud to get past and to the relative safety of a ledge at the back of the cavern.
Arnaud should be standing next to a crank. Tell him to use it, and a wooden board attached to a chain will rise nearby. Use another Odoris bolt on the wooden board, then release the crank and the rats will move again. Arnaud should now be able to move past them and rejoin you. Good job.
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Gotham Knights' graffiti is one of the few collectibles you can hunt down in the game, rewarding you with some XP and crafting materials if you locate all 12. That said, some of this street art is actually quite troublesome to find. You'd think giant murals would stand out, but Gotham is a bit of a multi-leveled maze as far as cities go.
Once you locate a mural, you need to scan it in order to get progress, and when you do it'll tell you a lil tidbit about the history of Gotham and what's being shown. If you hover your map cursor over a region, you can also see whether there are any murals left to collect by looking at the spray can symbol in the bottom right corner, which will have a green tick if you've found them all.
In this Gotham Knights graffiti guide, I'll give you the locations for each mural, directions to get there, and you can also see what each mural looks like if you cycle through the galleries below. I've arranged these in the most convenient order of collection starting from your home base at the Belfry.
Green Gotham - Financial District
Image 1 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)Image 2 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)This mural can be found exactly west of the Belfry on the side of a building with a water tower, looking directly onto the train tracks.
Stolen Gotham - The Cauldron
Image 1 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)Image 2 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)This one is on the side of a small building and looks directly onto a fenced parking area. Since it's on the upper level of The Cauldron you can also see it while travelling south on its west side.
Faces of Gotham - The Cauldron
Image 1 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)Image 2 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)The easiest way to find this one is to travel south on the central bridge through The Cauldron, then drop down to the left side into the lower level when you see the Cobblepot Steel billboard. Turn around and the mural should be right there against a wall.
Simpler Times - Old Gotham
Image 1 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)Image 2 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)This one is easy to find since it's on the main street junction just to the east of the Gotham City Cathedral.
Gotham Piers - Tricorner Island
Image 1 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)Image 2 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)Heading along the bridge to Tricorner Island, take the first off-ramp on the right, keep going straight and up a small flight of stairs, and you'll see the mural on the side of a house to your left.
Lyceum Mural - Bowery
Image 1 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)Image 2 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)As you're about to head onto the bridge between Bowery and Bristol, you can see this mural on a building just to the right.
Origin of Evil - Otisburg
Image 1 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)Image 2 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)Just to the east of Wayne Tower, this one is against a wall underneath a railway line that crosses the road.
Born This Way - West End
Image 1 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)Image 2 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)This one is quite easy to miss, but if you head west down Croydon Avenue past the Gotham City Labor Union and around the corner, you'll see it on the right side, slightly raised up from street level.
Our Friend Joel - West End
Image 1 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)Image 2 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)Heading across Madison Street Bridge from the Financial District into the West End, you'll spot this mural to the right on the building behind the gas station, just as you pass Pamela's Cafe Diner.
GCU - Gotham Heights
Image 1 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)Image 2 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)Travel across Aparo Bridge from the West End into Gotham Heights, and immediately turn right down the small street as you arrive. The mural is on the side of a building to your left.
The March of Crabs - Robinson Park
Image 1 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)Image 2 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)This one is a little trickier to find since it's on the border between Gotham Heights and Robinson Park. Head to the statue of the globe with tentacles in the western side of the park, then head west under Chambers Street to find this mural against a wall to the left.
See Us - Bristol
Image 1 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)Image 2 of 2(Image credit: Warner Bros)You'll find this one next to the basketball court surrounded by the big residential buildings on the south side of Bristol.
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You'll need to find and defeat the Fortnite Inkquisitor boss if you want to grab the Mythic SMG. This boss is part of the Fortnitemares Halloween event, during which you'll also have the option to turn yourself into a werewolf—and, let's face it, why wouldn't you?
If you want to take on the Inkquisitor to complete one of the Fortnitemares quests, you'll need to head to a specific place on the map to get him to spawn. Even when you find it, this boss is pretty tricky to take down, so I'll give you some tips for that too. So if you're ready to deploy, here's where to find the Fortnite Inkquisitor and how to defeat it when you do.
Where to find the Fortnite Inkquisitor
(Image credit: Epic Games)First up, you'll need to make your way to Grim Gables located southwest of Shiny Sound. Head into the mineshaft in the basement of the mansion there and you should find six braziers circling a symbol on the ground.
Walk around inside the circle until the ground starts shaking and the braziers light up and the Inkquisitor will appear.
How to defeat the Inkquisitor
The Inkquisitor boss is no pushover as it carries a Pumpkin Launcher, a seemingly endless supply of Firefly Jars, and a Mythic Suppressed SMG. He can also summon in zombies to help him, so you're going to need to be aware of your surroundings.
Your best bet is to give have a squad of friends to help you out, then each of you get as much space as possible so you can dodge out of the way of incoming Firefly Jars and other projectiles. Keep your distance and be on the look out for any summoned zombies closing in. Building can also give you some breathing space in a pinch.
You want to make sure your Shield is full before summoning this boss, and it's helpful to have a supply of them to help mitigate some of the damage you'll receive. A high-damage weapon should make the fight much shorter too.
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There have been a couple of reveals today showing off designs for a pair of Nvidia Ada Lovelace graphics cards from two different ends of the RTX 40-series spectrum. At one end the Chiphell forum has gotten hold of some shots of the unfeasibly massive cooling array that was apparently specced out for the 900W variant of Nvidia's top GPU silicon, and at the other we have some renders of the RTX 4070.
And they honestly couldn't be more different.
If we start with the most recognisable, we have the RTX 4070 shroud presented by YouTuber, Moore's Law is Dead. In order to protect their sources they had a render made from actual photographs of the card's cooler, and it's claimed, "the thing looks 99% like the real thing."
We're back to a dual-slot design for the RTX 4070, which is a blessed relief coming off the back of the frankly vast RTX 4090 cooler. That chonky boi is apparently also going to be used for the RTX 4080 16GB Founders Edition, too. According to the leak, the RTX 4070 is effectively going to be a slightly smaller variant of the RTX 3080 Founders Edition design.
They also report that, according to their sources, there's been no hint of any kind of cooling issues keeping the RTX 4070 chilled under that shroud. And you'd hope that to be the case given that if we are looking at a cut-down version of the AD104 GPU that was going to be used for the erstwhile RTX 4080 12GB, that's one comparatively smol graphics die.
In fact, at 295mm² it's only slightly bigger than the GA106 chip Nvidia used to power the RTX 3050 of the previous generation.
(Image credit: Moore's Law is Dead)When's the RTX 4070 going to arrive? Ah… no idea. Given the RTX 4080 16GB is coming on November 16 the likelihood of getting our hands on a more mainstream GPU this side of the new year is pretty low. As is the card coming with anything like a sensible price tag.
What definitely wouldn't have come with a sensible price tag is the Titan RTX Ada Lovelace card that may once have existed. Reports are that any Titan card in this generation has been cancelled, as the MLID channel claims it was "melting power supplies, and sometimes melting itself lol."
But the 900W-capable cooler design has been shown via a post on Chiphell which exposes the monstrous size of the chip chiller. There were claims the people working on the potential card in the labs they mounted the motherboard to the side of the card instead of the other way around.
(Image credit: Chiphell)Your next upgrade(Image credit: Future)Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the restAnd from the images shown online, you can see why. It looks a lot like the massive vapor chamber cooling array actually mounted vertically on top of the PCB and GPU rather than horizontally. If you see where the actual mounting plates for the GPU and VRM are, they appear to be positioned on what is traditionally the edge of a graphics card cooler.
I'm glad we work with an open test bench here for our component benchmarking, because I wouldn't have wanted to try and squeeze that thing into an actual chassis. But hey, it's seemingly been cancelled so we don't have to worry about that.
On to the RTX 4080 16GB, which will be plenty big enough, I'm sure.
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The Intel Core i5 13600K is another mighty mid-range chip from Intel, and you can expect a major uplift in core counts even with this more parsimoniously priced Raptor Lake chip. Well-tuned to deliver high gaming frame rates, this is ultimately the chip most gamers should consider first for their next gaming PC.
Core i5 13600K specsCores (P+E): 6+8
Threads: 20
L3 Cache (Smart Cache): 24MB
L2 Cache: 20MB
Max P-core Turbo frequency (GHz): 5.1
Max E-core Turbo frequency (GHz): 3.9
P-core base frequency (GHz): 3.5
E-core base frequency (GHz): 2.6
Unlocked: Yes
Max PCIe lanes: 20
Graphics: UHD Graphics 770
Memory support (up to): DDR5 5600MT/s, DDR4 3200MT/s
Processor Base Power (W): 125
Maximum Turbo Power (W): 181
RRP: $319–$329The fundamental hybrid architecture found in the Core i5 13600K is a continuation of the one introduced with Alder Lake and the 12th Gen, but with Raptor Lake there have been a few key improvements. I go into those in greater detail in our Core i9 13900K review, but this is the headline upgrade: more cores.
The Core i5 13600K is a 14-core processor, made up of six Hyper-Threaded Performance-cores (P-cores) and eight Efficient-cores (E-cores), for a total of 20 threads. That's four more E-cores than this chip's predecessor, the Core i5 12600K, but don't be fooled by the E-cores's diminutive name and silicon footprint. Those four extra cores make for a significant increase in multithreaded performance.
The chip makes light work of Blender's Junk Shop benchmark, putting in a significantly faster samples per minute pace than the Core i5 12600K it replaces. The Core i5 13600K is also 37% faster than the Core i5 12600K in the synthetic Cinebench R23 benchmark. But the even more surprising stat is that the Core i5 13600K is only 12% shy of the multithreaded score of the Intel Core i9 12900K.
The Core i5 13600K's single-threaded Cinebench score? Exactly the same as a Core i9 12900K, actually.
Image 1 of 4(Image credit: Future)Image 2 of 4(Image credit: Future)Image 3 of 4(Image credit: Future)Image 4 of 4(Image credit: Future)Alright, real-life performance won't see the Core i5 13600K matching the Core i9 12900K in every regard, but it really does deliver something similar in gaming for a lot less money.
Image 1 of 7(Image credit: Future)Image 2 of 7(Image credit: Future)Image 3 of 7(Image credit: Future)Image 4 of 7(Image credit: Future)Image 5 of 7(Image credit: Future)Image 6 of 7(Image credit: Future)Image 7 of 7(Image credit: Future)Test rigsIntel
Motherboard: Asus ROG Strix Z690-F Gaming WiFi
Storage: 2TB Sabrent Rocket 4.0 Plus
Cooler: Asus ROG Ryujin II
PSU: Gigabyte Aorus P1200WAMD
Motherboard: ASRock X670E Taichi
Storage: 1TB WD Black SN850
Cooler: Corsair H100i RGB
PSU: NZXT 850WShared
Memory: G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000 CL30 2x 16GB
Graphics card: Nvidia RTX 3080 10GB
In three out of six games I've tested, the Core i5 13600K matches the pace of the Core i9 12900K. In one of those three, it actually outperforms the Core i9 chip. That's Civ 6, which admittedly has become a bit of a cakewalk for the latest generation of processors from Intel and AMD. But it's no less an excellent showing for the far cheaper CPU.
Speaking of AMD, the Core i5 13600K is looking increasingly impressive in the face of the competition. The Core i5 13600K beats the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X in all but a single game, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and it doesn't let up in more productivity/creative workloads, such as Blender and x264. The blend of P-cores and E-cores appears to be working a treat versus even Zen 4's homogenous, and still mighty, core design.
(Image credit: Future)Even when it comes to power efficiency, which is usually not Intel's forte, the Core i5 13600K's more sensible clock speeds and core counts make for a much more efficient chip. It's relatively similar in terms of power draw in our x264 benchmark to the Ryzen 7 7700X, and it generally doesn't run as hot as the competition for that efficiency. That said, it does draw more from the wall than its predecessor, the Core i5 12600K. Compared to the Core i9 13900K, however, it's practically in a permanent eco-mode.
Image 1 of 3(Image credit: Future)Image 2 of 3(Image credit: Future)Image 3 of 3(Image credit: Future)The Core i5 13600K is made that much better by its price versus the competition and against the 12th Gen. It's listed with a $319.00—$329.00 recommended customer price. Now, that is a great price for this sort of performance, but I should mention that may or may not exactly materialise on launch day. The on-shelf price may be upwards of that. But the thing to consider is that AMD seemingly has very little response to this chip with the existing Ryzen 7000-series lineup either way.
It would take a serious price cut to make the Ryzen 7 7700X the chip to buy at this price, and if the 7700X can't do it, the Ryzen 5 7600X can't either. Though the Ryzen 5 7600X is cheaper at $299, and so far there's no Raptor Lake chip under $300, so I'm not dismissing the cheaper option entirely here.
Intel also has the holistically cheaper chip in the Core i5 13600K. I suspect some builders will find a way to spend a bucket load of cash on their motherboard and RAM, rather than taking the cheap 600-series/DDR4 option, but if you wanted to you could save a lot of money on Intel's 600-series chipsets and more affordable RAM versus AMD's newer and generally dearer AM5 chipsets and DDR5 memory.
That pricing disparity might not remain for the lifetime of these chips, but at launch it's certainly a factor to consider. Both companies should have cheaper CPUs and chipsets available early next year to make life easier for budget builders, anyways.
(Image credit: Future)The Core i5 13600K is much more of an all-round powerhouse than I had expected it to be.
We're once again seeing the best gaming chip come from the lower rungs of the stack with Raptor Lake. The Core i5 13600K delivers exceptional gaming performance in a sensibly priced package, delivering only a handful of frames less than the processors that fetch double the asking price. For a gaming PC build in 2022/23, this is absolutely the chip I'd recommend to most.
But I'd go one further than that. The inclusion of four more E-cores turns this processor into a 14-core chip with the multithreaded performance to deliver in high-demand applications, and that makes it a great fit for streaming, content creation, editing, and more. The Core i5 13600K is much more of an all-round powerhouse than I had expected it to be.
So, if supply remains steady and the price sticks to the recommended figure, this is a shoe-in for the overall best CPU in 2022, and likely a good part of 2023, too.
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Intel's Core i9 13900K is spectacularly good at what it does, and what it does is pretty much everything. Gaming? Of course, it can push high frame rates alongside the latest GPUs. Multitasking? Yep, easy. With 24 cores it's perfectly suited to lots of stuff happening all at once. High-demand creative workloads? Absolutely, it barely breaks a sweat.
Intel's hybrid architecture has really come into its own with the Core i9 13900K. Throw it at any problem, and it's likely going to solve it in record time.
Now for some PC builders, that's an easy buy. You want the fastest chip around, here it is. But I would suggest that most PC gamers with a moderate budget will want to look at the Intel Core i5 13600K instead.
Sure, it's not as fast or as threaded, but it delivers nearly as high frame rates in games and has plenty of multicore chops for content creation and streaming. All for nearly half the price.
But to say the Core i9 13900K is too expensive would be wrong. It's actually, surprisingly priced roughly the same as a Core i9 12900K, despite being much faster, offering eight more cores, and arriving on a now cheaper platform. They're both fairly equal when it comes to game performance—neither holds back a modern GPU.
However, for how well-provisioned the Core i9 13900K is across the board, it's a chip that can make some sense for a power user or busybody in need of a significant boost for their desktop PC.
Intel Core i9 13900K architecture
(Image credit: Future)What is Raptor Lake?
The 12th Gen Alder Lake chips may have been Intel's first hybrid architecture, but the 13th Gen Raptor Lake processors are much more proof of what a hybrid approach is capable of. I have to say I'm a little surprised, in fact, as Raptor Lake is much more than the generational stop-gap before Meteor Lake that I was initially expecting.
At a fundamental level you'll find two types of cores in Raptor Lake: Performance-cores (P-cores) and Efficient-cores (E-cores).
The P-cores are more like the kind you'd expect to see in a gaming processor: big, fast, and great for pushing high frame rates. These you can expect to see hitting high 5GHz clock speeds pretty much across the board with Intel's 13th Gen K-series chips. You can also push these P-cores to a more impressive 6GHz under the right conditions.
If you look closely, you'll see eight P-cores (green-tinted blocks with pink splodges in the middle) and four clusters of E-cores (dark blue blocks). (Image credit: Intel)The Raptor Cove core powers the P-core in Intel's 13th Gen, which replaces the Golden Cove core found in 12th Gen processors. The most notable improvement is the increase in L2 cache: from 1.25MB per P-core on Golden Cove to 2MB per core on Raptor Cove. That's a pretty massive uplift by desktop CPU standards, and will have a direct impact on performance as the P-cores have to call out to slower memory further away from the chip less often.
Intel has rolled out an improved process node for use with the 13th Gen. It's Intel 7 still, but it's a newly-optimised Intel 7 that Intel cites as 3rd gen Intel SuperFin. With this it claims "significantly better channel mobility" and, in Raptor Lake's case specifically, a focus on high speeds.
E-cores have a much smaller physical footprint on the chip. It makes for quite an interesting game of spot the difference between a hybrid and non-hybrid chip, and even between the Alder Lake and Raptor Lake dies. E-cores are suited best to the busywork your processor has to deal with while it's also stressing over frames in-game. Stuff like background tasks and taking care of those utilities and apps you want to leave on while you use your PC. E-cores run much slower than the P-cores, around 2–4GHz.
Intel's shifted the voltage to frequency curve with Raptor Lake. (Image credit: Intel)These E-cores are using the same Gracemont core design as Alder Lake, so you're largely relying on the higher counts of E-cores to push multithreaded performance up with Raptor Lake. Though further optimisations to Raptor Lake's Compute Fabric, caching policy, memory subsystem, and ring frequency to support the newly beefed up core counts will also make a difference, as will the new and improved P-cores.
The task of dividing up work between the P-cores and E-cores falls on your OS, but Intel has Thread Director to help out with that. This block makes more telemetry data available to the OS to better help in sharing the workload over all available cores, and alongside the latest major Windows 11 update, 22H2, helps share the load from background and foreground tasks.
That said, a lot of Raptor Lake is recognisable from Intel's 12th Gen chips, but what's great with this first wave of 13th Gen CPUs is that there's simply more of everything: more E-cores, higher clocks, larger caches, and better performance. The Core i9 13900K is the chip set to benefit the most from this upgrade, so let's get into the processor's specs.
Intel Core i9 13900K specifications
(Image credit: Future)What's inside the Core i9 13900K?
Core i9 13900K specsCores (P+E): 8+16
Threads: 32
L3 Cache (Smart Cache): 36MB
L2 Cache: 32MB
Max P-core Turbo frequency (GHz): 5.8
Max E-core Turbo frequency (GHz): 4.3
P-core base frequency (GHz): 3
E-core base frequency (GHz): 2.2
Unlocked: Yes
Max PCIe lanes: 20
Graphics: UHD Graphics 770
Memory support (up to): DDR5 5600MT/s, DDR4 3200MT/s
Processor Base Power (W): 125
Maximum Turbo Power (W): 253
RRP: $589–$599'More is better' appears to be the mantra for Raptor Lake and the Core i9 13900K. The Core i9 13900K has been generously provisioned with a ton of E-cores, 16 in fact. That's double what you'll find on the Core i9 12900K, and those cores are not at all forgotten when it comes to the performance this processor offers in multithreaded tasks—these E-cores are as fast as they are many.
The E-cores hit a max Turbo of 4.3GHz, which won't be breaking any records, however, it is notably 400MHz quicker than the E-cores on the Core i9 12900K. Intel also now holds that its E-cores are as proficient as its Skylake cores but much more efficient. Similar claims were made with Alder Lake, but these E-cores are almost done dirty by Intel in sounding so much less important than the almighty Performance-cores. They're pretty darn quick and plenty proficient for plenty of tasks.
The P-cores are the focus for us gamers, however. The Core i9 13900K's P-core runs at 5.8GHz, which is so tantalisingly close to the 6GHz mark that you just wish it was possible out of the box. That's an accolade that the Core i9 13900KS will claim early next year, so if you're keen on that then you might have to wait a little longer for the special edition chip to arrive.
That 5.8GHz figure is the Thermal Velocity Boost frequency, which does require serious cooling to hit. You're more likely going to see 5.7GHz or below as you go about your gaming.
Still, these are incredibly quick cores, and both the P-cores and E-cores are backed up by 14MB of L2 cache and 30MB of L3.
When it comes to the platform for the 13th Gen, we're in luck. These chips use the same LGA 1700 socket size as the 12th Gen, and are fully compatible with 600-series motherboards. That should help bring the cost of these chips down, as when we first looked at the 12th Gen only the high-end Z690 motherboards were available and that made them much dearer as an upgrade. That's no longer the case, and we're actually testing the 13th Gen chips on an Asus Strix Z690 board and can confirm all runs well on the older, but nearly identical, chipset.
The only differences to note with the 700-series chipset is an increase of eight more PCIe 4.0 lanes and up to five USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports—though these specs will depend on whichever motherboard you decide to buy. In total, Intel's Core i9 13900K is able to deliver 16 PCIe 5.0 ports
What that also means is you're able to upgrade your Alder Lake chip to a Raptor Lake chip, though why you would after looking at the performance delta between these chips is another thing entirely.
Intel Core i9 13900K performance
(Image credit: Future)How does the Core i9 13900K perform?
If you wanted more multithreaded performance on desktop, you got it. The Core i9 13900K actually makes ex-HEDT chips look slow by comparison. In fact, Intel's Core i9 13900K is almost 10,000 points clear of the Core i9 12900K in Cinebench R23. In the Blender Junk Shop benchmark, the Core i9 13900K is 60% faster than the Alder Lake chip.
If you want lots of speedy threads to throw at creative apps, this is it.
Similarly PCMark's score for general productivity is extremely high for the Core i9 13900K, and it delivers the highest memory bandwidth in SiSoft Sandra we've ever recorded. It also breaks through the 100fps ceiling in encoding benchmark x264, managing 109 fps and far in excess of the competition.
Image 1 of 4(Image credit: Future)Image 2 of 4(Image credit: Future)Image 3 of 4(Image credit: Future)Image 4 of 4(Image credit: Future)With these sorts of scores it's no wonder that high-end desktop (HEDT) CPUs are mostly a thing of the past—I'm surprised there's even a whiff of a HEDT Raptor Lake chip following the scores the Core i9 13900K is posting.
When it comes to gaming performance, the Core i9 13900K is equally impressive. This chip does little to hold back a modern high-end GPU, such as the RTX 3080 we're testing with, and I have no doubts it'll make the best pairing with Nvidia's new RTX 4090, too. Minimum and 1%/0.1% lows were also impressively high and consistently so, which is a good marker of CPU performance nowaday.
However, those extra cores don't mean much in gaming workloads. There were times when the Core i9 13900K struggled to show off what its clock speed and cache improvements are good for versus the previous generation's Core i9 12900K. Generally, I noticed only a moderate improvement in frames per second between the two generations' finest chips, and in two benchmarks performance actually dropped.
Image 1 of 7(Image credit: Future)Image 2 of 7(Image credit: Future)Image 3 of 7(Image credit: Future)Image 4 of 7(Image credit: Future)Image 5 of 7(Image credit: Future)Image 6 of 7(Image credit: Future)Image 7 of 7(Image credit: Future)Test rigsIntel
Motherboard: Asus ROG Strix Z690-F Gaming WiFi
Storage: 2TB Sabrent Rocket 4.0 Plus
Cooler: Asus ROG Ryujin II
PSU: Gigabyte Aorus P1200WAMD
Motherboard: ASRock X670E Taichi
Storage: 1TB WD Black SN850
Cooler: Corsair H100i RGB
PSU: NZXT 850WShared
Memory: G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000 CL30 2x 16GB
Graphics card: Nvidia RTX 3080 10GB
Both Shadow of the Tomb Raider and F1 2021 ran slower on the Core i9 13900K versus the Core i9 12900K, and the same can be said for the Core i5 13600K versus the Core i5 12600K. So perhaps there's some extra optimisation needing to be done in those games to extract more out of them. Intel's Marcus Kennedy told me that may be the required course of action following the publication of the company's own benchmarks that showed a couple of games running slower on Raptor Lake, but we'll have to wait and see.
In the games which are more CPU limited, namely Far Cry 6, and thus better able to show the performance disparity between chips, there remains only 4fps between the Core i9 13900K and Core i5 13600K. It's not a tremendous lead for a chip that's nearly double the price.
Generally, though, we're seeing top gaming performance with the Core i9 13900K (and Core i5 13600K, for that matter), which puts this chip at the top of the charts versus Intel's true rival, AMD.
Neither AMD's new Ryzen 9 7950X or Ryzen 7 7700X can match the gauntlet that Intel's Core i9 13900K is laying down in most games, with the sole exception of Shadow of the Tomb Raider. In Civ 6's AI test, the Core i9 13900K is neck and neck with AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X, but little over a second separates even the best CPUs from the worst in that benchmark nowadays.
In Total War: Three Kingdoms, the Core i9 13900K offers up 9fps more than the Ryzen 9 7950X. In Metro Exodus, 6fps. In F1 2021 and Far Cry 6, Intel's chip extends its lead by a larger margin, 13fps and 23fps, respectively.
Intel holds the gaming performance crown this generation. Though you really must consider that at 4K, these sorts of performance leads shrink to a much smaller margin, if any. Modern games are becoming far less CPU limited and far more GPU limited, and that means the GPU is only going to play more of an important role in game performance as time goes on. That's sure to be doubly true when DirectStorage rolls around, which will further free up the CPU while gaming.
If you're looking purely for a gaming chip, then, the Core i9 13900K is entirely overkill. You've got to look at its multithreaded performance and think 'that's something I could do with more of' to really consider spending this much on a chip. Or have plenty of money to spare and big bragging ambitions.
Image 1 of 3(Image credit: Future)Image 2 of 3(Image credit: Future)Image 3 of 3(Image credit: Future)Turning to more creative endeavours, where once Intel's hybrid mix of cores couldn't quite live up to the might of a 16-core/32-thread Ryzen 9 7950X, and the Core i9 13900K is now a much more impressive match. In x264, the Core i9 13900K actually beats the Ryzen 9 7950X, which is rather impressive. It is also only six samples per minute slower in Blender's Junk Shop benchmark. The third-fastest chip in the Blender benchmark is the Ryzen 9 5950X, and that's down on the Core i9 13900K by 44.5 samples per minute. So it's close between the top two.
The only major loss for Intel here is in efficiency. The Core i9 13900K demands around 60W more under load in x264 than the Ryzen 9 7950X. That said, AMD's chip runs slightly hotter, and it tends to use up more power when idling. Similarly, the Core i9 13900K comes out looking more efficient in terms of fps per watt in Far Cry 6, but it's worth remembering this is the game that more heavily favoured Intel's processors in testing.
Intel Core i9 13900K analysis
(Image credit: Future)How does the Core i9 13900K stack up?
Money is the real clincher here. As ever. At $589–599, the recommended customer pricing of the Core i9 13900K, and actually even if it's priced higher than that at launch, Intel's latest and greatest should cost less than AMD's $699 Ryzen 9 7950X.
If you run through the key battles for these two chips, you've got gaming performance, in which Intel's chip mostly wins out; productivity, multitasking, & creative performance, where the two are much closer and trade blows; and price, which Intel wins.
The few times that AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X does come out on top, the Core i9 13900K is often very close behind. Is that the sort of upper hand worth paying extra for? In my mind, no, it's not. Intel has done itself a huge favour by not massively increasing the asking price of its chips despite the increase in cores—a shot of adrenaline for its entire K-series lineup.
The Intel Core i9 13900K is more than enough processor to satisfy all gamers, streamers, and creative professionals.
I can see maybe some particularly demanding workloads for rendering or encoding in which 16 of Zen 4's finest will work better than Intel's 24 mix-and-match cores, but I've only seen that in Blender. Even then, the Ryzen hardly has a controlling lead. PCIe lanes may also be another important factor for some: AMD has the advantage in this department with 24 PCIe 5.0 lanes direct from the CPU.
But the reasons for buying AMD's top chip are becoming more niche than ever with the release of the Intel Core i9 13900K. And both are becoming niche as the mid-range CPUs enjoy ever-growing core counts. I wonder if we'll see the red team become more aggressive with its actual pricing on the shelf once the dust settles from Intel's release, because as it stands I fear its chips may be a tough sell next to Raptor Lake. Perhaps the $549 Ryzen 9 7900X will fare better, but then it's less likely to meet the requirements of the creative professional in need of all the cores quite like the Ryzen 9 7950X can.
The tougher sell for Intel is then to gamers that already have a fairly recent processor in their machine. You can probably write off most users with Alder Lake chips in their machines, there's very little reason to upgrade from a 12th Gen chip, but even 11th Gen and AMD's 5000-series processors still hold a candle to the 13th Gen for gaming.
Yeah, the Ryzen 7 5700X is slower at 1080p, but at 1440p, 4K? Is it fast enough to warrant ripping up my entire machine and starting again with a whole new build? Depends how old your current CPU is, I suppose.
But that's the never-ending cycle of CPU upgrades, and ultimately there will always be someone out there with a four-, five-, six-year-old processor looking for their next upgrade. If that's you, and you have the budget, or you're in truly desperate need of multithreaded performance, then I believe the Intel Core i9 13900K is more than enough processor to satisfy all gamers, streamers, and creative professionals.
Core i9 13900K verdict
(Image credit: Future)Should you buy the Core i9 13900K?
The Intel Core i9 13900K is a superb processor, and extremely good company for an enthusiast-grade graphics card. Its core count is extreme, even by today's standards, and its clock speed is pushing up to new heights only previously possible with a dousing of liquid nitrogen. It's incredibly impressive. Compare it to a Core i9 or Core i7 from just a few generations ago and you'd hardly believe it was the same company behind the Core i9 13900K.
Admittedly overkill for most.
Though admittedly also overkill for most. The average gamer isn't really going to benefit a whole lot from buying this Core i9 versus Intel's equally awesome, if not even more so, Core i5 13600K. I'm also dreaming up what might come later down the line in the Core i5 13400. That's at least one rightfully capable gaming chip at a fraction of the price of this multithreading leviathan.
But fine, I submit. I'm not going to belabour the point. This is a mighty processor at a surprisingly reasonable price, and a lot of builders will want one simply because it's the best of the best.
With Alder Lake and the 12th Gen, Intel proved its hybrid architecture was more than a flash in the pan concept. With Raptor Lake, it refined it into the best processor we've seen in a long time. I fully expect Raptor Lake and the Core i9 13900K to win back a lot of favour with PC builders—we're not at a loss for incredible processors right now and Intel's Core i9 13900K is top among them.
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The Street Fighter 6 beta was good. Like, really good. So much so that the few players who were even able to get into the beta wanted a way to continue playing after it ended on October 10. Well, it happened, and now Capcom has put everyone on the naughty step by removing the game's executable file from people's computers.
As reported by GamesRadar, the whole thing started on October 14 when a mod went out that allowed those with keys to continue accessing specific offline modes once the beta wrapped up. Most of it was offline versus, though a few extra tweaks also allowed access to the training mode. Of course, it began to spread away from hushed Discord servers to Reddit, bringing the whole thing to Capcom's attention.
Now, as of October 20, an update has been pushed out that removes the game's executable file from Steam. Since that's what people needed for it to run, the mod is pretty much dead in the water. According to GamesRadar, there are certain methods that can be used to retrieve the .exe but of course, none of that is particularly above board.
Ah I guess the cats out of the bag nowthe sins of the past have returned, and yes the SF6 beta was cracked open past just the datamining, people able to play the game offline and all that.Papa Capcom took measures to stop it and got some people, but certainly not everyone.October 19, 2022
See moreIt's definitely a shame that the beta was so exclusive and for such a short period of time. A ton of my pals applied for keys and were left empty-handed, with many going ahead and purchasing keys just to play. It's clear that there's a huge hype around Street Fighter 6 right now—hell, I don't even like 2D fighters that much and I'm excited to give it a go. I managed to have a quick whirl at a recent fighting game event and had a great time, especially since it's so accommodating to players like me whose experience lies primarily with 3D fighters (and who can't pull off a quarter circle to save their life).
It's not the first time a Street Fighter beta has been broken into—Street Fighter 5's beta was completely cracked, allowing anyone to download and give it a try all the way up to its launch. This time around it was more of a mod than a crack since you still needed a beta key for it to work. Hopefully, it doesn't steer Capcom away from doing more PC betas in the future, especially with this being the second time it's happened to the developer.
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Forget HDTVs or oversized, uber-wide monitors. If you want a truly epic, cinematic gaming experience, there can be only one option. A projector. Cue the hot new BenQ X3000i, one of a burgeoning breed of beamers that are expressly designed for gaming.
You can, of course, game with pretty much any projector. Indeed, pixel-shifting 4K projectors can now be had for relatively little money. What you don't generally get from cheaper models are any features for improving the gaming experience. Typically, you'll be looking at refresh rates limited to 60Hz and relatively little attention paid to latency.
Arguably even more important, cheaper projectors tend to be dimmer projectors. For home cinema applications, that's OK. The idea is that you're largely, if not exclusively, using the thing for serious content consumption of an evening in a room where the ambient light levels are under some sort of control.
But gaming? You're much more likely to want to do that at almost any hour and it might not be terribly convenient to block out ambient light every time you want to have a quick session. Which is where the BenQ X3000i comes in. As its name implies, this is a beamer capable of fully 3,000 lumens. That's two to three times the brightness of a typical budget projector. Inevitably, that brightness comes at a cost, here you're looking at $1,999 (£1,916), while basic 4K DLP projectors can be had for half the money.
Still, the extra cash also nets you a 240Hz refresh rate and a claimed input latency of just 4ms along with that full 4K resolution. Yes, the X3000i is based on a 1080p DLP chip, not a true 4K chip. However, using clever DLP pixel shifting technology you do get all 3,840 by 2,160 pixels. That's not true of 4K LCD projectors with pixel shifting tech, which don't deliver a true 4K pixel grid.
BenQ X3000i specs(Image credit: Future)Projector type: DLP
Lamp type: 4-LED
Brightness: 3000 lumens
Native resolution: 3,840 x 2,160 (with pixel shift)
Refresh: 60Hz @ 4K, 240Hz @ 1080p
Contrast: 500,000:1 (dynamic)
Colours: 30-bit, 100% DCI-P3
Lamp life: 20,000 hours (30,000 Eco)
Throw ratio: 1.15–1.15
Zoom ratio: 1.3x
Lens shift: No
Audio-out: Yes (3.5mm stereo)
Inputs: 3x HDMI 2.0
Price: $1,999 | £1,916There is, however, at least one catch. The BenQ X3000i can't combine 4K with 240Hz. In fact, it can't even do 4K and 120Hz. The high refresh functionality is limited to 1080p and below. While you wouldn't expect the X3000i to do 4K and 240Hz—not least because you'd need a DisplayPort 2.0 interface to support that—4K at 120Hz would have been nice. For the record, the X3000i is limited to HDMI 2.0 rather than HDMI 2.1, the latter being required for 4K@120Hz. It's also worth noting that variable refresh is not supported.
Anyway, the X3000i's gaming prowess aside, what does it have going for it? BenQ claims fully 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 digital cinema gamut, which is nice, along with full HDR support. In part that's enabled by a four-LED light source, which is rated at 20,000 hours. No more worrying about lamp life, the traditional projector bugbear of yore.
The X3000i also sports an eight-segment light wheel, which bodes well for avoiding that other DLP-specific projector issue, namely the rainbow effect. As for optics, the X3000i has a throw ratio of 1.15 to 1.5 to one, 1.3x zoom, and manual focus. So, while it's not strictly a short-throw projector, you don't need a huge room to get a large image. By way of example, positioned 10 feet from your screen, the X3000i will produce a 105-inch image.
Less edifying is the lack of lens shift. That's really limiting in terms of where you install this projector. For a given screen positioning you only have two fixed locations where the projector will achieve correct geometry. The optics required for lens shift are more complex and expensive, which is why it's rarely seen on cheaper projectors. But with the X3000i's relatively beefy pricing, its absence is felt.
(Image credit: Future)Whatever, it's all wrapped up in an unusual cubed-shaped chassis. That's at least in part to allow for the TreVolo audio system combining dual 5W speakers. The final feature of note is the bundled Android streaming dongle. It's primarily nice to have because its functionality is integrated into the X3000i's remote and thus means you don't need to have two remote controls, as you will with a third-party HDMI dongle. BenQ also provides a neat slot and dedicated HDMI port with USB power under the top cover to house the dongle, leaving the two rear HDMI ports free for a PC and console gaming combo.
But what of the actual viewing experience? The X3000i is certainly punchy. The impact of the 3000 lumens is very noticeable compared to, say, a 1,500 lumen cinema-orientated projector. We're still not convinced the X3000i really works in a brightly lit room full of ambient daylight. Truly, no projector no matter how bright is great in such conditions. What the X3000i does allow, however, is a few more options to enjoy gaming without having to be super careful about a bit of background light. Just don't go thinking this is a great option for all-purpose day and night gaming, it's a bit more limited than that.
The colour saturation does become a little OTT, but it's not a huge distraction.
In general projector image quality terms, the BenQ X3000i is good but not great. At 4K resolution, the pixel definition is pretty good—close to that of a true native 4K projector—and the colours in cinema mode are fairly natural and convincing. Dip into one of the brighter modes, including gaming mode, and the colour saturation does become a little OTT, but it's not a huge distraction.
Less convincing are the contrast and black levels. Even in cinema mode, black tones are a little washed out and grey, a problem that increases with the brighter presets. Put simply, we wouldn't recommend this projector if your main remit is watching movies and TV with a little gaming on the side.
(Image credit: Future)But as a pure gaming beamer? Well, that's different. For sure, in darker gaming scenes, we'd prefer more contrast. But most of the time, the zing and sizzle of those 3000 lumens is a lot of fun. What's more, running at 240Hz and 1080p, this is undoubtedly a very responsive projector. You really can enjoy online shooters with this thing.
That said, we're not sure many people are going to want to sit at a desk with keyboard and mouse playing games on a projector. So, the X3000i arguably lends itself more to games that work well with handheld controllers. At which point, running at 4K and 60Hz probably makes sense in terms of the overall visual spectacle. Whichever resolution or refresh rate you run at, the good news is that there's little if any visible rainbow effect thanks to that eight-segment light wheel.
All told, there's loads to like here. Put it this way, you haven't lived until you've seen something like Cyberpunk 2077 running at full reheat on a punchy 4K projector. It's something else. Likewise, playing Rocket League on a huge screen with a good sound system blasting away feels like you're actually in the stadium. It's a lot of fun.
Image 1 of 11(Image credit: Future)Image 2 of 11(Image credit: Future)Image 3 of 11(Image credit: Future)Image 4 of 11(Image credit: Future)Image 5 of 11(Image credit: Future)Image 6 of 11(Image credit: Future)Image 7 of 11(Image credit: Future)Image 8 of 11(Image credit: Future)Image 9 of 11(Image credit: Future)Image 10 of 11(Image credit: Future)Image 11 of 11(Image credit: Future)Speaking of audio, those TreVolo stereo speakers may be better than the tiny mono speaker most projectors house. But you still wouldn't want to actually game with it or watch movies. The sound quality is very muddy and flat. You'll need some proper speakers, to be sure. For the record, the bundled Android TV dongle works well and will stream at full 4K, which is critical in our view, albeit the range of apps on offer is a bit limited and notably doesn't include Netflix, and the projector has stereo audio-out, which is essential when using streaming dongles.
All of which makes the BenQ X3000i an interesting but not totally compelling proposition. We like the punchy brightness. But at this price point, we'd prefer a projector with lower brightness but better optics including lens shift and accept that ambient light levels need to be kept under control.
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Need to know
What is it? A bat family stealth action game set in an open world Gotham.
Expect to pay $60
Release date: October 21
Developer: WB Games Montréal
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Reviewed on: RTX 3080 Ti, i9 12900K, 32GB RAM
Multiplayer? Yes
Link: Official siteGotham Knights has an excruciatingly long intro where Batman dies. He brawls with Ra's al Ghul for what feels like 20 minutes and is eventually crushed by the debris of a crumbling bat cave. The game's heroes find his body in the rubble, clutching his mask in one hand. Batman's death is the setup for a game that wants to distance itself from the Arkham series and introduce four bat protégés as worthy replacements. But Gotham Knights wasn't ready to let go of the Dark Knight.
No matter how dead Batman is in Gotham Knights, this game can't escape his legacy as the best videogame superhero. It mimics the Freeflow combat that defined the Arkham series and features many of the same villains that were already in Rocksteady's games. Gotham Knights tries so hard to convince you that it's different and that Batman is truly, definitively dead, but all of its new characters end up pulling from the same old script.
(Image credit: Tyler C. / WB Games Montréal)Gotham Knights did have me fooled for a few hours, though. At first it reminded me how delicious the Arkham-style third-person stealth and combat can be. Every punch and kick has weight and rhythm—it's practically staccato. It's the rare action game, outside of Musou beat-em-ups like Dynasty Warriors, where a group of enemies isn't a chore; it's an opportunity to flex your gadgets and patience to sneak through a puzzle of patrols. As you learn the visual tells and the button presses to associate with them, fights elevate from messy scraps to Hong Kong ballets.
Then I went back and tried both Arkham Origins and Arkham Asylum and realized the trick Gotham Knights played on me.
Gotham Knights benefits from the years-long gap between it and the Arkham series, because if you haven't spent time in those games recently, you might have forgotten how tremendous Arkham Asylum's combat was and how consistent it stayed all the way to Arkham Knight. It was already pristine, but Gotham Knights awkwardly tries to break it apart.
It's frustratingly inferior to those years-old games despite its attempts to mirror the Arkham combat. Like so many games that transition into open world RPGs with skill trees and levels and missions and crafting, it takes the resourcefulness and strengths of being Batman and scatters them across a big map for you to accrue over hours and hours of play. And it splits them up between individual heroes. Robin's skill tree has the Batman where you can string up an enemy from a vantage point, but the ability to place elemental-based mines is in another tree. And Batgirl can't do that move at all. Instead of building up an all-powerful arsenal of tools and attacks, each character was only a fraction of the Batman I know.
As a recreation of what made the other games great, it's a failure. Gotham Knights' attempt to translate Arkham into an online co-op game fragments great design into jagged pieces for the cheap dopamine hit of gradual progression.
Carbon copies
Early on, Batgirl, Robin, Nightwing, and Red Hood are effectively Batman lite, but in four different sizes. Because they're interchangeable, they all have the same goal—to follow the conspiracy that Batman was chasing before he died—and all of the same basic skills needed to do the job. Their conversations are punctuation between the open world segments and setup for your next mission. There are a few scenes that deal with the obvious tension in the group, but the game is most interested in having an excuse for four playable characters. Jason Todd, or Red Hood, died and was resurrected, and yet nobody wants to talk about how that has radically changed his relationship with the rest of the crew and his drive to fight crime in the same way. The characters can't stray far from the mission or Batman's values, which dulls Gotham Knights' one major chance to differentiate itself from the Arkham games.
You can swap between Batpeeps in the central Belfry location; level and ability points carry over, and each character is given adequate armor and weapons to equip. They do develop their own strengths through their skill trees: Robin can run around without making noise, Batgirl can disable security cameras and turrets, Nightwing can debuff and heal allies, and Red Hood can tank hits and crowd control enemies. This can slightly change your approach to stealth and combat scenarios, but the disadvantages for being the least optimal character aren't substantial. I spent most of my time as Batgirl for her swift combo attacks and because her suits looked nice, and I ran into zero roadblocks in the open world or in the game's cordoned off villain missions—which see the return of characters like Mr. Freeze, Harley Quinn, and Clayface.
(Image credit: WB Games)In two-player co-op I could start to see where their distinct traits interlock. I fought Harley Quinn, an aggressive, high-level boss as Robin with an ally Red Hood who repeatedly got caught in lethal grab attacks. I built up my Momentum meter to deploy a decoy that kept the boss distracted while I helped Red Hood up from a downed state or gave him room to heal. But outside of tough encounters like that, there's little need to build strategies around abilities. You just cooperatively punch enemies until a notification pops with an XP reward.
Each of the characters play like a diluted version of Arkham Batman.
The boss fights in Gotham Knight don't stick out like they do in the Arkham games, largely opting for battles of stats and reflexes. Bosses have big health bars, hard-hitting combos and AoE attacks that are designed to simply punish your dodge timing and positioning compared to normal enemies. As a solo player, they're marathons that drain you of resources, forcing you to balance earning Momentum and spending it on your own high-damage abilities to catch up. In co-op, they resemble simple MMO bosses that require whoever has their focus to work on dodging while the other gets damage in.
Gotham Knights doesn't fully commit to archetypes like tank, support, and DPS. And as a result, each of the characters play like a diluted version of Arkham Batman. None of them have truly dramatic strengths or weaknesses. Until you dig down into the final parts of the talent trees, craft unique gear, and equip them with stat-enhancing armor mods, the four heroes can't match how perfect Batman was as a videogame protagonist. He's a walking Swiss army knife of gadgets and fighting techniques, all of which is at your disposal. But Gotham Knights killed him, split his body into four parts, and forces you to play as one severed limb at a time.
Been there, done that
(Image credit: Tyler C. / WB Games Montréal)Gotham Knights' cleverest idea is taking open world activity bloat and breaking it up into nightly adventures, initiated after you check in at the Belfry base. As you grapple between rooftops, you come across special targets that, when interrogated, will give you information—hilariously delivered as clue points dropped on the ground like Diablo loot—to discover premeditated crimes. These crimes will show up with better XP and crafting material rewards the next night you explore the city. Most missions have bonus objectives like finishing without being detected or killing enemies with ranged weapons, but premeditated crimes have more enemies and even harder objectives. If you fail or ditch the area, you can't do them again.
These crimes were the steepest and most satisfying challenges that Gotham Knights' open world gave me, and felt worth the heap of rewards. Only the premeditated crimes made me consider how to apply the Bat Fam's specialties to what the encounter required. As Batgirl I could scan an area, disable a turret or enemy sniper and swoop in for a silent knockout. When I inevitably screwed up and got detected, these missions became frantic as I tried to manage multiple enemies throwing fire bombs and bullets my way.
But by the time I was finishing my fourth bank robbery and gang deal, the suspension of disbelief wore away. Gotham city has a lot of crime—way more than is realistic for what is supposed to be a real city where people live, even if it is an infamous hellhole. You'd at least think the criminals would learn to go for less ambitious crimes than ones that involve 20 of their buddies and a stolen laser cutter to open a vault every other day. There's no systemic or procedural progression to make Gotham's absurd ecosystem of crime adapt to your actions, so stopping these heists and kidnappings quickly loses all significance.
It's a half-baked system, and yet sadly the only thing in the game that aims higher than all the Arkham games before it.
Swing and a miss
(Image credit: Tyler C. / WB Games Montréal)Even in a largely barren open world, Gotham Knights strained my PC's resources while clearing out all the crime and collectibles. I ran the game at 4K (with DLSS enabled) on a 3080 Ti and an Intel i9 2900K and the open world tanked my fps down into the 60s and would dip lower when I fought near fires or other busy effects. Locking my fps to 60 made it more consistent, but wasn't enough to completely smooth out performance.
Interior areas ran much better, but considering the bulk of the game has you sifting through the city, it was a pain to have to manage frame drops without falling off a perch and alerting an entire group of enemies. I also experienced a handful of crashes when I entered story missions and the Belfry, but they largely cleared up after upgrading to the latest Nvidia drivers and restarting my PC. Other PC Gamer staff reported framerate issues as well at 1080p. None of my issues made the game unplayable, but it's concerning for players with lesser hardware, and made an early chunk of the game a pain to play as I adjusted settings.
Everything in Gotham Knights is done better in another game; some with Batman and some without. The Arkham games had RPG-like talent trees and progression, but those were layered on top of already satisfying stealth and combat systems. Gotham Knights starts and ends with brawls that feel like fighting in mud, even compared to the developer's own Arkham Origins. And its large-scale version of Gotham is rife with duplicated crimes and almost no reason to keep it safe in the first place. It's a mostly empty playground for its four heroes to farm XP for the next mission.
Gotham Knights tried to distance itself from Batman by killing him off, but instead it just split him into four pale imitations adrift in a bland open world. It's just as well he's dead; even Batman couldn't fix this mess.
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Forget Silent Hill and disregard Uncharted, because my favourite game series about amphibious sleuths and their crustacean partners returns to us on October 27 with Frog Detective 3: Corruption at Cowboy County.
Continuing the Frog Detective saga, Frog Detective 3 takes you and your partner—Lobster Cop—to a Wild West-themed locale to solve the "conundrum of a sheriff-less county". If it's anything like the last two games, you'll mostly progress the plot by chatting with a gaggle of bizarre and endearing anthropomorphic town inhabitants and collecting a few key items. There's also a magnifying glass, which serves no purpose beyond zooming in on things a bit.
If it's not abundantly clear, these games are pretty much one big, absurd comedy skit. The joy comes not from solving puzzles or collecting clues, but in the interactions you have with the various weird animal-people that make up each game's cast. It's more like Wes Anderson Does Gone Home than a Phoenix Wright-style investigative mystery. As the game's Steam page used to read, "If you're looking for hard-hitting detective work, you've clicked on the wrong store page".
Frog Detective 3 is pitching itself as the third and final game in the series, which is probably for the best. As much as I enjoy the silly, cosy comedy of these games, the joke would probably start to wear thin if it got stretched out much further. Better to go out on a high note than to make me resent the sight of gaming's foremost froggy gumshoe.
Just like the last two games, Frog Detective 3 is being developed by a tiny dev team made up of Grace Bruxner, Thomas Bowker, Dan Golding, and Olivia Haines. It will release on Steam on October 27 and will, we can but hope, finally put the dark mysteries at the heart of the series to a long-awaited rest.
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There's a lot of exciting hardware coming out right now. AMD, Nvidia, and Intel all have new products for us enthusiasts to salivate over, but there's a clear trend, and it's a sad one. PC hardware just keeps getting ever more expensive. The more feature rich AM5 motherboards are a case in point. The idea of dropping well over $500 on a motherboard is ludicrous to many.
News is emerging that AMD's new Ryzen 7000 series isn't selling as well as AMD would want. Broader economic considerations aside, steep motherboard pricing is certainly a contributing factor. After years of being spoiled by the AM4 upgrade path, upgraders are forced to buy a new motherboard and DDR5 memory. I hate to say it, but consoles look like really good value in comparison.
Thankfully, not all AM5 boards are exorbitantly priced. One such example is the ASRock X670E Pro RS I've got on hand for review. It's designed to be a cost-effective motherboard that offers the important X670E feature set, including PCIe 5.0 GPU and SSD support, the ability to run a Ryzen 9 7950X without issue, and provide the essentials like Wi-Fi 6E and ample storage support.
At $279 / £320 / AU$569 it's one of the cheaper X670E motherboards. In fact, it's one of the cheaper X670 boards full stop. You'll need to choose a B650 or B650E board if you want to save more money. At half the price of high-end boards like ASRock's own Taichi, the Asus Crosshair X670E Hero or Aorus Extreme, does the X670E Pro RS have to cut too much for such a saving? Let's see what it has to offer.
X670E Pro RS specs(Image credit: Asrock)Socket: AMD Socket AM5
CPU compatibility: AMD Ryzen 7000 desktop processors
Form factor: ATX
Memory support: Up to DDR5-6600+ (OC), Up to 128GB
Storage: 5x M.2; 6x SATA
USB: Up to 1x USB 3.2 Gen2x2, 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2, 8x USB 3.1 Gen 1, 8x USB 2.0
Display: 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x DP 1.4
Networking: Wi-Fi 6E; Realtek 2.5G LAN
Audio: Realtek ALC897 7.1 Channel HD Audio
Price: $279 / £320 / AU$569The ASRock X670E Pro RS isn’t what you'd call a beautiful board, but I like the silver and black combination, along with the fonts atop the M.2 heatsinks. There's a little bit of RGB lighting flair underneath the chipset heatsink, however. And, if you love your RGB lighting, there are three ARGB headers plus an additional non-addressable one.
ASRock includes a graphics card support device that mounts to two of the motherboard screw holes. That's handy if you plan to buy a monster sized graphics card. Yes, I'm looking at you, chonky RTX 4090.
The board includes five M,2 slots, once of which is a PCIe 5.0 slot cooled by a chunky heatsink. You'll still want to have decent case airflow though as M.2 heatsinks adjacent to a graphics card can actually absorb heat if neglected. I would not recommend using the middle two slots if you're using a gaming GPU. Use the two at the bottom of the board before those middle two.
Rounding out the storage support are six SATA ports.
Image 1 of 8(Image credit: Future)Image 2 of 8(Image credit: Future)Image 3 of 8(Image credit: Future)Image 4 of 8(Image credit: Future)Image 5 of 8(Image credit: Future)Image 6 of 8(Image credit: Future)Image 7 of 8(Image credit: Future)Image 8 of 8(Image credit: Future)The VRM is adequate, if nothing special, though you wouldn't expect ASRock to include everything a high-end board has. A 14+2+1 phase solution is enough to power a 7950X without issue. The board includes 4+8-pin CPU power connectors.
The heatsinks are good for an 'entry level' X670 board. Running a 7950X under a sustained all core load, they were merely warm to the touch.
The I/O at the rear is excellent for a board at this price point. You get Wi-Fi 6E and Realtek 2.5G LAN which matches some much more expensive boards. Then you get DP 1.4 and HDMI 2.1 ports for use with the new integrated GPU capabilities of Ryzen 7000 CPUs.
The USB complement is good, with a total of ten rear ports. There are two 3.2 Gen 2 ports (one of which is Type-C) plus four 3.2 Gen 1 and four 2.0 ports. Internal headers can provide another eight ports plus the all-important USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 type-C.
The audio is an area that's less impressive. Realtek ALC892 is cheap, but an expensive controller and things like DACs are how board makers justify adding the big bucks for high end boards. As one of the cheaper boards offering a full X670E feature set, I understand ASRock having to make a few compromises.
ASRock's BIOS keeps things simple, the new releases really lower the boot times and unless you're into tweaking memory for hours on end looking for a few extra 3DMark 2001 frames, it includes everything a gamer needs, including the impressive ECO modes.
ASRock goes further and includes enhanced PBO modes that allow you to set maximum temperatures and voltages. These modes are a fantastic way to tune your system, allowing you to optimize for any type of cooler.
System Performance
Image 1 of 6Image 2 of 6Image 3 of 6Image 4 of 6Image 5 of 6Image 6 of 6Gaming Performance
Image 1 of 5Image 2 of 5Image 3 of 5Image 4 of 5Image 5 of 5As we almost always say, using benchmarks as a differentiating factor between motherboards isn't usually very revealing unless there's something very wrong. The ASRock is perhaps a touch under the average of the boards I have tested so far, though when it comes to gaming, the differences are always within a margin of error.
Test rigCPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X
Graphics: Zotac GeForce RTX 3080 Ti AMP Holo
RAM: 2x 16GB G.Skill Trident Z5 DDR5-6000 C30
Storage: 2TB Seagate FireCuda 530
Cooling: Cooler Master PL360 Flux 360mm AIO
PSU: Corsair AX1000Perhaps ASRock still has that last 1% of BIOS optimizing to do. I know for a fact some engineering teams are stretched thin with both AMD and Intel launching new platforms at the same time. If you buy an ASRock X670E Pro RS, it's definitely worth grabbing a new BIOS off the ASRock website before you do anything else with it.
However, at this early stage of the life of the AM5 platform, it feels remarkably mature in general. There's still some work to do to improve boot times, and we're yet to see PCIe 5.0 SSDs reach the market, but compared to some of the issues that first generation Ryzen had at the time of its launch, ASRock and AMD can't be too unhappy.
I'm also pleased to see BIOS flashback support on the Pro RS and seemingly all other AM5 motherboards. This means you'll be able to upgrade to a future CPU without needing a Zen 4 chip. Future and proofing are two dirty words, but in the case of AM5 at this time, relatively, it's as good as it gets.
Image 1 of 3(Image credit: Future)Image 2 of 3(Image credit: Asrock)Image 3 of 3(Image credit: Asrock)The ASRock X670E Pro RS is a generally plain motherboard. And there's nothing wrong with that at this price point. If you're a gamer who sticks your PC under the desk, out of sight and mind, then there's no need for you to spend money on bling.
It's proof you don't have to spend loads of money on an expensive motherboard. Saving a couple of hundred dollars and putting it towards a faster CPU or better graphics card will deliver actual performance gains. Unless you need things like USB 4, 10G LAN or multiple PCIe 5.0 SSD support, you don't really lose all that much compared to more expensive boards.
What it does do is deliver the core X670E feature set with no fuss. You get PCIe 5.0 graphics card and SSD support, Wi-Fi 6E, a capable VRM and presumably you'll be able to drop a future Ryzen 8000 or 9000 CPU in with just a BIOS update.
The ASRock X670E Pro RS is proof you don't need to spend loads of money on an expensive motherboard.
So, if the asking price of X670E boards in the region of $600 / £600 / AU$1,000 or more leaves you incredulous, a board like the ASRock X670E Pro RS is one you should consider. But don't forget B650 and B650E too, B650E in particular offers many of the same features at an even lower price point.
Throw in a 7600X with a RTX 40 or Radeon RX 7000 card, and 32GB of DDR5 and you've got a capable gaming system on your hands, but even better, you'll be able to upgrade your components for years to come. When you look at it in those terms the ASRock X670E Pro RS offers excellent value, and that's something that can't be said for too many AM5 motherboards.
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If you're hoping to find the answer to the October 20 (488) Wordle as quickly as possible then you've come to the right place—just scroll down or click the sidebar and you'll see today's solution. Prefer a quick hint? Don't worry, you'll find that and plenty of other helpful tips here too.
With today's Wordle I uncovered a few greens early on… and then spent every guess afterwards stumbling around in the dark before realising almost too late that the answer had practically been staring me in the face the whole time. A win's a win, even if I could have got there sooner.
Wordle hint
Today's Wordle: A hint for Thursday, October 20
The answer today is the name of a popular hard-wearing fabric often coloured blue and most commonly used to make jeans. You'll need to find two vowels today.
Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day
If there's one thing better than playing Wordle, it's playing Wordle well, which is why I'm going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the path to success:
- A good opener contains a balanced mix of unique vowels and consonants.
- A tactical second guess helps to narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
- The solution may contain repeat letters.
There's no time pressure beyond making sure it's done by midnight. So there's no reason to not treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you're coming up blank.
Wordle answer
(Image credit: Josh Wardle)What is the Wordle 488 answer?
I'm here to help you win. The answer to the October 20 (488) Wordle is DENIM.
Previous answers
Wordle archive: Which words have been used
The more past Wordle answers you can cram into your memory banks, the better your chances of guessing today's Wordle answer without accidentally picking a solution that's already been used. Past Wordle answers can also give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle solving fresh.
Here are some recent Wordle solutions:
- October 19: QUIRK
- October 18: EXIST
- October 17: STEIN
- October 16: SPADE
- October 15: CATCH
- October 14: FLOOR
- October 13: EQUAL
- October 12: IONIC
- October 11: VALID
- October 10: ENJOY
Learn more about Wordle
Every day Wordle presents you with six rows of five boxes, and it's up to you to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them.
You'll want to start with a strong word like ALERT—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters. Hit Enter and the boxes will show you which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns
️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 
means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 
means you've got the right letter in the right spot.You'll want your second go to compliment the first, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer.
After that it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).
If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you'll find those below.
Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes.
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Need to know
What is it? A first-person ghostbusting simulator with co-op and asymmetrical multiplayer.
Expect to pay: $40
Release date: October 18, 2022
Developer: Illfonic
Publisher: Illfonic
Reviewed on: Windows 10, Ryzen R7 5700g, 16GB DDR4 RAM, Radeon RX 5700
Multiplayer? Yes
Link: Epic StoreSpirits Unleashed opens with a music video of Fortnite Ernie Hudson doing the 'ol walk-and-nod in the original firehouse, that routine your manager does when he has to pretend to be busy. "I may run this place, but don't go around calling me 'boss'," he tells me. I move the mouse from one side of my desk to the other to try and break eye contact with this awkward scene. He orders me to learn to use the Proton Pack while his lackeys, the new generation of Ghostbusters, tell me about picking up "side hustles." This place needs a union.
Workplace gripes aside, bustin' ghosts isn't the worst gig. My first day on the job in Spirits Unleashed let me play around with some cool toys. The Proton Pack, a portable Three Mile Island rigged up to a fire hose, roared as I pulled back on the trigger the first time. That was when I got my first and only framerate drop, like the game was taken by surprise at how much oomph its ghostbusting gun had. It felt good.
The Proton Pack works in conjunction with the traps from the film, the streams harmlessly crossing without consequence in multiplayer.
Ghostbusters '84 has a sharp wit: it's still a hilarious satire of money-grubbing small business psychos and the gnarled bundle of red tape they run up against. Nothing about the "close three portals while getting harassed" asymmetrical multiplayer of Spirits Unleashed feels like it's in keeping with the cynical energy of the source material. Sure, my motley crew of gig workers and I have to coordinate and focus fire on a ghost to pull them into a placeable trap, balancing our respective proton heat levels and working the best angles, but none of us ever felt like Spengler or Ray.
Spirits Unleashed just doesn't have a ton of personality, something that can't be said for the film it's based on. The custom characters are real voids: the only things they have to say are affirmative barks in the tutorials. I'd have loved to hear some Akroyd/Ramis-style riffing among the squad mid-mission in the vein of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, but there's none of that here.
Visually, too, Spirits Unleashed is uninspired, resembling the rounded-edge Fortnite style. It doesn't look bad per se—there's some impressive lighting from the Proton Pack as lightning bolts skitter up and down adjacent walls like a nuclear kaleidoscope—but little else. Barring the licensed theme, the music is unremarkable and bizarrely adjacent to the Harry Potter film scores, a banal 4/4 arrangement of womp-womp horns and royalty-free strings. Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed peddles the fantasy of being a Ghostbuster but without any of the style or humor required to really make it feel like you're in that ugly gray jumpsuit.
(Image credit: Illfonic)Moment-to-moment Spirits Unleashed is a bit of a bore. Blasting a ghost fills up a meter. When that meter is full, the ghost can be pulled into the trap, as long as the trap has a charge (another meter). The Proton Pack will overheat if fired too long. That's three meters on the screen now. When the tutorial is done, there are three more, and none of them fill up or empty out particularly fast. The key one is the "building haunt" meter—the forces of the paranormal win when it tops out. It's all a bit drab, the meters ticking up and down never requiring more than passive management.
The only non-meter-based interaction occurs when a ghost gets near a civilian. You have to do a Gears of War active reload on them to calm them down. (Hey, we're Ghostbusters, not social workers.)
(Image credit: Illfonic)Those civilians populate six drab locations, most of them businesses haunted by the specter of unpaid wages and OSHA violations. There's nothing too special about any of them—I expect real bust-heads may get a kick out of wandering through the iconic firehouse hub world, but even as a casual fan, I found very little there to stave off my boredom between ghostbusting gigs.
Not all ghosts are the same, as the legal likeness and voice of Dan Aykroyd informs me—there are five different Slimer-likes for players to control, each with a different set of abilities to harass and impede the human players. I found that the ghosts weren't especially fun to play as or against: they're all too quick to catch up to when bustin', and too fragile to bother taking risks with when spookin'. At a glance, the Poltergeist seems to be the meta pick, slightly faster than the already too-fast default ghoul, and able to spawn annoying defensive mobs.
(Image credit: Illfonic)Spirits Unleashed just isn't all that satisfying to play—the "combat" doesn't reward precision or accuracy in any meaningful way, focused entirely on cohesive team play. Well enough, I suppose—us guys, we gotta stick together. But the ceiling for individual play is pretty low: there's little in the way of equipment, and the Proton Pack upgrades feel indistinguishable from the stock model. Unless your communication with teammates is ironclad (never the case in quickplay) you'll rarely eke out a win.
It all comes down to preventing the ghost from going through a door after breaking free. As a result, flying solo online is often too tedious to be worthwhile, and the AI is far too simplistic to provide much in the way of a challenge at the moment. Most matches saw my human teams fulfilling every objective except busting said ghost. How much of that is owed to screwy balance vs. quickplay apathy I can't pin down, but that doesn't change how frustrating Spirits Unleashed can be sometimes.
I was told bustin' was hardy blue collar work, but there's no real minute-to-minute urgency here like in Dead by Daylight, with victory and defeat never feeling entirely in my hands.
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Hello shogun2413,
Welcome to UnityHQ Nolfseries Community. Please feel free to browse around and get to know the others. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.
shogun2413 joined on the 10/20/2022.
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Konami announced the long-rumoured Silent Hill 2 remake is real, and is being developed by Bloober Team, the Polish studio responsible for The Medium. Said remake now has a Steam page, and a set of system requirements. They are… not low.
The recommended specs call for a GeForce RTX 2080 or AMD Radeon 6800XT while noting they will enable you to play on medium-quality settings at 60fps, or on high-quality settings at a mere 30fps either in Full HD "or 4k using DLSS or similar technology". That's a heck of a demand to still end up with just 30fps on high after turning on DLSS.
Bloober are certainly capable of making attractive games, and The Medium's spooky split worlds and character animations looked great. Though I did have to turn ray tracing off even with a 3080 to stop the framerate from dropping whenever someone lit a cigarette.
The original Silent Hill used fog to cover up its limited draw-distance. These days, volumetric fog can be a demanding feature, affecting performance in games like Monster Hunter: World and Vermintide 2 (where turning it down can net you a 15% framerate boost, you're welcome). But it's possible that other things are responsible for the high specs, and we don't know how far along in development Bloober's Silent Hill 2 remake is. The system requirements may be an educated guess that will be revised closer to release, and Silent Hill 2 doesn't have a release date yet.
Just yesterday the Gotham Knights system requirements came in, and they too were surprisingly demanding. Silent Hill 2's description says we'll "Experience a master-class in psychological survival horror―lauded as the best in the series―on the latest hardware with chilling visuals and visceral sounds" and maybe they mean it about "the latest hardware".
Here are the full Silent Hill 2 system requirements.
Minimum
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 x64
- Processor: Intel Core i5-8400 | AMD Ryzen 3 3300X
- Memory: 12 GB RAM
- Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 5700 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 50 GB available space
- Sound Card: Windows Compatible Audio Device.
- Additional Notes: Playing on minimum requirements should enable to play on Low/Medium quality settings in FullHD (1080p) in stable 30 FPS.
Recommended
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 11 x64
- Processor: Intel Core i7-8700K | AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 2080RTX or AMD Radeon 6800XT
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 50 GB available space
- Sound Card: Windows Compatible Audio Device.
- Additional Notes: Playing on recommended requirements should enable to play on Medium quality settings in 60 FPS or High quality settings in 30 FPS, in FullHD (or 4k using DLSS or similar technology).
Image 1 of 8(Image credit: Konami)Image 2 of 8(Image credit: Konami)Image 3 of 8(Image credit: Konami)Image 4 of 8(Image credit: Konami)Image 5 of 8(Image credit: Konami)Image 6 of 8(Image credit: Konami)Image 7 of 8(Image credit: Konami)Image 8 of 8(Image credit: Konami) -
Have you seen this robot? He's about 7'3", approximately 2 tons, and has a friendly bird on his shoulder. After nine days missing from the game without any updates, Overwatch commercial leader Jon Spector announced on Twitter that Bastion would finally return to Overwatch 2 on October 25. By that time, he will have been gone for over two weeks. Spector also announced that the Junkertown map has been removed to fix a bug affecting graphical performance, but it'll be back on the same day as Bastion.
Blizzard made the call to temporarily remove Bastion from Overwatch 2 on Monday, October 10 after a bug was discovered that allowed the robo-hero to indefinitely use his mortar strike ultimate ability to devastating effect. Torbjörn was also targeted for bug fixes at the same time, but he remains playable in Quick Play while Blizzard works on him.
Good news, everyone. Bastion and Torbjorn have been located in Junkertown, and we are arranging for them to rejoin the other agents of Overwatch on 10/25.October 19, 2022
See moreBastion hasn't been so lucky. What Blizzard initially described as a "quick trip to the workshop" will drag on for 15 days. The newly-reworked hero has not only been unplayable in matches, but all evidence that he's even in Overwatch 2 has been completely scrubbed from the client. You can't enter training mode with Bastion, play him against bots, or even look at his cosmetics in the main menu. In fact, he no longer appears in the list of heroes at all, forcing me to question if he ever really existed.
The wait for Bastion's safe return has gone on long enough that community reactions have begun to graduate from lighthearted memes anticipating his homecoming to dour doomposting and mild aggravation that Blizzard hasn't been communicative about the issue. It's true that nine days is a while to wait for an update, which is also a bit strange considering how vocal Overwatch's official support channels have been about the game's other ongoing issues like server interruptions and inventory disparities.
new_hero_leak_found_some_locked_achievements from r/Overwatch
Spector's statement is a welcome relief, but it doesn't mention why a bug that seems so ordinary on the surface (pressing two buttons at the same time to un-cancel an ultimate) was apparently difficult to crack. The uncertainty has certainly taken a toll on my Bastion-maining friend, who told me last night that he's stopped queuing for DPS because of the jolt of disappointment he feels when the character select appears and he remembers the sad state of affairs.
The October 25 update can't come soon enough, because as Twitch streamer Hoshizora points out, Bastion has now been missing from Overwatch 2 longer than he's been in it.
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As well as announcing a remake of Silent Hill 2 being developed by Bloober Team, a new game called Silent Hill Townfall from No Code and Annapurna Interactive, another new game called Silent Hill F, plus whatever the interactive live event Silent Hill Ascension turns out to be, Konami revealed that the upcoming third Silent Hill movie will adapt the story of the second videogame.
Christophe Gans, who directed the first, slightly more popular movie in the series, will be back to direct Return to Silent Hill. "We decided to go back to the best of these stories," Gans said in today's announcement. "I mean Silent Hill 2. The film is the story of a young guy coming back to Silent Hill, where he has known a great love, and what he is going to find is a pure nightmare."
Several scenes familiar from the game were recognizable in storyboards and artwork from the upcoming movie shown during the transmission: James discovering Eddie vomiting into a toilet, James and Maria arriving at Brookhaven Hospital, and James about to encounter his first monster in a tunnel. Producer Victor Hadida described Return to Silent Hill as "very modern but also very true to the videogame" while also saying, "Christophe is a real gamer. He has been immersed in this world."
One challenge Return to Silent Hill will face is that the other movies in the series already plundered Silent Hill 2 for monster designs. While loosely based on the first game's plot, the first movie featured notable enemies from the second game like the bubble-head nurses, one of the squirming, body-bagged "lying figures", and of course Pyramid Head. "One of my major goals in this film is how to redesign the classic monster of Silent Hill," said Gans. "I was talking about Red Pyramid, you know, the guy with the helmet. He's again in this one."
"The monsters are one of the elements that the fans are waiting for," said Hadida, "and we are updating those in a way that the creation is similar, but they will be striking."
According to Rui Naito, an assistant producer at Konami in charge of Silent Hill's cross-media development, it was actually the movie that inspired the current revival of the videogames. "We received a fantastic film concept and script and we thought, 'This is going to be a great film!' However, part of me wondered whether it was enough to just make a new film. We wanted to bring back the game series as well," he said.
Naito also said, "we already have storyboards and image boards, but actually filming and casting are still in the works," so don't expect Return to Silent Hill to be in theatres any time soon.
Microsoft's latest Activision acquisition defense: What if Call of Duty sucked?
in Gaming News
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One of the big sticking points in Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard is Call of Duty. Both Sony and regulators have expressed concerns that Microsoft could use the series as a weapon against PlayStation by making it exclusive to Xbox consoles. Microsoft has repeatedly said that it won't do this, but in a new response to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority it also made the point that it might not matter someday, because nothing is forever.
There are few videogame series as lucrative and reliable as Call of Duty, it's true. It's been around for almost 20 years now—the original Call of Duty launched in 2003—and became a true behemoth with the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in 2007. It's understandable that Sony would be a little jittery at the prospect of losing access to millions of game sales (and millions more microtransactions) every year. But what if Call of Duty sucked? Nobody would care about exclusivity then, right?
"While Call of Duty is one of a number of popular franchises, its success over time is not guaranteed," Microsoft wrote in its response to the CMA. "Relevance with gamers is earned or lost with every release.
"This dynamic is shown by the performance of last year’s Call of Duty: Vanguard release, which was heavily criticized by the trade press and gamers alike, resulting in significantly lower sales than reflected in the internal documents cited by the CMA."
Vanguard isn't the only Call of Duty to disappoint in recent years, of course: Infinite Warfare, released in 2016, sold only half of the previous year's Black Ops 3.
The CMA didn't immediately buy the argument, stating in reply that the Call of Duty series as a whole continues to have "persistent high revenues and player engagement" even when individual titles fail to meet expectations, and that "gamers who did not like Vanguard most likely continued to play older CoD titles rather than switch away to a different game."
Microsoft defended its position, however, by noting Activision's 10Q filing for the quarter ended June 30, 2022, which showed an across-the-board decline in Call of Duty in the months following Vanguard's release: "Average MAUs [monthly active users] decreased by 47 million or 12% for the three months ended June 30, 2022, as compared to the three months ended June 30, 2021 ... primarily due to lower average MAUs for Activision, driven by the Call of Duty franchise."
The 10Q filing also cites Crash Bandicoot: On the Run! as contributing to that decline in Activision's monthly playerbase, but Microsoft did not include that in its response. It also didn't mention the part in the filing where Activision said that "we believe that overall trends in the number of MAUs can be a meaningful performance metric, [but] period-to-period fluctuations may not be indicative of longer-term trends." Take that as you will.
Microsoft may be torquing the point a bit, but even so it's a fair position to take: Popular videogame series are remarkably durable—just look at Madden NFL, which has been around since the 1980s—but nothing is forever and it's quite possible that someday, people will get bored with annualized iterations of the same basic military shooters. Is it likely to happen anytime soon? I would have to say no, and the bulk of Microsoft's defense in this CMA filing (relating to Call of Duty) continues to rest on the economic argument that it wouldn't be in Microsoft's interests to take Call of Duty off PlayStation platforms.
But it's an interesting (and, let's be honest, fun) acknowledgement: Someday there might be a Call of Duty so bad that Sony wouldn't even want it.
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