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Major electronics manufacturer Samsung says that none of its employees were injured by a Russian missile strike that landed near its research and development office in Kyiv, Ukraine.
The near-miss was reported on Facebook by Andrii Skira, the director of the consumer electronics division at Samsung Ukraine. "Yes, 101 Tower biz.center was damaged today morning after Russian terrorists bomb attacks in Kyiv City (with Samsung Electronics Ukraine and Samsung R&D offices)," Skira wrote. "All Samsung employees were out of office. We are safe!"
Samsung confirmed the damage to the building in a statement sent to PC Gamer. "We can confirm that none of our employees at Samsung Ukraine has been hurt," a Samsung spokesperson said. "Some of the office windows were damaged due to the impact from the blast that occurred nearby. We remain committed to ensuring the safety of our employees and will continue to closely monitor the situation."
Multiple people shared images and video clips of the damaged building on Twitter:
#Samsung Electronics regional headquarters in Kyiv hit by a Russian missile #Kiev #Ukraine #NATORussiaWar #Zaporizhzhia #Dnipro #Odessa #Lviv #KryvyiRog #NATORussiaWar pic.twitter.com/eqV34rvezzOctober 10, 2022
See moreYesterday, Samsung R&D Institute Ukraine Building was hit by a Russian missile.Samsung stated that none of their employees at Samsung Ukraine has been hurt. But, some of the building's windows were damaged due to the blast impact. pic.twitter.com/9YcKV2psYSOctober 11, 2022
See moreSamsung office hit by Russian missile in #Kyiv #RussiaUkraineWar #UkraineRussianWar #UkraineWar #UkraineRussiaWar #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/aXYCcQhLd4October 10, 2022
See moreAs reported by SamMobile, Samsung was one of many companies that cut back or halted its business in Russia following that country's invasion of Ukraine, announcing in March that it had stopped selling mobile phones, chips, and other products in Russia. The withdrawal from the phone market alone represented a big hit: According to a 2021 Statisa report, Samsung accounted for more than one-third of all smartphone sales in the third quarter of that year, although a more recent Statcounter report indicates that its total market share has declined to 22% as of September 2022.
Samsung is also a big player in the PC enthusiast market: It's leading the charge on the development of GAA technology, makes some very sweet SSDs, and has a 55-inch curved gaming monitor that will swallow you whole. Figuratively, of course.
Russia launched a missile strike against civilian targets in Ukraine on October 10, two days after an explosion damaged the Kerch Bridge that was erected by Russia in 2018 following its invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014. An official cause of the explosion has not yet been determined, but Russian president Vladimir Putin described it as a "terrorist" attack and promised that further such attacks will bring more "severe retaliation."
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In the Cyberpunk universe, you can definitely have too much of a good thing. It may seem like a great idea to give yourself cybernetically enhanced vision, leg implants that let you double-jump, retractable blades that pop out of your arms, and any number of other body-enhancing bits of cyberware, but replacing your human parts with machinery comes with a downside: the gradual loss of your humanity and a chance of developing cyberpsychosis, a mental disorder with symptoms that include loss of empathy, impulsive outbursts, and extreme violence.
In the Cyberpunk tabletop game, a player's humanity is governed by an empathy stat, which drops each time a new cyberware implant is installed and can eventually lead to cyberpsychosis, at which point the player's character is controlled by the GM. Cyberpsychosis is also heavily featured in the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime series on Netflix, as several characters grapple with the affliction.
In Cyberpunk 2077, though, the condition isn't particularly well-explored. There are a series of missions to track down and neutralize cyberpsychos running amok in Night City, but these mostly boil down to some brief investigative activities that lead to boss fights against powerful and unhinged enemies. Now there's a way to go a bit deeper into the concept with your own character.
As spotted by GamesRadar, prolific Cyberpunk 2077 modder djkovrik has created the Wannbe Edgerunner mod, which will let you play CD Projekt's RPG with a more lore-based approach to cyberpsychosis. It adds a new humanity system to the game, bringing it more in line with the TTRPG and Cyberpunk Edgerunners, and the effects of cyberpsychosis will kick in when your humanity drops too low.
It's not just adding new cyberware to your body that will cause a drop in your humanity score. Committing murders will also cause your humanity to drop, functioning a bit like a morality system. Using certain operating systems will also lower your humanity score, like Berserk, which when activated gives you attack buffs for melee and projectile weapons, and Sandevistan (also featured in the anime series) which buffs blade attacks. In other words, if you plug in some cyberware and go rampaging around the city murdering innocent people with special attacks, you're gonna become the cyberpsycho you're already acting like.
(Image credit: Netflix)
Side-effects of cyberpsychosis start off pretty mildly, introducing some minor visual glitches and a debuff to your critical damage modifier that can be cured by getting some sleep. Symptoms get more severe, however, with more extreme visual glitches and another debuff to critical hit chance. When you go full cyberpsycho you'll become more powerful with buffs to your speed, armor, and health regeneration, but your vision will be swamped with glitches and cops will automatically be dispatched to your location.
It's not all bad news. Buying higher quality cyberware won't have as big a cost on your humanity as buying cruddy junk parts and cramming them into your body. You can also offset your plummeting humanity with an injection of neuroblockers, as seen in the anime series. They're available to buy at ripperdocs, and using these injections will remove cyberpsychosis side-effects and freeze the loss of humanity points while the meds are active.
It sounds like an interesting system to add to Cyberpunk 2077. It'll definitely give you pause when you're thinking about going ham on a bunch of civilians, and it'll give you some new choices to mull over when you're considering what cyberware you want to bolt onto your bod. You'll find the Wannabe Edgerunner mod at Nexus Mods.
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If you ignore the price, the just announced Meta Quest Pro might be the new best VR headset. It's the long-teased high-end version of the Meta Quest 2 aimed at professionals: Meta is promoting it with visions of headset-wearing creatives meeting in VR or standing in unfurnished office buildings pointing at mixed-reality schematics. Personally, I'd just play games on the thing. The only problem is that it's $1,500.
That's not too expensive compared to Microsoft's HoloLens, which is also aimed at businesses and starts at $3,500, but it's a lot more expensive than most VR gaming systems. The $999 Valve Index is already pricey.
The Quest Pro sure looks sleek, though. It uses what Meta calls "patented pancake lens" technology—I love a straightforward name—which the company says results in a 40% thinner "optical stack" than the Quest 2. It's not quite the VR glasses we might hope the tech eventually arrives at, but much closer than most headsets. At the same time, the images produced by the Quest Pro are supposed to be significantly improved: The 1832x1920 per-eye resolution and 90Hz refresh rate are the same as the Quest 2, but Meta promises higher contrast, a sharper image, and 1.3 times the color range.
The Quest headsets are all-in-one devices, so they don't have to be hooked up to a PC unless you're trying to play a graphically demanding game like Half-Life Alyx. Even at PC Gamer, we have to admit that wireless VR is ideal, even if the headsets aren't very powerful; the Quest 2 contains 6 GB RAM and a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 CPU and GPU to run games like SuperHot VR and Beat Saber. The upgraded Quest Pro uses 12 GB RAM and a new Snapdragon XR2 Plus platform, which Meta says provides "50% more power." I don't expect to run Half-Life Alyx on the thing, but I'm curious to see what it can do.
The Quest Pro also features a better view of your real surroundings for mixed reality (four times the resolution compared to the Quest 2, plus color), facial expression tracking ("smiles, eye-brow raises, winks and all"), and new self-tracking Touch Pro Controllers (meaning you can put them behind your back without the headset losing track of them). The controllers will be available separately later this year for $300, if you want to use them with a Quest 2.
If it all works as advertised—our friends at Tom's Guide were impressed with their demo—it sounds like a great headset, but likely too expensive to recommend for gaming. Aside from its all-in-oneness, price is one of the main reasons we've recommended the Quest 2. Compared to the $800 HTC Vive Pro 2 or Valve's $999 Index, which uses wires and external sensors, the Quest 2 has obviously been the more practical, affordable choice, and that remained true even after Meta increased the prices of both Quest 2 models by $100. The 128GB Quest 2 is currently $399 and the 256GB model is $499.
(Image credit: Meta)There are a couple of other downsides. The battery life is shorter than the Quest 2's: just one to two hours, says Tom's Guide, although you can use it while it's plugged in. The Quest Pro also lets peripheral light in so that you can see where you're going, a feature which reflects its office productivity orientation. "Partial light blocker" attachments are included, but "full light blocker" attachments will be sold separately later this year.
At $1,500, the Quest Pro may succeed or fail depending on whether architects and engineers actually find it useful to hang out in empty lofts projecting diagrams into the space between them. It was built to serve the vision behind Facebook's "metaverse" rebrand, and I suspect the only gamers who'll be buying them are those who already spend thousands of dollars on custom F1 race car simulation rigs a probably a few Star Citizen players. For everyone else, a $1,500 gaming PC would be a lot more exciting than an enterprise-grade VR headset, given that the Meta Quest 2 will provide a pretty similar experience if you're going to hook it up to your PC to play Half-Life Alyx anyway.
The Quest Pro is available to pre-order now, and Meta says they'll start shipping later this month. There's more info in
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The Saints Row reboot did not make the splash that Volition and Deep Silver had hoped. It's a surprisingly conventional action-crime romp , but a little too toned down relative to the previous games: "Compared to spraying sewage on mansions to lower property values or driving a car while being mauled by a tiger who sits in the passenger seat, the reboot's activities seem down to earth," editor Jody Macgregor wrote in our 60% review.
Lars Wingefors, the CEO of Deep Silver parent Embracer Group, also acknowledged in September that he "had hoped for a greater reception of the game," although he added that the company remained committed to the long-term future of the series.
Because of that, "delivering new content has become less of a priority for now," Volition said in an update posted today, so that it can focus instead on improving the base game.
"We are supporting Saints Row for the long-term, and while we’d have preferred to be talking about roadmaps and expansions, right now we feel the focus must be on telling you how we’re going to improve the Saints Row experience for all players in 2022 and beyond," Volition said.
"Right now our development priority is delivering improvements over new features. In keeping with that, we’re going to ship our first major update in late November to pack in as many improvements and fixes as we can."
The first major update, planned for late November, will include more than 200 bug fixes and stability upgrades, with "a particular focus on challenges, overall stability and co-op." Volition apologized for the co-op fixes taking longer than expected, and said that along with bug fixes, it's also working to make it clearer to players "how and when co-op is possible."
Quality of life changes, including "reducing repetition in some activities, making challenges more rewarding, improving vehicle management, a revamp of rumble and haptic features, and more," will also be made in this update, although they will represent "just the tip of the iceberg," Volition said. "These are wins we feel we can get to you quickly while we work on even bigger and better improvements based on your feedback."
It's not unprecedented for games to bounce back from a bad launch—rare, perhaps, but as we've seen recently with No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077, it can be done. The big question is, how much of Saints Row's trouble can be attributed to technical issues, and how much of it is simply because it's not a great game? I have no opinion on the matter—I haven't played the new Saints Row, or any of the others for that matter—but it's definitely relevant. We found that Saints Row ran quite well in our review, but the open world activities "are the worst they've ever been," and Santo Ileso, the fictional city in which Saints Row is set, is "so flat I forgot I even had a wingsuit when I wasn't doing the side hustles where you have to use it." Bugs are one thing, but an underwhelming design is awfully tough to patch out.
(Image credit: Deep Silver)Despite the focus on improving the technical side of the game, Saints Row won't go entirely without new content in 2022. A Front to Back cosmetic pack, which will apparently include ugly clothing and a hideous car skin, will be released free for all players this week, and more free content packs (some of which will be exclusive to expansion pass owners, so not really "free" in the strictest sense of the word) will be released over the balance of the year.
"We plan on supporting Saints Row for the long-term," Volition said. "2023 will be a hugely exciting year for Saints Row owners with a raft of content, including all-new story content (included in the Expansion Pass, but will also be available to buy separately) and free new gameplay experiences and areas of the city to explore."
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There is no more tired, derivative aesthetic in gaming than corrupting red crystals that turn people into zombies. Despite my harsh anti-crystal/anti-portal agenda, Shatterline's roguelike-inspired Expedition mode seized the better part of my weekend. Even though it lacks the polish (and visual interest) of big-budget first person shooters, Shatterline is a promising free-to-play FPS on Steam that has a lot to offer for no buy-in.
Shatterline's derivative, crystal-core aesthetic (think Control, Chorus, or Metal Gear Survive) with near-future, exosuit-clad dudebros presents a very "2010s console shooter" vibe. There's an attempt at a narrative—Shellguard operatives, who use crystals in a good way, need to stop the "Crystalline," the agent of a mad god beyond the stars. There are also some mooks calling themselves "The Strafe," human followers of the Crystalline who think the laughably evil looking red energy crystals are sacred and healing, but they're a bit more "blood and soil" about it than your new-age Facebook friends. These guys are capital-g Goons, shouting "For the crystals!" as you mow them down. The fluff here is lightweight and overstuffed with proper nouns, riding a grating thin line between inoffensive and offensive blandness.
Shatterline's PvP is a mix of familiar gametypes: Payload, bomb defusal, team deathmatch. Each Shellguard Operative has a couple distinct tools, but these are mostly accents to individual playstyles. A crystal-based grenade here, a scouting drone, the works. There's some neat map interactivity though: physics objects and doors can be kicked Duke Nukem-style to open up new pathways and roll cover into would-be killzones. The time-to-death is all over the place, and largely the result of primary weapon fire, so there's little incentive for tight synergized team play like in Rainbow 6: Siege or Overwatch.
Strictly F2P players can flip through a random selection of operatives that rotates every match, which is totally serviceable for casual play. For a reasonably monetized F2P shooter, it's definitely adequate, but still insubstantial. Shatterline rarely feels like something distinct from the older Call of Dutys it's pulling from. The cosmetic progression is weak, too. I found it tough to get excited about unlocking new sets of fingerless gloves for guys that only really say variations of "It's go time."
Weapons are operating in that same trite near-future visual framework: the blocky, rugged assault rifle fills the role of an AK-47, and its sleeker, more rectangular brother functions like an M4, etc. There's a familiarity here that may be endearing to fans of the near-future Call of Duty games, (Black Ops 2, 3, & 4 specifically), with unfortunately similar gunplay. The Modern Warfare 2 beta was all over the place in terms of modes, balance, and maps, but man, those guns. MW2's assault rifles sound like artillery batteries going off in sequence. In contrast, Shatterline's weapons feel like they've been ripped out of a 5-10 year old shooter, with little to no recoil, tinny sound, and a PvP time-to-death that confusingly feels both too long and too short, owing to jittery hit detection.
I know MW2 probably got primo access to dark money military consultants to make modern war look as badass as possible, but there's a new standard for how guns feel that Shatterline needs revamped sound and a more consistent damage model to reach.
For me, Shatterline's primary draw was the eerie nordic hillsides you explore in Expeditions, a PvE side mode styled after Destiny's Strike missions that's interwoven with PvP progression. Deploying battle royale style into a semi-randomly generated map, you and two others (friends, ideally) serpentine your way through a mix of silicate cliff faces and slag-strewn countryside, clearing out cultist encampments and crystalline zombie hordes, pushing towards supply drops and boss encounters that provide weapon schematics for use in the PvP mode. There's a refreshing amount of freedom here—in stark contrast to the PvP experience, Expedition's open-ended structure and play space incentivize a methodical, considerate approach to tough-as-nails combat. I found that exploration typically yields more rewards than beelining towards the objective, and the critically important supply drops can often be teased out from baiting predictable enemy spawns.
It's not a world full of surprises—random combat encounters materialize every couple hundred meters, almost always at forks between branching paths, but I was still getting great gear from finding cool little research stations, crystalline caves, and abandoned villages.
Something about the combat in the Expedition mode just clicks—positioning, elevation, accuracy, all things that felt secondary to pure reflexes in PVP are vitally important in expeditions. I found myself easily overwhelmed by even the weakest of enemies when caught unaware, something that happened often thanks to some clever AI. Shatterline's bestiary loves hit-and-run tactics, so taking them out required coordinated group fire. Oftentimes I'd be desperately firing off a whole magazine at a sniper just outside of my optimal engagement range.
(Image credit: Frag Labs)That line between hard-won victory and crushing defeat is down to the cohesion of your team play, again something absent on the PvP side. It's a difference so striking that Shatterline feels like two different games awkwardly fused at the hip via an interwoven progression model.
Expeditions grow even more tense as they go on due to a "Contamination meter," which randomly applies meaningful combat buffs to enemies at key intervals throughout a run. You can exfiltrate from expeditions after tackling just one objective—often a Destiny-style combat puzzle, hacking a terminal and fending off waves of attacks—or you can push on, chasing better blueprints and more attachments. These encounters really impressed me. They're nail-biting firefights with limited opportunity for rest and resupply. I do have to flag the mission chatter here for being unnecessarily distracting, though. The scientists who facilitate your missions will squabble and feud over each other's notes and citations over the course of these encounters, something so distracting that it got me killed twice.
Shatterline has a bit of an identity crisis. The PvP is a frustrating rehash of the kind of shooter I stopped playing in middle school, a free-to-play Black Ops 2 with crystals (ugh!). Although Modern Warfare 2 is introducing a similar PvE mode, it'll be tough to beat Shatterline's tense combat and open-ended missions, especially at the asking price of "free." especially when it successfully synthesizes the brain smoothing feedback loops of both Destiny 2 and Warzone. Shatterline is punching well above it's weight class, even if it's bringing old moves to the fight.
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Valve's new handheld gaming PC is still a burgeoning piece of tech, but its accessories market is already crowded enough that we decided to gather the best Steam Deck accessory Prime Day deals. Not a lot of big companies are making accessories for the Deck yet, so much of what you'll find on Amazon right now is of inconsistent quality. We've not only sorted through the Prime Day accessory prices to find the best ones, but we've also tested many of these products ourselves.
Below is a roundup of what we recommend. Expect to see a lot of JSAUX, one of the first bigger accessory outfits with a whole line of kit for your Deck—it's got docks, screen protectors, cases, and even backup chargers. You'll also find at least one product that's an absolute must-have for Deck owners, including big price drops on microSD cards that can instantly expand the Deck's memory.
JSAUX Kickstand Case |
$22.99$18.39 on Amazon (save $4.60)
For all its fancy bells and whistles, the Steam Deck for some reason does not come with a kickstand. This lightweight attachment fixes this grave sin, and it's at its cheapest during Prime Day.JSAUX Steam Deck Screen Protector | 2 pack | Glass | 9H Hardness |
$9.99$7.99 on Amazon (save $2)
There's no excuse not to have a good screen protector on your tech these days. Glass protectors are so smooth that you can barely tell you're not actually touching the screen, and you'll be glad you have the first time your weighty Deck falls flat on its face.JSAUX Steam Deck Carrying Case | Hard Shell | Charger Storage |
$29.99$23.99 on Amazon (save $6)
The Steam Deck comes with a serviceable case, but this one includes a few nice upgrades: internal space for a charger and power bank, and a flap that serves as a stand for your Deck.Annapro Carrying Case for Steam Deck | Hard Shell | Charger Storage |
$39.99$34.95 at Amazon (save $5)
If you want to go bigger on a carrying case, this Annpro bag is currently the best option out there. It's got a pocket that's a perfect size for the deck, as well as ample space for a charger, power bank, and a dock or tablet.IINE Steam Deck Protective Case | Silicon |
$29.99$20.79 at Amazon (save $9)
If hard shells aren't your thing, consider a grippy silicon sleeve like this. There are a few silicon cases out there for the Deck and just about any of them will get the job done, but this one comes in a pretty green that really helps offset the Deck's dull gray-on-gray aesthetic. This one also comes with thumbstick covers and screen protectors.JSAUX Docking Station for Steam Deck | 3 USB-A 3.0 ports | HDMI 2.0 | Ethernet |
$49.99$39.99 at Amazon (save $10)
JSAUX is making what are currently our favorite third-party hubs for the Steam Deck. This one isn't quite as fancy as its version with an M.2 slot for expanded storage, but it's got plenty of other nice features and a good discount on Prime Day.SanDisk Ultra microSDXC | 1TB | 120 Mb/s transfer speed |
$199.99$97.99 at Amazon (save $102)
Prime Day is the perfect time to expand your Steam Deck's memory with a microSD card so big you won't have to think about storage for a while. At these prices I recommend going for a full 1TB, but the 500GB version is on sale as well.AuviPal 90 Degree USB-C Adapter | 2 pack |
$9.99$6.39 (save $3.60)
Fancy turning an existing USB-C power block into a backup Steam Deck charger? You'll probably want a pair of these 90-degree adapters. You can plug a standard line into the Deck's top-mounted charging port, but it's clunky, places unnecessary strain on the port, and looks really dumb. -
Electronic Arts revealed Need for Speed Unbound last week as a mix of extremely realistic cars and "the freshest street art," which among other things includes some extremely unrealistic visual effects and customization options: Colored smoke, hand-drawn sparks flying off tires, speed lines, lightning bolts, and all that sort of thing.
It's the part of the game that promises to make Unbound stand out from the crowd of realistic racing games, like Forza, Gran Turismo, and most of the previous Need for Speed games—but if that's not your thing, you can switch it all off if you like.
(Image credit: Electronic ARts)"Yes, you can turn the effects off," EA said on Twitter. "In fact, you can choose to never put them on in the first place. Just like any other part of a car."
EA revealed more about how the two visual styles will come together in an update in which it described Unbound as "like a classic, generation-defining muscle car that gets resurrected and redesigned with the style and bravado of tomorrow."
"We wanted to deliver an art style that matters for gameplay, one that clearly celebrates player actions, enhances the player experience, and rewards them along the way," art director Darren White said. "We wanted to take players to that next level in Need for Speed Unbound with our driving VFX, which we call 'tags.'"
Tags will "come to life" when you activate your boosting power, and will be seen in the game world "as dramatic, customizable effects that paint the surrounding world, including illustrative lines that etch around the curves of your car." The realistic cars and game world "really help ground the visuals," White said, but it's the flashy, fast-firing effects that really catch the eye and underpin EA's Unbound concept.
"Taking inspiration from street art and other media, we creatively subvert the characters and visual effects, turning them into expressionistic illustrations of ‘you’ and ‘your actions,'" White said. "It’s literally 'graffiti-coming-to-life.'"
Yes, you can turn the effects off. In fact, you can choose to never put them on in the first place. Just like any other part of a carOctober 11, 2022
See moreIt's an interesting idea and certainly different from other games in the genre, but it's fair to say that for some people, "different" equates to "bad," and even players who aren't put off by the look might find all the on-screen jazz distracting in the midst of a high-speed street race. So even though tags are Unbound's big stunt, it's easy to understand why EA is going to let players switch it all off.
Need for Speed Unbound comes out on December 2 and will be available for PC on Steam, Epic, and Origin.
(Image credit: Electronic Arts)(Image credit: Electronic Arts) -
Amazon Prime Early Access sale has rolled in, or Prime Day two as many are calling it. It's brought a whole bunch of excellent PC gaming deals in with it, including some excellent discounted laptops. If you want to get your outdoor game on but prefer the trusty old keyboard and mouse (or trackpad) to the Steam Deck's sticks and buttons, you'll find yourself well-served by this event's slate of portable powerhouses.
Even if you aren't dead-set on playing games at your local Starbucks, the extra oomph offered by a gaming laptop will come in handy if you're doing heavy editing work, running a bunch of programs at once, or trying to open more than four Chrome tabs. There's no force like brute force, and being able to chuck oodles of power at basic productivity tasks can come in very handy indeed.
- Check out the best Amazon Prime Early Access gaming deals
- Gaming laptop deals to swoon over this Amazon Prime Early Access
Below, I've rounded up a selection of currently-discounted gaming laptops going for under $1,000, and there's some real bright spots in there. The Gigabyte A7 K1, for example, is a behemoth of a machine, equipped with an RTX 3060; 16GB of RAM; and a 17.3 inch, 1080p panel that runs at 144hz. It's normally $1,299, but the current sale has cut that down to a seriously tempting $999.
There is, admittedly, one drawback here: the laptops listed below top out at 512GB of storage, with one of them — the Acer Nitro 5 — coming in at just 256GB. That's gonna get cramped no matter how you slice it, unless you restrict yourself to very old or very indie games.
Not to worry, though, because we've collected the best Amazon Prime Day SSD deals on one handy page. If you're buying an SSD for a laptop, you'll want to skip past the internal drives, but there are numerous well-priced and speedy external SSDs to hook up to your new machine.
Acer Nitro 5 | Nvidia RTX 3050 | Intel Core i5 10300H | 15.6-inch | 1080p | 144Hz | 8GB RAM | 256GB SSD |
$839.99$769 at Amazon (save $70.99)Alright, so the RAM is a little lacking, but this nifty little laptop should see you right at its native 1080p in most plenty of games. A 10th Gen Intel CPU like this is still just about relevant today, and the CPU/GPU combo makes this one a tidy entry level gaming laptop. You might want to grab some more storage for this one, though, depending on the kind of games you play.View Deal
MSI GF65 Thin | Nvidia RTX 3060 | Intel Core i5 10500H | 15.6-inch | 1080p | 144Hz | 16GB RAM | 512GB SSD |
$909.99$851.62 at Amazon (save $58.37)It may come in at the lower end of the gaming spectrum, but this is a dependable machine that's lighter than your average gaming laptop. It falls down a little when it comes to storage space, but the CPU is still pretty relevant today. It's a good price for a portable gaming machine with a current gen GPU, either way.View Deal
Gigabyte A7 K1 | Nvidia RTX 3060 | AMD Ryzen 7 5800H | 17.3-inch | 1080p | 144Hz | 16GB RAM | 512GB SSD |
$1,299$999 at Amazon (save $200)A nice wide view with this 17-inch gaming laptop, and though it may not be the most powerful thing around, you still get a current-gen GPU with ray tracing ability, coupled with a sweet Ryzen CPU. It has a good mid-range gaming spec to back it up, though some more SSD space would've been nice.View Deal
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A Plague Tale: Requiem, a brother-and-sister action-adventure about rats, curses, and life after the French Revolution, comes out in just one week, which means it's probably time to look into whether your PC is up to the task of running it.
It's a bit of a good news/bad news situation: The minimum spec is quite manageable, but the recommended is a real jump up.
(Image credit: Asobo Studio)Minimum (1080p, 30 fps, low settings):
- OS: Windows 10 (20H1, 64 bit)
- CPU: Intel Core i5 4690K (3.5GHz) or AMD FX-8300 (3.3GHz)
- RAM: 16 GB
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon RX 590, 4GB
- Storage: 55GB
- DirectX: Version 12
Recommended (1080p, 60 fps, ultra settings):
- OS: Windows 10 (20H1, 64 bit)
- CPU: Intel Core i7 8700K (3.7GHz) or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (3.6GHz)
- RAM: 16 GB
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 or AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, 8GB
- Storage: 55GB SSD
- DirectX: Version 12
Interestingly, the minimum requirement for A Plague Tale: Requiem is almost identical to the recommended requirements for its predecessor, A Plague Tale: Innocence, which came out in 2019: The only difference is that Innocence also supports Windows 7 and 8, and requires 50GB of drive space rather than 55GB.
It's also interesting that there's no 4K spec listed, but the "ultra" setting should be pretty easy on the eyes regardless. Nvidia confirmed in June that A Plague Tale: Requiem will support DLSS and ray tracing on its RTX-series GPUs. Here's an eyeful of that:
A Plague Tale: Requiem is set to go live on Steam on October 18. If that's not enough to keep you busy for the balance of the month, be sure to check out our list of all the other October PC game releases and events you should know about.
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A few years ago, I asked "Can real-time strategy come back from the brink of death?", and the outlook wasn't great. The genre had been dwindling for two decades, a process that seemed to accelerate over the last 10 years, and despite a few bright spots, it didn't look like the hunger for new games was there. The remaining RTS fans like myself, it seemed, were in for another gloomy decade. I've never been so happy about being wrong.
It's perhaps a bit too soon to call it a comeback, but lately it's been impossible to look at the genre and not feel optimistic. Just look at what we got excited about at Gamescom: Homeworld 3, The Great War: Western Front, Tempest Rising. The accidental theme of the event this year was the return of the '90s, but these upcoming real-time romps aren't all just trading in nostalgia. Homeworld 3 is doing some really interesting stuff with terrain in space, and The Great War splices the real-time shenanigans with a dose of grand strategy—there are plenty of novelties to be found.
(Image credit: Blackbird Interactive)Not long after Gamescom, we got our first glimpse of another returning RTS titan: Sins of a Solar Empire 2. And, once again, the excitement is due to a lot more than just nostalgia. Sins 2 is doing some really wild stuff with physics and celestial mechanics, making you fight across solar systems that are constantly moving, with planets orbiting stars and moons orbiting planets, forcing you to adjust travel plans. And each ship is like an army, with turrets that independently track targets, shooting—or shooting down—missiles that are all individually simulated.
There's quite a bit going on in the World War 2 front, as well, and next year we'll get to play Company of Heroes 3 and Men of War 2, a pair of long-awaited sequels that are approaching the conflict from very different angles. With CoH3 there's the Total War-style turn-based Italian campaign, along with a more traditional North African campaign, while MoW2 has fancy features like the new dynamic frontline that determines where you can reinforce and construct fortifications, as well as the ability to take direct control over units, letting you drive tanks and fire artillery—not a first for the series, but extremely cool nonetheless.
If you're hankering for some classics but don't want to wait for these impending sequels, there's Command & Conquer Remastered, which launched a couple of years ago and is exactly what you'd want from a remaster. It should keep you going until the arrival of the aforementioned Tempest Rising, which harkens back to the old C&C days, with its factions heavily evoking GDI and NOD. There's even a tiberium-like resource. Last year also gave us Age of Empires 4, which lacked the ambition I'd normally expect from Relic, but was otherwise a very good instalment in the beloved series. Old armchair generals are still being well taken care of in the RTS nursing home.
(Image credit: Microsoft)We're not just witnessing the reappearance of old favourites, though. A lot of new and upcoming RTS games have hitched their wagon to the immensely popular survival genre, just like their city builder cousins. Popularised by They Are Billions, these games blend RTS battles and base building with tower defence quirks and relentless waves of enemies that fill the screen. Now we've got Diplomacy is Not an Option, Alien Marauder and Age of Darkness, to name but a few. These new kids on the block are targeting a very different kind of RTS itch, but already they feel like they've always been part of the genre.
These new kids on the block are targeting a very different kind of RTS itch, but already they feel like they've always been part of the genre.
Even one Steam's most wishlisted city builders, Manor Lords, is taking some cues from real-time strategy, letting you recruit troops and send them into real-time brawls to defend your territory from other feudal lords. So we're seeing a lot of different approaches to hybridisation, which will hopefully allow those uninitiated in the mysteries of the RTS to dip their toes in.
On the subject of letting new players take their first furtive steps into the wonderful world of real-time strategy, I've got my eyes on Stormgate, a free-to-play RTS with a co-op campaign. That should make it a bit easier to talk my more hesitant friends into playing. But there are also reasons for veterans to take notice. Developer Frost Giant was founded by StarCraft 2 devs who'd grown tired of waiting for Blizzard to make a new RTS, so they know their stuff.
(Image credit: Frost Giant Studios)One of the most reassuring things about this new wave of RTS games is that there seems to be enough faith in the genre to justify the use of big licences like Dune and Terminator. Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance developer Slitherine also released a Starship Troopers RTS this year. Times have changed a lot when licensed games are actually good news.
Even Star Wars is getting in on the action. After years of EA wasting the licence, we're finally starting to see new games from a galaxy far, far away. Other studios and publishers are now playing around with the licence, too, but it's EA that's bringing us the RTS, which will be developed by the newly-formed Bit Reactor and overseen by Respawn. It's one of three games Respawn's involved with, the other two being the sequel to Fallen Order and an FPS. Seeing an RTS being announced next to more obvious things like a sequel and a shooter is kind of incredible, and one of the biggest indications that the genre is once again being taken seriously.
(Image credit: Shiro Games)It's worth emphasising that I don't think this potential comeback could have happened were it not for the communities, modders and indie developers keeping the lights on for all these years, along with the few big games from studios like Eugen Systems and Relic. Plenty of teams have been working away within the genre, and while most haven't been able to attract many players, they were still experimenting and giving the genre a bit of visibility, holding it back from the edge of the cliff.
Now we'll just have to wait and see if this is just a temporary blip or if enough players will swarm these games to justify more of them. Even with my penchant for negativity, I'm feeling pretty positive. What's exciting about this new wave of games is their diversity, reflecting just how broad the genre can be. They aren't just appealing to antediluvian diehards like myself—all kinds of players should be able to find something to pique their interest. Come back in a few years to read my inevitable follow-up to see if I was right.
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Elgato Stream Deck | streaming tool |
$149.99$89.99 at Amazon (save $60)
The Elgato Stream Deck is seen as a quintessential part of a content creator's set up. And you can add it to yours for the cheapest it gets. Here's a link for US buyers.View DealThe Stream Deck, not to be confused with its portable cousin, is currently discounted in the Amazon Prime Day sales. This piece of kit is instantly recognisable to many content creators, especially streamers, as a quintessential part of a creator's PC set up, so much so that I'm looking at one on my desk right now.
I've previously written about how casual, small streamers shouldn't need to feel like they have to own a Stream Deck to be a streamer. It's often worth buying quality mics, headsets, and cameras first. However, when the Stream Deck has a good chunk of its price knocked off, I can get behind the idea of buying it while it's a good deal. It's available at a low of £89.99 or $89.99 depending on if you're in the UK or US.
The Stream Deck that's on sale is the original 15 key Deck in Black. There are smaller and larger options available but I've found 15 keys more than enough for all my streaming needs.
Elgato Stream Deck | streaming tool |
£139.99£89.99 at Amazon (save £50)
The Elgato Stream Deck is seen as a quintessential part of a content creator's set up. And you can add it to yours for the cheapest it gets. Here's a link for UK buyers. View DealThese keys are programmable LCDs that you can hook up to streaming software and other Elgato products like its Ring Light or Key Lights. These keys can open software, take clips, run ads, and more. It's just an easy tangible way to control certain aspects of your stream, or just your regular set up.
As far as I'm aware there isn't a huge advantage to buying the newer Mk. 2 rather than the original, other than the base of the Classic is a little flimsier and the Mk. 2 looks a little nicer. But I've never been too annoyed at the Classic occasionally falling backwards in the two years I've owned one.
Even if you're not a content creator, if you're always opening the same software, pausing and playing music, or just need more hotkeys in your life, the Stream Deck is a pretty solid desk item to have knocking about.
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XFX RX 6700 XT Speedster SWFT309 | 12GB GDDR6 | 2,560 shaders | 2,581MHz Boost |
$519.99$379.99 at Amazon (save $140)
I am so over XFX's naming scheme for its graphics cards, but suffice to say that this graphics card deal is almost identical to the XFX RX 6700 XT Speedster Qick we spotted, albeit with a slightly lower boost clock. Though how much difference that will make in gaming will be negligible. This GPU is cheaper though, which is always important.View DealSometimes, I still can't believe it. Reasonable prices on graphics cards in 2022? Perish the thought. But while my brain is stuck thinking of GPUs as the high-demand, high-cost items of the last few years, the XFX RX 6700 XT Speedster is out here selling for a startlingly reasonable price. This one is going for under its $479 MSRP.
It's a brave, new post-ethereum merge world.
That's great news, because here's XFX's take on the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT—a card that we were a bit unsure about at its original price point but that makes a lot of sense on sale. This GPU can net you buttery-smooth framerates at 1080p and 1440p without missing a beat. Sure, it struggles at 4K, and it lacks Nvidia frills like ray-tracing, but for anyone gaming on monitors with lower (and, let's be honest, still totally adequate) resolutions, this card has got you covered.
- Check out the best Amazon Prime Early Access gaming deals
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This is an RDNA 2 card, which is still — just barely — AMD's latest architecture for its graphics cards, though RDNA 3 is coming soon. It follows its RDNA 2 brethren by cramming 12GB GDDR6 memory onto its board, handily beating out green team competitors like the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 in terms of raw VRAM. It's no slouch in the clock-speed department either, although it does have a 230W power draw to show for it.
For now, the RX 6700 XT is a great card for 1080p and 1440p gaming at a great price, though when AMD drops the next load of graphics cards you may find yourself wanton. If you're in need of a new GPU right now, though, and aren't too interested in the latest, absolutely gigantic offerings from Nvidia, you could do a lot worse than picking up one of these while it's available for such a steep discount.
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One of this year's rumbling controversies around Twitch has been the platform's revenue split. Twitch takes a 50% cut of the subs revenue streamers earn on the platform, whereas competitors such as Youtube offer a more generous 70/30 split in favour of the streamer. There was a big community push earlier in the year, featuring the obligatory internet petition and given fuel by the fact Twitch had historically offered big streamers a better deal.
Twitch responded to this with a statement in September that said it would be moving away from the sweetheart deals (though of course left wiggle-room so it can still do them), and wouldn't be increasing the revenue split in favour of streamers. Now at Twitchcon, the company's chief monetisation officer has addressed the revenue split again, and essentially put some of what the company's already said in blunter terms.
Minton was asked about the topic during the 'Patch Notes' stage segment (thanks, Eurogamer), and his answer starts during this stream at the rough timestamp of 02:20:15. After some introductory fluff about hearing responses and how Twitch is "100% focused on helping to improve [streamers'] income" Minton directly addresses the sub-rev split.
"The question here is y'know 'why not'," says Minton, "and we did look at all possible options: could we do it, could we offer 70/30 widely and broadly? And the answer is no, [it] simply is not viable for Twitch or the long term, at least as we know things today."
Those words "not viable" may confirm what many suspect: Twitch has tonnes of money sloshing about in its ecosystem, but no-one really knows whether it's turning a profit yet. Which is where Minton goes next:
"Now the immediate response that typically follows is 'wait a minute, you're part of Amazon', but Amazon expects Twitch to survive and thrive as a sustainable business," says Minton. He then goes on to chat about the upside of Prime subs and make the argument that "you add that to the rev share on the paid subs it equals about 65%." I wonder how many streamers will buy that one.
There's also a digression on what an "expensive endeavour [Twitch is] to deliver", which repeated the points made in the company's initial statement. Minton did at least give everyone a cheap laugh with a verbal fumble while addressing "the sub rev 'frack'."
Head of Monetization at Twitch Mike Minton finally says outloud the truth about the sub revenue share pic.twitter.com/0ziICzYVtXOctober 9, 2022
See moreMinton ends by saying that their stance is that the rev share split is part of a bigger question, going on to list all the Twitch tools that allow streamers "to make more money on the audiences you already have."
He ends by claiming the following: "For every viewer hour, if you look over the last five years, we've increased your revenue 27% year-over-year-over-year [...] so you're earning three times as much from the same community as you would have five years ago."
Yes that's audiences being discussed in frank accounting terms, but that's Minton's job and he was asked the question. It seems clear that, while the lid is by no means on this issue, Twitch is being firm in its position for now. The widespread discontent has also led to it making these arguments more transparently than it has in the past, at least, and some of what it says is true. Any notion, for example, that Amazon would happily subsidise Twitch as a loss-making platform seems like one for the fairies.
Elsewhere at Twitchcon, it's been all about a high-profile and upsetting disaster: a streamer broke her back in two places after jumping into a foam pit.
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As part of the Bytes quest in Fortnite, you'll need to don his outfit and hunt for a TV that needs tuning. This is one of the trickier weekly challenges as you'll need to first unlock the Bytes outfit then try and find the TV while trying not to get eliminated. In this guide, I'll talk you through how to get the Bytes outfit and where to find that elusive TV to get new styles for The Nothing's Gift pickaxe.
How to unlock the Bytes outfit
Unlocking the Bytes outfit is the easiest part of this quest. You'll need to purchase the premium Battle Pass and earn Battle Stars to unlock everything on page two. Once everything else has been unlocked, you'll be able to get Bytes and The Nothing's Gift pickaxe, which you can get new looks for.
To get XP and earn Battle Stars, you'll need to complete daily, weekly, story and milestone challenges, such as slide-kicking a boulder and opening vaults. Eliminating opponents, lasting as long as possible in battle royale matches and interacting with items, like Mending Machines, and chests also earns you XP, so go ahead and touch everything. You can also go the more expensive route and purchase levels with V-Bucks, but I'm not going to encourage you to do that.
Image 1 of 3(Image credit: Epic Games)Image 2 of 3(Image credit: Epic Games)Image 3 of 3(Image credit: Epic Games)Where to find the TV
Now that you've got Bytes' outfit on, it's time to go and find a TV that needs tuning. There are at least two TVs you can definitely tune but, unfortunately for you, they are found in two fairly popular landing areas. Some players have also claimed that TVs found outside these areas have been tuneable when approached when wearing the Bytes outfit, so give it a go.
The first TV can be found in a house between Herald's Sanctum and Tilted Towers, to the east of the pond. The second TV can be found in a small building in the east of Lustrous Lagoon. You only need to tune one of the TVs and to do so, just walk up to it and wait for the Tune prompt to appear.
After you tune the TV you'll get Bytes quests such as searching Chromed chests and dealing damage to Chromed Wildlife—like the weird shiny pigs—which unlocks more styles for your pickaxe.
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The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player Kristian 'k0nfig' Wienecke, a Danish national, has left esports organisation Astralis by mutual consent after an unpleasant incident in Malta. He was playing in the ESL Pro League before, on September 20, Astralis said he would miss upcoming matches due to a "complicated ankle fracture."
Rumours quickly began swirling around the CS: GO community that things were even worse than that, before esports site Jaxon reported, based on an eyewitness to the incident, that Wieneke had been "involved in a quarrel that turned into a fist fight."
Wienecke initially played down this report but, a few days later, eyewitness Michiel de Jong gave a fuller version of events. According to this account, reported by Jaxon, the promoter spat in Wienecke's face, kicked him, and then went back into the nightclub as bouncers got involved. Shortly afterwards the promoter re-emerged, Wienecke ran after him and, per de Jong: "They went into a fight with fists and kicks and went to the ground when k0nfig shouted that he broke his leg."
Wienecke has now released a lengthy statement that is broadly in-line with this account (thanks, The Loadout) but goes into much more detail. He opens by calling the last few weeks "the hardest time of my life" where "I've been scared, broken, and completely lost". Thanking people for their support, Wienecke goes on to explain that, following a disappointing loss, he and others went out to drown their sorrows before leaving Malta the next day.
As the night wore on they ended up at a nightclub in Paceville. Wienecke went off to get something to eat while his teammates went in, then returned around 30 minutes later and walked up a staircase to the club's entrance
Long story short, the guy in charge on the door takes exception to Wienecke, calls him a "tattooed loser", and says he's not getting in without paying 500 Euro for a table. "He was aggressive and I felt humiliated so we got into an argument," says Wienecke.
"I was so scared that I was about to die. I remember feeling like I was watching my own body from above laying there."
Kristian Wienecke"I told him he was the loser for standing in a nightclub queue and feeling better than everyone else and then suddenly he spat me directly in my face and kicked me straight in my face. He was standing several steps over me on the staircase, so it was like a kicking to a football. It made me fall down the stairs and sprain my foot. It hurt like hell, but adrenaline, fear and confusion had completely taken over my body, so I didn’t notice it at first. I just remember feeling confused. Then after he ran inside the club with the bouncers in front of him. My mouth was swollen, my leg and foot hurt as hell."
Wienecke sat down on the pavement gathering his thoughts when the same individual left the nightclub in what appeared to be a hurry.
"I felt so angry and unfairly treated so I humped after him and caught up with him further down the road to confront him," writes Wienecke. "I regret this terribly. I should have walked away. I should have just gone home and licked my wounds because then none of this had happened. When I caught up with him, I said I would report it to the police and he immediately spat at me once again and cursed at me which infuriated me. We got into [a] fight, and he broke my leg and I fell to the ground. He was kicking me multiple times in my head while I was laying down.
"I tried getting away from the situation but I couldn’t because of the broken leg. I tried to run away but I couldn’t put weight on my right leg. It just snapped and broke completely, dislocating my foot as well. He stopped kicking me because I dragged him down to me and I had to do self-defence to make him stop kicking me."
By this time other parties had separated the pair, and someone called an ambulance (Wienecke also claims the promoter had stolen his phone at some point).
"I was so scared that I was about to die," writes Wienecke."I remember feeling like I was watching my own body from above laying there."
(Image credit: Jonathan Nackstrand via Getty images.)"It felt so 'frelling' bad that I just wanted to delete everything and just give up. I couldn’t stop crying. I was in my own bed feeling empty."
Kristian Wienecke
Wienecke spent several days in a Maltese hospital, but the doctors couldn't properly re-set the break and surgery was required, which he elected to have back in Denmark. At this point, however, the medical team noticed "a fracture in my orbital wall" (one of the four bones surrounding the eyeball) that would require he stay in Malta for up to four weeks."It broke my heart. I was so scared I started sweating and crying," writes Wienecke. "Everything I wanted in the whole world was just to go home and get surgery. I knew if I could get home my mood would be so much better and I would feel safe and have people that love me close."
The nature of the orbital wall fracture, however, meant that in the Danish doctors' opinion Wienecke would be safe to travel, and on Thursday 22nd September he flew home, and went straight to hospital from the airport. "They tried to put my foot in place but they couldn’t do it," writes Wienecke. "I have never experienced so much pain."
The player goes on to detail the surgery that followed: holes drilled in his shin and foot, the insertion of titanium rods, re-attaching a foot muscle that had torn, a metal plate screwed-in to the shin. The surgeries were successful, but "It felt so 'frelling' bad that I just wanted to delete everything and just give up," writes Wienecke. "I couldn’t stop crying. I was in my own bed feeling empty."
Wienecke says that throughout this time he wondered if this was the end of his career, but "this is nowhere near the end for me. I’m going to war against myself now. 'frell' no I’m not going anywhere." He states his intention to "make this downfall into something positive" and "become the god-tier Counter-Strike player that I know I can be."
As regards the promoter, the local authorities in Malta are investigating and Wienecke is being treated as a victim. He says he tested negative for drugs at the hospital, but claims the authorities have told him the promoter tested positive for drugs.
Wienecke ends by writing:
"Actions have consequences and I fully accept responsibility for mine. Now and in the future. To all of you out there, here's the lesson which I've come to learn the hard way. Turn the other cheek if you can. Walk away. Violence solves nothing. It is never worth it!"
Well, if the above account doesn't convince you that getting into random fights is a bad idea, nothing will. Reading Wienecke's account, I want to suggest that this story has two villains: our allegedly drug-addled and violent promoter, and the esports organisation that's been so quick to wash its hands of the player. Wienecke is obviously not free of blame here (he'd been drinking that night, and re-initiated the confrontation after being attacked) but he is undoubtedly the victim, and has suffered enormous setbacks both physically and professionally.
"Kristian 'k0nfig' Wienecke is going through a tough time with issues he does not want to discuss publicly; we fully respect that," writes Kasper Hvidt, director of sports, in Astralis's official statement. "It has been affecting his ability to contribute to the team and we have had ongoing and constructive talks with Kristian, who needs time to focus on his private life."
So long and thanks for all the memories, eh? The topic of how these big esports organisations deal with the many young hopefuls who pass through their system is a perennial one: the rights and wrongs of youth training systems, and how prospects are managed, is still not a settled matter in football nevermind Counter-Strike.
But when one of its players has suffered a vicious assault like this, it feels callous and I would even say cruel for Astralis to compound this by cutting them off so quickly (whatever the language may say about the two "agree[ing] to a cancellation"). Wienecke has suffered enormously here, and it's easy to forget he's only 25 years old. At times like these you need friends and support, and now he has that: in the future, perhaps, Wienecke will make Astralis regret its decision.
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There's nothing subtle about Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card. It's a hulking great lump of a pixel pusher, and while there are some extra curves added to what could otherwise look like a respin of the RTX 3090 shroud, it still has that novelty graphics card aesthetic.
It looks like some semi-satirical plastic model made up to skewer GPU makers for the ever-increasing size of their cards. But it's no model, and it's no moon, this is the vanguard for the entire RTX 40-series GPU generation and our first taste of the new Ada Lovelace architecture.
On the one hand, it's a hell of an introduction to the sort of extreme performance Ada can deliver when given a long leash, and on the other, a slightly tone-deaf release in light of a global economic crisis that makes launching a graphics card for a tight minority of gamers feel a bit off.
This is a vast GPU that packs in 170% more transistors than even the impossibly chonk GA102 chip that powered the RTX 3090 Ti. And, for the most part, it makes the previous flagship card of the Ampere generation look well off the pace. That's even before you get into the equal mix of majesty and black magic that lies behind the new DLSS 3.0 revision designed purely for Ada.
But with the next suite of RTX 40-series cards not following up until sometime in November, and even then being ultra-enthusiast priced GPUs themselves, the marker being laid for this generation points to extreme performance, but at a higher cost. You could argue the RTX 4090, at $1,599 (£1,699), is only a little more than the RTX 3090—in dollar terms at least—and some $400 cheaper than the RTX 3090 Ti.
Though it must be said, the RTX 3090 Ti released at a different time, and its pandemic pricing matched the then scarcity of PC silicon and reflected a world where GPU mining was still a thing. Mercifully, as 2022 draws to a close, ethereum has finally moved to proof-of-stake and the days of algorithmically pounding graphics cards to power its blockchain are over.
Now, we're back to gamers and content creators picking up GPUs for their rigs, so what is the RTX 4090 going to offer them?
Nvidia RTX 4090 architecture and specs
(Image credit: Nvidia)What's inside the RTX 4090?
The RTX 4090 comes with the first Ada Lovelace GPU of this generation: the AD102. But it's worth noting the chip used in this flagship card is not the full core, despite its already monstrous specs sheet.
Still, at its heart are 16,384 CUDA cores arrayed across 128 streaming multiprocessors (SMs). That represents a 52% increase over the RTX 3090 Ti's GA102 GPU, which was itself the full Ampere core.
The full AD102 chip comprises 18,432 CUDA Cores and 144 SMs. That also means you're looking at 144 third gen RT Cores and 576 fourth gen Tensor Cores. Which I guess means there's plenty of room for an RTX 4090 Ti or even a Titan should Nvidia wish.
Memory hasn't changed much, again with 24GB of GDDR6X running at 21Gbps, which delivers 1,008GB/sec of memory bandwidth.
Image 1 of 3(Image credit: Nvidia)Image 2 of 3(Image credit: Nvidia)Image 3 of 3(Image credit: Nvidia)GeForce RTX 4090 GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Lithography TSMC 4N Samsung 8N CUDA cores 16,432 10,752 SMs 128 84 RT Cores 128 84 Tensor Cores 512 336 ROPs 176 112 Boost clock 2,520MHz 1,860MHz Memory 24GB GDDR6X 24GB GDDR6X Memory speed 21Gbps 21Gbps Memory bandwidth 1,008GB/s 1,008GB/s L1 | L2 cache 16,384KB | 73,728KB 10,752KB | 6,144KB Transistors 76.3 billion 28.3 billion Die Size 608.5mm² 628.5mm² TGP 450W 450W Price $1,599 | £1,699 $1,999 | £1,999 Almost a full 1GHz faster than the RTX 3090 of the previous generation.
On the raw shader side of the equation, things haven't really moved that far along from the Ampere architecture either. Each SM is still using the same 64 dedicated FP32 units, but with a secondary stream of 64 units that can be split between floating point and integer calculations as necessary, the same as was introduced with Ampere.
You can see how similar the two architectures are from a rasterisation perspective when looking at the relative performance difference between an RTX 3090 and RTX 4090.
If you ignore ray tracing and upscaling there is a corresponding performance boost that's only a little higher than you might expect from the extra number of CUDA Cores dropped into the AD102 GPU. The 'little higher' than commensurate performance increase though does show there are some differences at that level.
Part of that is down to the new 4N production process Nvidia is using for its Ada Lovelace GPUs. Compared with the 8N Samsung process of Ampere, the TSMC-built 4N process is said to offer either twice the performance at the same power, or half the power with the same performance.
This has meant Nvidia can be super-aggressive in terms of clock speeds, with the RTX 4090 listed with a boost clock of 2,520MHz. We've actually seen our Founders Edition card averaging 2,716MHz in our testing, which puts it almost a full 1GHz faster than the RTX 3090 of the previous generation.
And, because of that process shrink, Nvidia's engineers working with TSMC have crammed an astonishing 76.3 billion transistors into the AD102 core. Considering the 608.5mm² Ada GPU contains so many more than the 28.3 billion transistors of the GA102 silicon, it's maybe surprising it's that much smaller than the 628.4mm² Ampere chip.
(Image credit: Future)The fact Nvidia can keep on jamming this ever-increasing number of transistors into a monolithic chip, and still keep shrinking its actual die size, is testament to the power of advanced process nodes in this sphere. For reference, the RTX 2080 Ti's TU102 chip was 754mm² and held just 18.6 billion 12nm transistors.
That doesn't mean the monolithic GPU can continue forever, unchecked. GPU rival, AMD, is promising to shift to graphics compute chiplets for its new RDNA 3 chips launching in November. Given the AD102 GPU's complexity is second only to the 80 billion transistors of the advanced 814mm² Nvidia Hopper silicon, it's sure to be an expensive chip to produce. The smaller compute chiplets, however, ought to bring costs down, and drive yields up.
For now, though, the brute force monolithic approach is still paying off for Nvidia.
What else do you do when you want more speed and you've already packed in as many advanced transistors as you can? You stick some more cache memory into the package. This is something AMD has done to great effect with its Infinity Cache and, while Nvidia isn't necessarily going with some fancy new branded approach, it is dropping a huge chunk more L2 cache into the Ada core.
The previous generation, GA102, contained 6,144KB of shared L2 cache, which sat in the middle of its SMs, and Ada is increasing that by 16 times to create a pool of 98,304KB of L2 for the AD102 SMs to play with. For the RTX 4090 version of the chip that drops to 73,728KB, but that's still a lot of cache. The amount of L1 hasn't changed per SM, but because there are now so many more SMs inside the chip in total, that also means there is a greater amount of L1 cache compared with Ampere, too.
But rasterisation isn't everything for a GPU these days. However you might have felt about it when Turing first introduced real time ray tracing in games, it has now become almost a standard part of PC gaming. The same can be said of upscaling, too, so how an architecture approaches these two further pillars of PC gaming is vital to understanding the design as a whole.
And now all three graphics card manufacturers (how weird it feels to be talking about a triumvirate now…) are focusing on ray tracing performance as well as the intricacies of upscaling technologies, it's become a whole new theatre of the war between them.
(Image credit: Future)This is actually where the real changes have occurred in the Ada streaming multiprocessor. The rasterised components may be very similar, but the third-generation RT Core has seen a big change. The previous two generations of RT Core contained a pair of dedicated units—the Box Intersection Engine and Triangle Intersection Engine—which pulled a lot of the RT workload from the rest of the SM when calculating the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) algorithm at the heart of ray tracing.
Ada introduces another two discrete units to offload even more work from the SM: the Opacity Micromap Engine and Displaced Micro-Mesh Engine. The first drastically accelerates calculations when dealing with transparencies in a scene, and the second is designed to break geometrically complex objects down to reduce the time it takes to go through the whole BVH calculation.
Added to this is something Nvidia is calling "as big an innovation for GPUs as out-of-order execution was for CPUs back in the 1990s." Shader Execution Reordering (SER) has been created to switch up shading workloads, allowing the Ada chips to greatly improve the efficiency of the graphics pipeline when it comes to ray tracing by rescheduling tasks on the fly.
Intel has been working on a similar feature for its Alchemist GPUs, the Thread Sorting Unit, to help with diverging rays in ray traced scenes. And its setup reportedly doesn't require developer input. For now, Nvidia requires a specific API to integrate SER into a developer's game code, but Nvidia says it's working with Microsoft, and others, to introduce the feature into standard graphics APIs such as DirectX 12 and Vulkan.
(Image credit: Nvidia )It's voodoo, it's black magic, it's the dark arts, and it's rather magnificent.
Lastly, we come to DLSS 3, with its ace in the hole: Frame Generation. Yes, DLSS 3 is now not just going to be upscaling, it's going to be creating entire game frames all by itself. Not necessarily from scratch, but by using the power of AI and deep learning to take a best guess at what the next frame would look like if you were actually going to render it. It then injects this AI generated frame in before the next genuinely rendered frame.
It's voodoo, it's black magic, it's the dark arts, and it's rather magnificent. It uses enhanced hardware units inside the fourth-gen Tensor Cores, called Optical Flow Units, to make all those in-flight calculations. It then takes advantage of a neural network to pull all the data from the previous frames, the motion vectors in a scene, and the Optical Flow Unit, together to help create a whole new frame, one that is also able to include ray tracing and post processing effects.
(Image credit: Nvidia )Working in conjunction with DLSS upscaling (now just called DLSS Super Resolution), Nvidia states that in certain circumstances AI will be generating three-fourths of an initial frame through upscaling, and then the entirety of a second frame using Frame Generation. In total then it estimates the AI is creating seven-eighths of all the displayed pixels.
And that just blows my little gamer mind.
Nvidia RTX 4090 performance
(Image credit: Future)How does the RTX 4090 perform?
Look, it's quick, okay. With everything turned on, with DLSS 3 and Frame Generation working its magic, the RTX 4090 is monumentally faster than the RTX 3090 that came before it. The straight 3DMark Time Spy Extreme score is twice that of the big Ampere core, and before ray tracing or DLSS come into it, the raw silicon offers twice the 4K frame rate in Cyberpunk 2077, too.
But if you're not rocking a 4K monitor then you really ought to think twice before dropping $1,600 on a new GPU without upgrading your screen at the same time. That's because the RTX 4090 is so speedy when it comes to pure rasterising that we're back to the old days of being CPU bound in a huge number of games.
Synthetic performance
Image 1 of 3(Image credit: Future)Image 2 of 3(Image credit: Future)Image 3 of 3(Image credit: Future)With ray tracing enabled you can be looking at 91% higher frame rates at 4K.
Therefore, the performance boost over the previous generation is often significantly lower when you look at the relative 1080p or even 1440p gaming performance. In Far Cry 6 at those lower resolutions the RTX 4090 is only 3% faster than the RTX 3090, and across 1080p and 4K, there is only a seven frames per second delta.
In fact, at 1080p and 1440p the RX 6950 XT is actually the faster gaming card.
That's a bit of an outlier in terms of just how constrained Far Cry 6 is, but it is still representative of a wider trend in comparative gaming performance at the lower resolutions. Basically, if you had your heart set on nailing 360 fps in your favourite games on your 360Hz 1080p gaming monitor then you're barking up the wrong idiom.
1440p gaming performance
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)At 4K the performance uplift, generation-on-generation, is pretty spectacular. Ignoring Far Cry 6's limited gaming performance, you're looking at a minimum 61% higher performance over the RTX 3090. That chimes well with the increase in dedicated rasterising hardware, the increased clock speed, and more cache. Throw in some benchmarks with ray tracing enabled and you can be looking at 91% higher frame rates at 4K.
4K gaming performance
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)But rasterisation is only part of modern games; upscaling is now an absolutely integral part of a GPU's performance. We use our comparative testing to highlight raw architectural differences between graphics card silicon, and so run without upscaling enabled. It's almost impossible otherwise to grab apples vs. apples performance comparisons.
It's important to see just what upscaling can deliver, however, especially with something so potentially game-changing as DLSS 3 with Frame Generation. And with a graphically intensive game such as Cyberpunk 2077 able to be played at 4K RT Ultra settings at a frame rate of 147 fps, it's easy to see the potential it offers.
You're looking at a performance uplift over the RTX 3090 Ti, when that card's running in Cyberpunk 2077's DLSS 4K Performance mode itself, of around 145%. When just looking at the RTX 4090 on its own, compared with its sans-DLSS performance, we're seeing a 250% performance boost. That's all lower for F1 22, where there is definite CPU limiting—even with our Core i9 12900K—but you will still see a performance increase of up to 51% over the RTX 3090 Ti with DLSS enabled.
DLSS performance
Image 1 of 5(Image credit: Future)Image 2 of 5(Image credit: Future)Image 3 of 5(Image credit: Future)Image 4 of 5(Image credit: Future)Image 5 of 5(Image credit: Future)Again, if you just take the RTX 4090 running without upscaling compared with it enabled at 4K you're then looking at a 150% increase in frame rates.
On MS Flight Sim, which we've also tested with an early access build supporting DLSS 3, that incredibly CPU bound game responds unbelievably well to Frame Generation. In fact, because it's so CPU limited there is no actual difference between running with or without DLSS enabled if you don't have Frame Generation running. But when you do run with those faux frames in place you will see an easy doubling of stock performance, to the tune of 113% higher in our testing.
The other interesting thing to note is that Nvidia has decoupled Frame Generation from DLSS Super Resolution (essentially standard DLSS), and that's because interpolating frames does increase latency.
Just enabling DLSS on its own, however, will still radically decrease latency, and so with the minimal increase that enabling Frame Generation adds on you're still better off than when running at native resolution. That's also because Nvidia Reflex has been made an integral part of DLSS 3, but still, if you're looking for the lowest latency for competitive gaming, then not having Frame Generation on will be the ideal.
Native 4K | DLSS Performance | DLSS Performance with Frame Generation (Image credit: CDPR)But for singleplayer gaming, Frame Generation is stunning. For me, it looks better than a more blurry, low frame rate scene, and cleans up the sometimes-aliased look of a straight DLSS Super Resolution image.
Personally, I'm going to be turning Frame Generation on whenever I can.
Which admittedly won't be that often to begin with. It will take time for developers to jump on board the new upscaling magic, however easy Nvidia says it is to implement. It is also restricted to Ada Lovelace GPUs, which means the $1,600 RTX 4090 at launch, and then the $1,200 RTX 4080 and $900 RTX 4080 following in November.
In other words, it's not going to be available to the vast majority of gamers until Nvidia decides it wants to launch some actually affordable Ada GPUs. Those which might arguably benefit more from such performance enhancements.
Power and thermals
Image 1 of 3(Image credit: Future)Image 2 of 3(Image credit: Future)Image 3 of 3(Image credit: Future)PCG test rigCPU: Intel Core i9 12900K
Motherboard: Asus ROG Z690 Maximus Hero
Cooler: Corsair H100i RGB
RAM: 32GB G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB DDR5-5600
Storage: 1TB WD Black SN850, 4TB Sabrent Rocket 4Q
PSU: Seasonic Prime TX 1600W
OS: Windows 11 22H2
Chassis: DimasTech Mini V2
Monitor: Dough Spectrum ES07D03And what of power? Well, it almost hit 500W running at stock speeds. But then that's the way modern GPUs have been going—just look at how much power the otherwise efficient RDNA 2 architecture demands when used in the RX 6950 XT—and it's definitely worth noting that's around the same level as the previous RTX 3090 Ti, too. Considering the performance increase, the negligible increase in power draw speaks to the efficient 4N process.
The increase in frame rates does also mean that in terms of performance per watt the RTX 4090 is the most efficient modern GPU on the market. Which seems a weird thing to say about a card that was originally rumoured to be more like a 600W TGP option.
Nvidia RTX 4090 analysis
(Image credit: Future)How does the RTX 4090 stack up?
There really is no denying that the RTX 4090, the vanguard of the coming fleet of Ada Lovelace GPUs, is a fantastically powerful graphics card. It's ludicrously sized, for sure, which helps both the power delivery and thermal metrics. But it's also a prohibitively priced card for our first introduction to the next generation of GeForce GPUs.
Sure, it's only $100 more than the RTX 3090 was at launch, and $400 less than the RTX 3090 Ti, which could even make it the best value RTX 40-series GPU considering the amount of graphics silicon on offer. But previous generations have given the rest of us PC gamers an 'in' to the newest range of cards, even if they later introduced ultra-enthusiast GPUs for the special people, too.
At a time of global economic hardship, it's not a good look to only be making your new architecture available to the PC gaming 'elite'.
But the entire announced RTX 40-series is made of ultra-enthusiast cards, with the cheapest being a third-tier GPU—a distinctly separate AD104 GPU, and not just a cut-down AD102 or AD103—coming in with a nominal $899 price tag. Though as the 12GB version of the RTX 4080 doesn't get a Founders Edition I'll be surprised if we don't see $1,000+ versions from AIBs at launch.
That all means no matter how impressed I am with the technical achievements baked into the Ada Lovelace architecture—from the magic of DLSS 3 and Frame Generation, to the incredible clock speed uptick the TSMC 4N process node delivers, and the sheer weight of all those extra transistors—it's entirely limited to those with unfeasibly large bank accounts.
And, at a time of global economic hardship, it's not a good look to only be making your new architecture available to the PC gaming 'elite'.
(Image credit: Future)Nvidia will argue there is silicon enough in the current suite of RTX 30-series cards to cater to the lower classes, and that eventually, more affordable Ada GPUs will arrive to fill out the RTX 40-series stack in the new year. But that doesn't change the optics of this launch today, tomorrow, or in a couple of months' time.
Which makes me question exactly why it's happening. Why has Nvidia decided that now is a great time to change how it's traditionally launched a new GPU generation, and stuck PC gamers with nothing other than an out-of-reach card from its inception?
Do the Ada tricks not seem as potent further down the stack? Or is it purely because there are just so many RTX 3080-and-below cards still in circulation?
I have a so-far-unfounded fear that the RTX 4080, in either guise, won't have the same impact as the RTX 4090 does, which is why Nvidia chose not to lead with those cards. Looking at the Ada whitepaper (PDF warning), particularly the comparisons between the 16GB and 12GB RTX 4080 cards and their RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3080 12GB forebears, it reads like the performance improvement in the vast majority of today's PC games could be rather unspectacular.
Both Ada GPUs have fewer CUDA cores, and far lower memory bandwidth numbers, compared with the previous gen cards. It looks like they're relying almost entirely on a huge clock speed bump to lift the TFLOPS count, and the magic of DLSS 3 to put some extra gloss on their non-RT benchmarks.
In a way it might seem churlish to talk about fears over the surrounding cards, their GPU make up, and release order in a review of RTX 4090. I ought to be talking about the silicon in front of me rather than where I'd want it to exist in an ideal world, because this is still a mighty impressive card from both a gen-on-gen point of view and from what the Ada architecture enables.
(Image credit: Future)I said at the top of the review there's nothing subtle about the RTX 4090, but there is a level of finesse here to be applauded. The RT Core improvements take us ever further along the road to a diminished hit when enabling the shiny lighting tech, and the Tensor Cores give us the power to create whole game frames without rendering.
Seriously, DLSS with Frame Generation is stunning.
I'm sure there will be weird implementations as developers get to grips (or fail to get to grips) with enabling the mystical generative techniques in their games, where strange visual artefacts ruin the look of it and create memes of their own, but from what I've experienced so far it looks great. Better than 4K native, in fact.
And while the $1,600 price tag might well be high, it is worth noting that spending big on a new generation of graphics cards is probably best done early in its lifespan. I mean, spare a thought for the people who bought an RTX 3090 Ti in the past seven months. For $2,000. They're going to be feeling more than a little sick right now, looking at their overpriced, power-hungry GPU that is barely able to post half the gaming performance of this cheaper, newer card.
It feels somewhat akin to the suffering of Radeon VII owners once the RX 5700 XT came out. Only more costly.
Nvidia RTX 4090 verdict
(Image credit: Future)Should you buy an RTX 4090?
The RTX 4090 is everything you would want from an ultra high-end graphics card. It makes the previous top card of the last generation look limp by comparison, brings unseen new technology to gamers, and almost justifies its cost by the sheer weight of silicon and brushed aluminium used in its construction.
There's no other GPU that can come near it right now.
It's the very epitome of that Titan class of GPU; all raw power and top-end pricing.
Which would be fine if it had launched on the back of a far more affordable introduction to the new Ada Lovelace architecture. But that's something we're not likely to see until the dawn of 2023 at the earliest. The 2022 Ada lineup starts at $899, and that too is prohibitively expensive for the majority of PC gamers.
There's no denying it is an ultra-niche ultra-enthusiast card, and that almost makes the RTX 4090 little more than a reference point for most of us PC gamers. We're then left counting the days until Ada descends to the pricing realm of us mere mortals.
In itself, however, the RTX 4090 is an excellent graphics card and will satisfy the performance cravings of every person who could ever countenance spending $1,600 on a new GPU. That's whether they're inconceivably well-heeled gamers, or content creators not willing to go all-in on a Quadro card. And it will deservedly sell, because there's no other GPU that can come near it right now.
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Google has teamed up with three notebook manufacturers to launch gaming Chromebooks. Yes, I know what you're thinking. Chromebooks don't have the graphical grunt required for gaming at particularly high frame rates, and if that wasn't problem enough, they're not using an OS compatible with games out of the box. So what is all this about?
Well, these three new notebooks from Asus, Acer, and Lenovo are built to maximise the potential and playability of cloud gaming. The likes of GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Amazon Luna. To do that, they share a few key features:
- 120Hz or faster refresh rate screen
- Wi-Fi 6/6E support
- Anti-ghosting keyboard
Google says its plan is to reduce the upfront cost of gaming to allow more people to get involved, and it felt like cloud gaming on a Chromebook was a good way to go about that.
The three gaming chromebooks range in price from $399–$799. Some come with more powerful CPUs, up to Intel 12th Gen mobile chips, though if you're planning on streaming most of the time you could get away with a cheaper model.
All three gaming Chromebooks will be available from October 22, 2022.
Beyond the hardware, Google is rolling out a few software changes to make cloud gaming work better on Chromebooks. It's adding launcher search integration to make finding games easier, even when they're on various cloud gaming platforms, and Google also says these three devices (and any that join them later down the line) will come with a setup process to make cloud gaming out of the box that much easier.
Google has also been working with peripheral manufacturers—including HyperX, Corsair, SteelSeries—to certify their products for use with Google's ChromeOS. This is a part of Google's "Works With Chromebook" program. These manufacturers will have progressive web apps for Chromebooks ready to go, so that you can still access all the features they bring to the table, and at least 'key devices' will be certified out of the gate to work on the platform.
Though the irony of Google announcing gaming Chromebooks just after it confirmed it will be killing its own cloud streaming platform in January is not lost. In a recent Q&A with Google on its new Chromebooks, the team did field a few questions regarding Stadia, including on how the company sees cloud gaming's future following its decision to drop out of that market. The team did respond saying that, ultimately, it's Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and more that are providing the cloud gaming services today, and they seem as committed as ever.
Race on(Image credit: Future)Best PC racing wheels : perfect for any circuit.
Best VR headset: which set is right for trackdays?I agree with Google on that one. I don't think cloud gaming is going anywhere, and GeForce Now is a really good service if you've already started building up a Steam library and don't fancy buying your games all over again. In terms of the sort of experience you can expect, that really depends on your internet connection and latency. Generally, those I've tested personally have been great on quick Wi-Fi, though can struggle when you're out and about on sluggish public Wi-Fi connections or hotspots. Just something to bear in mind with these Chromebooks, anyways.
But it's good to see more support for game streaming from Google in other ways than Stadia after its demise. Cheaper and easier access to gaming will always get a thumbs up from me.
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I'm a big baby, that's my problem. Whenever I try to dip more than a toe into one of the major multiplayer games of the day—your Overwatches, your Dotas, your Leagues of Legend—I invariably have some terrible interaction that puts me off it. Like a high school PE lesson, eventually someone who takes the game a lot more seriously than I do will get very, very upset by my lack of skill and run me out of town in a blur of insults and flop sweat. It's a phenomenon that Vela Games—founded by a band of Riot, Blizzard, and EA long-timers—is more than familiar with, and it's one the studio is doing its best to scrub from its debut game, Evercore Heroes.
"We have a low tolerance for people being awful," says Vela CEO and co-founder Travis George, who used to work as product lead on League of Legends, "and we just want to uphold that at every touchpoint we can." That philosophy shines through: although my brain shouts 'MOBA' the second I lay eyes on the game, it becomes rapidly apparent that Evercore Heroes differs from LoL or Dota in a few deliberate and crucial ways.
(Image credit: Vela Games)For one thing, you're not going up against another team, at least not directly. After you and three teammates have picked your characters—from a roster of heroes that can be divided into tanks, DPS, and support, because some things are eternal—you're dropped onto a map to face off against, well, NPCs. Whether big or small, boss or minion, your enemies are all AI and blissfully devoid of opinions on your playing ability. There's no human opponent in sight, because your human competitors (made up of four teams of four players each) are all on their own maps, identical to yours, facing off against equally identical swarms of AI-controlled adversaries and bosses. You can't even pop into chat to offer your rivals helpful tips or denigrate their ancestors: communication is strictly intra-team.
The gameplay loop isn't hard to grasp. You have two goals: defend your team's evercore crystal (your ancient, to all intents and purposes) from NPC attackers, and beat the end boss before the other teams. The end boss fight starts simultaneously for everyone, but before it does you're empowering your own team throughout a match's phases by fighting monsters, levelling up your selected hero's four abilities, and accruing gold to buy 'shards' that grant you advantages in the shape of damage buffs, defence boosts, and so on. Gold and experience is shared across the whole team, too, so no one gets left behind.
Your opponents can't be directly affected. They're just wisps on your map, their position and progress tracked via the game's HUD, eternally out of physical reach. You can, however, screw with them by achieving particular goals in each phase. In the match I saw, a rival team achieved a phase objective first, so the players we were spectating had to fight an elite enemy while their enemies went on their merry way, building their power for the final fight. Even in that last boss fight, a challenge popped up—be the first to seize a few control points—that rewarded the victor with a damage bonus. It's this back-and-forth, a constant trade of buffs and debuffs, that replaces the straight-up, no-frills murder of more standard PvP fare.
(Image credit: Vela Games)"In traditional PvP games, there is this aspect of, 'I have to end your fun as part of my fun,'" says George. "There's two aspects: 'How well do we work together as a team?' and 'How well do we get in the other team's way?'" Vela reckons it's that second part, taking other players out of the game, ending their fun, which so often breeds toxicity. It doesn't matter how good a PvP player you are, George points out, "If somebody's just got your number, or you're just having a bad day […] it ends your fun, it compounds your frustration." So Vela switched things up. "There's still competition," George assures me, but "you can't 'end' that game, you don't have that 'domination' aspect of it."
"In Evercore Heroes, the focus is much more on 'work together as a team to outplay other teams.'" So indirect competition, racing to beat bosses before your enemies, takes the place of head-to-head battling. Multiplayer? Yes. Online? Absolutely. Battle arena? Not so much, unless you count the NPCs.
With friends like these
Even if you're not frustrated by griefers on the other team, there's still your allies to consider. Anyone who's ever dropped into a team-based game with strangers will be painfully aware that there's usually two outcomes: either everyone goes off and does their own thing (and you lose), or the team isn't effective because someone's skills aren't up to snuff (and you lose). Either way, it's only a matter of time before someone halfway around the world is castigating you for your incompetence, laziness, moral weakness, and lack of frontier spirit.
There's still competition, but you can't 'end' that game, you don't have that 'domination' aspect of it.
Travis George, Vela Games CEO"We're not gonna fix player behaviour on the internet. We're not signing up for that,' says George, probably wisely, but the team has thought about it a lot. After all, while they want to cut out "raging strangers" they're also keen on getting players socialising. It's here that Brian Kaiser, another co-founder—formerly of EA and currently heading up Evercore's narrative—chimes in: "There's opportunities to think about matchmaking in deeper ways than we have traditionally," he says, noting that it's not just players' skill levels, but their motivations that determine how well a team coheres. "If you do want to get in and [...] try a new character and you're just starting out, can we connect you with people that have very similar motivations?" Vela hasn't shown off how they're doing this yet, but I'm interested to see how, and if, they pull it off.
(Image credit: Vela Games)It certainly makes sense to try. George points out that, in any game like this, "There are times when it's like, 'Hey I wanna play and have fun and try some new stuff,'" and it's important to cater to that, too. Most of my own unpleasant multiplayer experiences have ultimately boiled down to a mismatch between my expectations and those of my teammates. Even if matchmaking puts me on a team that was on my (lack of) skill level, it can easily become a disaster if they're all dead-set on winning the match while I just want to take a new hero for a spin, or vice versa. Ironing out those kinds of motivational disparities could make a big difference.
Besides, Vela is pretty confident everyone will have a lot of learning to do once Evercore Heroes launches. Kaiser tells me that, while "a lot of familiar elements that draw inspirations from different games" are recognisable in the game's DNA, mastering it isn't a question of transferring over your knowledge from League or Dota. "You can't run the old playbook," he grins.
Gigaturtles, all the way down
Evercore Heroes has a bunch of maps spread across five biomes. Vela showed off four of those biomes during the demo, and they're pretty much what you'd expect: you've got forests, you've got tundra, you've got jungles, and so on and so forth. Also, and you can tell this part is important because it's written in capital letters and underlined three times in my notes, one of them rests atop something called a gigaturtle. So I'm sold.
If you do want to get in and [...] try a new character and you're just starting out, can we connect you with people that have very similar motivations?
Brian Kaiser, Vela Games co-founderThe game's premise is that certain parts of its world are "subject to violent surges of chaotic magical energy," says Kaiser, but the people in them keep that energy at bay with evercore crystals. When the forces of chaos get their act together to lay siege to those crystals, people have to turn to the game's heroes to defend them. So far, only eight of those heroes have been revealed, but Vela's third co-founder, Lisa Newon George, promises that plenty more are yet to come.
Vela has made sure to cover a gamut of playstyles with its first batch of heroes. There's a zippy assassin, a long-range archer, an AOE guy, a single-target guy, and someone who is essentially a bipedal wall, among others. Each one has a set of four abilities plus an array of three 'talent slots'. The abilities are easy to understand: you use them in combat to harm or heal and power them up over the course of a match, but talents are a longer-term affair. As you spend more time with each hero, you work your way up what is, in essence, a skill tree. The talents you unlock can modify stats, change up your abilities, or even create new in-game goals for your hero. But you can only have three of them active at a time, so while you can nudge your chosen character towards a certain playstyle with your talent choices, you aren't going to fundamentally overhaul them.
(Image credit: Vela Games)Unless you're talking about cosmetic overhauls, that is. Evercore Heroes is free-to-play, and Vela is opting for a seasonal structure when the game releases. Those seasons will introduce tweaks to heroes, new monsters, additional regions, and, of course, cosmetic updates. The team promises that new gameplay content, like new maps, biomes, and enemies, will be free for everyone. They didn't show off any cosmetics, but if I know anything about big online multiplayer releases, it's that the hats are never far behind.
Feedback loop
Newon George deals with Evercore Heroes' 'player content', and regularly emphasises the role that player feedback has played in the game's development. Beko, a support class hero and, more importantly, a cute little guy with a big stick and a lamp, is an example of that. "Together with the community, we co-created this design," says Newon George of Beko's appearance, but when I spoke to her, she was eager to note all the other ways players have gotten involved with Evercore Heroes' development, too.
"We've had, I think, upwards of a thousand different players playtest the game in various different formats," she says, noting that Vela has sought out playtesters of every skill level. They've had "advanced core gamers" (a title I'm adding to my business card) opine on "characters, objectives" and "overall meta", while also getting "brand new players" to "give us feedback on general impressions: where the pain points are, where the fun lies". The result is a game shaped by a "wider cross-section of different experiences". CEO Travis George added that the team had adopted changes "against even our own personal taste" as a result of player feedback.
(Image credit: Vela Games)You'll be able to take part in that playtesting yourself soon enough. Vela is inviting the curious to sign up for a playtesting event taking place between October 13 and 16 via the game's website and Discord, with Discord participants having a better chance of being selected. If you don't get in, you can track its progress on Vela's Twitter and YouTube pages. Oh, and if you see me in there, be nice.
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ASUS TUF Dash | GeForce RTX 3070 | Intel Core i7 12650H | 16GB RAM | 1TB SSD |
£1,599.99£1,079.99 at Amazon (save £520)
The ASUS TUF Dash gaming laptop is a little powerhouse, giving you an RTX 3070, 16GB RAM, and a powerful Intel Core i7 12650H processor—all in a neat package. For that low price, you can enjoy 1080p gaming on the go, and with a 1TB SSD, you won't have to worry about pesky installation sizes or storage upgrades. View DealGaming laptops are a tricky investment—they are far harder to upgrade than your standard desktop, and with new graphic cards coming out, it's easy to worry that they are always just a few steps away from feeling their age. That said, this ASUS TUF Dash gaming laptop is an excellent choice if you want something that is both capable of 1080p gaming, and also gets you an RTX 3070 to boot.
One of these cards would usually set you back by around £550-600, but in this case, you're getting an entire high-end gaming setup for just around double that. The laptop comes with 16GB RAM, which is enough for most games you'll be playing, and it also has a massive 1TB of SSD storage, which means you can have most of your gaming library available at all times.
The ASUS TUF Dash isn't what you'd typically imagine from a gaming laptop. It's both thin and lightweight, so it's easy to bring it with you when you fancy some games away from home, or just for a far less bulkier desktop setup than a full tower PC and monitors. Considering you can play almost anything on this laptop that you would on your PC, you might appreciate the extra space.
For quite a while, the ASUS TUF Dash has been one of the cheapest ways to get your hands on an RTX 3070, and with this deal, it's even cheaper than it usually would be—pretty tempting if you don't fancy a Steam Deck, but can't be without your games for too long.
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ROG Strix G10 | GeForce RTX 3060 | Intel Core i5 11400F | 16GB RAM | 512GB PCIe SSD |
$1,129.99$739.99 at Amazon (save $390.00)
It's rare to see an RTX 3060 PC at such a low price, especially one that doesn't require much in terms of upgrading other components. The Intel Core i5 11400F is an excellent CPU, you've got 512GB SSD storage, and with 16GB RAM, you've got everything you need for a solid gaming setup.View DealA gaming PC will set you back a significant chunk of change these days, especially if you want to future-proof your setup a little by buying something towards the higher end. That said, this ROG Strix G10 is an excellent price for anyone looking to buy a PC with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060.
There'd usually be a downside to a deal like this—less than ideal RAM or storage in need of an upgrade—but here you've got a PC with everything you need. We rate the Intel Core i5 11400F as one of the best of the latest 11th Gen desktop CPUs. It's also my current processor, and it more than keeps up with the nightmare-ish cocktail of games that I throw at it on a daily basis.
You've also got 16GB RAM, which is more than enough for most modern games, and 512GB storage. If you're the kind of person who likes to have a lot of games installed at once, that might dwindle before too long considering how big games can get nowadays, but it should last you a while either way, if not indefinitely.
Then you've got the RTX 3060, which is what this deal is all about. The card alone would usually set you back $350-400, whereas here you're getting an entire gaming PC thrown in for just about double the price. The RTX 3060 is a decent graphics card, too, offering a healthy performance boost over its 2060 predecessor.
All in all, you're getting a PC that can handle 1080p gaming at a pretty low price. If you're looking to buy your first gaming PC, there are far worse places to start. Hell, I'm almost tempted to buy it even though I've got one already.
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Things used to be better, you know. The sun was brighter, the winters shorter, all the world had a new car smell and you could, if you were so inclined, order a pizza to your home by typing /pizza into the text chat of Everquest 2. What a time it was to be alive.
But some ideas are too good to leave in the dustbin of history, which is presumably why you can now order Domino's pizza delivery by chatting to an NPC in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It's the work of a mod called Nickies' Pizzablivion, and if I close my eyes, I can just about imagine it's 2005 again.
The mod adds a character called Pizza Black to the outskirts of the village Weye. If you speak to him, you'll find an option to "Order Pizza" that, once clicked, will send a predetermined Domino's order right to your door, though you can change it yourself if you have some coding skill and knowledge of Domino's product codes. At present, the default order that you'll receive consists of:
- A 12-inch thin-crust pizza
- 8-piece garlic bread twists
- A 20-oz bottle of Fuze Lemon Tea
That comes to $28.23, tax and delivery fees included. The mod's author, Nickies, doesn't say if the mod works outside the USA, but I'd be surprised if it did without a lot of tinkering. They do say you might have to try a couple of times to make it work properly, though. In testing, Pizza Black only successfully placed an order on a second try.
Pizzablivion needs you to install a few bolt-ons to let an RPG from 2006 communicate with the Domino's of 2022, namely the Oblivion Script Extender, the OBSE Plugin Network Pipe, and the Magicjarvis fork of the ggrammar PizzaPi module. It sounds more complicated than it is: most of these mods just need you to drop them in the right folder, and they all have fairly detailed installation instructions.
A quick word of warning, though. In order for the mod to work properly, you'll need to enter your address and card details into the .py document that comes with it, which means storing all that info in plain text on your internet-connected computer. Nickies is emphatic that you use Nickies' Pizzablivion at your own risk, and that they aren't affiliated with Domino's. But, well, I have to admit I'm still very tempted.
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Amazon Prime Early Access SSD deals(Image credit: Future)
Jump straight to the deals you want...
1. SSD Deals
2. External SSD Deals
3. UK SSD dealsIf you're in the market to treat yourself to some speedy, next-gen SSD storage, then Amazon's new Prime Early Access event has popped up at just the right time. The two-day event should see plenty of savings on all kinds of storage, including the latest PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs. With PCIe 5.0 drives on the way before the year closes out, we'd expect some pretty deep cuts on the pricing front, doubly so for PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSDs and SATA drives.
If your gaming machine is still packing a spinning hard drive, then this is a particularly great time to give your machine a serious boost. An SSD is not only significantly faster than a hard drive, but they're more power efficient and more reliable too. They'll also put you in a good position to get the most from Microsoft's DirectStorage when we finally see games taking advantage of it.
If you're still on PCIe 3.0, don't worry. PCIe 4.0 SSDs are backward compatible and will run on your system. While it won't perform to its full potential, it should tide you over until you're ready to upgrade your motherboard, et al. If you're all about saving money, prepare to be tempted by a lot of PCIe 3.0 SSDs on sale. Although with PCIe 5.0 on the horizon, we're expecting savings even on the most recent drives, and when you're talking about as little as a $10–20 difference between the last-gen drives and the very latest offerings, it makes sense to pick the speedier options.
If you're not an Amazon Prime subscriber already, you can join Amazon Prime to get access to the Prime Early Access deals. Amazon Prime costs $139 for a one-year membership or $14.99 per month. Amazon offers a 30-day free trial, so you can try it out before fully committing.
It's worth noting that we expect the rest of the industry to want a slice of Amazon's action here too, and expect discounts from all usual suspects.
If you're after something more powerful, the Amazon Prime Early Access gaming PC and Prime Early Access gaming monitor deals might provide a more apt solution. There's also a page with our top picks, and the full selection of Amazon Prime Early access PC gaming deals around today, from TVs to peripherals, and more.
When is Amazon Prime Early Access 2022?
Amazon Prime Early Access will begin at 12 am PT, Tuesday October 11, and will run all the way through to 11.59 pm on Wednesday October 12. Expect 48 hours of potential PC gaming deals, before we get into the meatier discounts expected to drop on Black Friday—that's November 25 for anyone willing to wait that long. Truly, Amazon isn't messing around when it says Early Access. In fact, let's just have a deal event every month.
Where are the best Prime Early Access SSD deals?
- Amazon - Up to 50% off internal and external SSDs
- Best Buy - Save up to $150 on internal SSDs
- Newegg - Up to 30% off Samsung internal SSDs
- Walmart - Deals on internal and external SSD starting from $20
- B&H Photo - Save $80 on a Samsung 2TB 970 EVO Plus NVMe
- Staples - Save up to 30% on a range of SSDs, USB sticks, and external SSDs
Amazon Prime Early Access SSD deals
WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD | 1TB | PCIe 4.0 | 7,000MB/s reads | 5,300 MB/s writes |
$229.99$148 at Amazon (save $81.99)
This impressive SSD consistently gives the Samsung 980 Pro's performance a run for its money and is arguably the PCIe 4.0 drive to beat. It's our favorite high-speed SSD, and at this price makes a great upgrade for your gaming rig's boot drive.View DealWD Black SN770 | 1TB | PCIe 4.0 | 5,150 MB/s reads | 4,900 MB/s writes |
$129.99$98.88 at Amazon (save $31.11)
It may not match the peak performance of the pricier SN850, but this is a great budget option. And a good shout for anyone still stuck on a PCIe 3.0 motherboard but with a yearning for an upgrade soonish. This SSD will be as fast as any PCIe 3.0 drive, but then will reach its own top speeds as soon as you upgrade to a PCIe 4.0 board.View DealXPG GAMMIX S70 SSD | 1TB | PCIe 4.0 | 7,400 MB/s reads | 5,500 MB/s writes |
$127.49$109.99 at Best Buy (save $17.50)
There are some really great SSD deals this year, with the XPG Gammix being one of the best. It's faster than either Samsung or WD, and offers a whole lot of speedy storage for the money. And, again, if you're stuck on PCIe 3.0 this is a good upgrade to have in the back pocket for a Zen 4 or Raptor Lake platform of the future.View DealSamsung 980 SSD | 1TB | PCIe 3.0 | 3,500 MB/s reads | 3,000 MB/s writes |
$139.99$101.99 at Amazon (save $38)
For just over $100 you can bag a full 1TB of fast PCIe 3.0 SSD storage. That's plenty of space for a boot drive and a host of your most oft-played games. You would have to be a Samsung fan to pick this over the WD Black SN770, but if that goes out of stock, the Samsung 980 is a great backup. Back up. See, SSD deals humor, we've got it all.View DealXPG GAMMIX S70 SSD | 2TB | PCIe 4.0 | 7,400 MB/s reads | 6,700 MB/s writes |
$249.99$209.99 at Best Buy (save $40)
Looking to add storage to your PlayStation 5? This XPG SSD can provide you with an easy upgrade for both your console and gaming PC. This SSD isn't the cheapest it's ever been, but it's still a pretty good deal for a 2TB drive, and lightning fast. View DealSamsung 980 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD | 2TB| PCIe 4.0 | 7,000 MB/s reads | 5,100 MB/s writes |
$379.99$234.88 at Amazon (save $145.11)
Last Prime Day, this 2TB Samsung 980 Pro sold out fast. It's one of the better Gen4 NVMe SSDs you can use right now, even if it is a bit older. It has outstanding read/write speeds along with hardware-based AES 256-bit encryption. This isn't a cheap SSD, so I'll take any discount on it.View DealPNY CS900 3D NAND SSD | 1TB| SATA | 535 MB/s reads | 515 MB/s writes |
$95.99$78.70 at Amazon (save $16.29)
This PNY SATA SSD is a great option for budget builds where you can't quite stretch to a full PCIe drive. For less than $80 you can slowly ease yourself off your old spinning HDD with a large enough capacity for your OS and a bunch of games. Alternatively, it will make a great secondary storage if you're already sporting a faster SSD as your boot.View DealCrucial P2 3D NAND NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD | 2TB|
$199.99$164.99 at Amazon (save $35)
Another oldie but goodie. 2TB NVMe SSD is a more cost-effective high-capacity SSDs with decent performance. And at this price, nothing stops you from picking up a pair of them for a massive 4TB storage solution.View DealSK hynix Gold P31 SSD | 2TB| PCIe 3.0 |
$198.99$159.19 at Amazon (save $39.80)
This affordable SSD is perfect for anyone looking for a modest storage upgrade. SK hynix SSDs are almost never on sale so we were surprised to see these marked down a couple of bucks.
View DealAmazon Prime Early Access external SSD deals
Samsung T7 Shield | 1TB |
$129.99$109.99 at Best Buy (save $20)
We're big fans of the T7 Shield SSD and it's on offer this Prime Day week, giving you the option to get speedy portable SSD storage that won't give up the ghost if you drop it in the odd puddle. Weirdly, it's only discounted with the blue version, but hey, that's my favorite color so I'm okay with that.View DealSanDisk Extreme Portable SSD | 1TB |
$249.99$124.99 at Amazon (save $125)
This SanDisk is a great pocket-sized solution for your portable storage needs. This 1TB external SSD can take on the elements, and it even comes with a carabiner loop, so you keep it on your belt, which is totally not embarrassing.View DealCrucial X6 Portable SSD | 2TB |
$199.99$163.44 at Amazon (save $36.55)
While not the fastest external SSD you'll see, the Crucial X6's size makes it a perfect travel buddy for editing video's remotely or keeping your PS5 games close to you at all times.View DealWD_BLACK P50 Game Drive| 4TB |
$749.99$489 at Amazon (save $260.99)
This P50 is a shock-resistant external SSD that can take a beating while giving you massive storage to hold your game libraries for PC and Consoles. Yeah, it's still pricey after the discount, but hey, you won't have to worry about storage for a long, long while.View DealADATA SE900 | 1TB |
$159.99$119.99 at Best Buy (save $40)
With a genuine USB 3.2 Type-C interface you can reach the max 2,000 MB/s read speeds on this affordable ADATA drive. It's a small form factor drive, and is definitely a gaming portable SSD 'cos it's got RGB, right?View DealAmazon Prime Early Access UK SSD deals
WD_Black SN850 NVMe SSD with heatsink | 1TB | PCIe 4.0 | 7,000 MB/s reads | 5,300 MB/s writes |
£257.99£98.30 at Amazon (save £159.69)
The SN850 is arguably the PCIe 4.0 drive to beat, and consistently gives the Samsung 980 Pro's performance a run for its money. It's our favourite high-speed SSD, and this is the lowest it has ever been. That price is even more impressive given it comes with that chunky heatsink.View DealSamsung 980 NVMe SSD | 1TB | PCIe 3.0 | 3,500 MB/s reads | 3,000 MB/s writes |
£94.99£68.99 at Amazon (save £26)
This deal lets you bag a full 1TB of fast PCIe 3.0 SSD storage for a ridiculously low £69. That's plenty of space for a boot drive and a host of your favourite games, and while this is PCIe 3.0 in a land of faster PCIe 4.0 drives, it's still a great step up from SATA drives and HDDs.View DealWD_Black SN770 NVMe SSD | 1TB | PCIe 4.0 | 5,150 MB/s reads | 4,900 MB/s writes |
£177.99£74.99 at Amazon (save £103)
This SSD may not match the performance of the pricier SN850, but it's still a decent budget option for anyone stuck on a PCIe 3.0 motherboard but with a yearning for an upgrade in the near future. This SSD is as speedy as any PCIe 3.0 drive and will exceed that as soon as you upgrade to a PCIe 4.0 board. View DealSeagate FireCuda 530 NVMe SSD | 2TB | PCIe 4.0 | 7,300 MB/s reads | 6,900 MB/s writes |
£399.99£244.99 at Amazon (save £155)
Seagate is perhaps best known for mechanical HDDs, but you shouldn't write off this great SSD deal. It's one of the pricier options we have listed but the numbers speak for themselves, providing you have PCIe 4.0 support on your motherboard. If you're after super-fast loading times and plenty of storage, this is a solid deal.View Deal -
Throughout today and tomorrow, October 11–12, Amazon will be pumping out PC upgrade deals. In fact, it's early doors and I'm already seeing lots of deals on top components—including CPUs, RAM, coolers, motherboards, SSDs, and, yes, even graphics cards—but I expect even more deals to appear as the shopping event continues.
You don't have to stay on top of every great deal throughout the event, however. I'll be collating the best PC upgrade deals right here as the team finds them. This page will automatically refresh with the latest updates, so hang tight.
Cast a wider net with our best Amazon Early Access PC gaming deals round-up.
I'm searching Amazon for the best Prime Early Access deals, but, as ever, these sorts of prices reductions tend to spill over to other major retailers. They have to stay competitive with Amazon's prices, after all, and while they'd usually wait around until Black Friday to try and get stock out the door I suspect we'll see some great deals across the web over the next 48 hours. So I'll keep my eye on those, too.
Buying advice: graphics cards
Graphics cards might be the hottest ticket in town right now, and we're actually looking at the possibility of some great graphics cards deals as we head into the buying bonanza season. There's a glut of graphics cards with retailers and distributors, and this is stock that Nvidia and AMD will want to shift as best it can.
The big question is: What's a great price for a graphics card nowadays? For most of today's graphics cards, the manufacturer recommended price went up in smoke in a matter of days, perhaps even hours, after their release. So while I am optimistic about deals, I'm also going to stay sceptical of these so-called 'deals' at times. You shouldn't be paying over MSRP for a card that's nearing the end of its life, and the RTX 30-series and RX 6000-series are on their way out. That's truer of the high-end graphics cards today—the low-end from Nvidia and AMD are both going to be sticking around until at least some point early next year, if not much later than that.
Still, you shouldn't pay top dollar for even a budget GPU. Here are some resources we've put together to help you know whether a graphics card deal is really as good as it seems.
GPU performance
(Image credit: Future)Here's a list of the manufacturer set retail prices (MSRP), or recommended retail price (RRP), for most the latest graphics cards. For the most part, these are the set prices for the stock or reference versions of these cards, if applicable, and not representative of overclocked or third-party graphics cards, which may well be priced higher.
(Image credit: Future)Good morning, Jacob reporting for duty.
PowerColor RX 6600 Fighter | £259.98
Let's start off with this £260 RX 6600 that's currently live over at Ebuyer. That's £30 off the original price, and a greater saving that any I can see on Amazon right now, and certainly not a bad saving on this 1080p-capable card today.
PowerColor RX 6600 Fighter | 8GB GDDR6 | 1,792 shaders | 2,491MHz Boost |
£289.99£259.98 at Ebuyer (save £30)
The Radeon RX 6600 isn't a bad GPU for the right money, and this reduction to below £260 makes this one of the cheapest options around. The performance isn't far off Nvidia's RTX 3060, which means you're hitting silky smooth frame rates at 1080p without having to hack the settings. This is a quiet running card too.View DealWD_Black SN850 1TB | £98.30
WD has a habit of making SSDs that we absolutely love. That's not just for performance reasons—though note that this SN850 is no slouch at up to 7,000MB/s and 5,300MB/s read and write, respectively—but for the price you'll often find them going for. This 1TB SN850 is a rapid PCIe 4.0 drive with a heatsink (important if you want to use it in a PS5 though also handy if your motherboard has none) for under £100.WD_Black SN850 NVMe SSD with heatsink | 1TB | PCIe 4.0 | 7,000 MB/s reads | 5,300 MB/s writes |
£257.99£98.30 at Amazon (save £159.69)
The SN850 is arguably the PCIe 4.0 drive to beat, and consistently gives the Samsung 980 Pro's performance a run for its money. It's our favourite high-speed SSD, and this is the lowest it has ever been. That price is even more impressive given it comes with that chunky heatsink.View DealI'll let you in on a little secret: I'm checking Amazon's best prices for a product using a tool called CamelCamelCamel. It essentially shows you a handy graph for a product's historical pricing, like so.
(Image credit: CamelCamelCamel)I highly recommend, for any deals you come across, you do the same. That way you can be sure you're not being messed around by 'deals' that aren't what they seem. CamelCamelCamel is both a Chrome plugin and a free-to-use website.
Samsung Odyssey G7 | £419
Samsung makes a mean monitor, from massively ultrawide behemoths to compact speedy things like this G7. The G7 is a 1440p, 27-inch panel with a 240Hz refresh. So yeah, it's quick. We were pretty impressed with the G7 at launch, noting it as proof that VA panels can indeed by very speedy, though its HDR implementation could be better. It's also extremely curvy, so bear that in mind.
All said and done, the Samsung Odyssey G7 is down to £419. That's very nearly the lowest price we've seen this monitor going for on Amazon, which was back in mid-2021 when this monitor was going for £412. Still, it's a lot cheaper and well worth a look if you love speed.
Samsung Odyssey G7 | 27-inch | 1440p | 240Hz | VA |
£549.99£419 at Amazon (save £130.99)
The Samsung Odyssey G7 is extremely quick at 240Hz, so you'll need a decent graphics card to get the most out of it. This isn't the cheapest it's been, but is still a decent price for this panel.View DealCorsair 16GB (2x 8GB) 3200MHz C16 DDR4 RAM | £59.99
DDR4 RAM is essentially always on offer right now. The stuff is seriously cheap. A 16GB stick shouldn't cost you anything over £60 right now, and that's exactly the 'deal' I'm about to highlight. It's not really a deal in that it's actually discounted by any amount, but this kit is at one of its lowest prices to date right now.
At 3,200MHz, the kit below will be a good fit for any AM4 AMD CPU (Ryzen 5000-series and older) or Intel CPU up to the latest 11th Gen chips.
Corsair DDR4 RAM | 16GB (2x 8GB | 3,200MHz | C16 | £59.99 at Amazon
If you're still rocking 8GB of memory, now might be the time to upgrade. We're in a transitionary period between DDR4 and DDR5 right now, and if you don't plan on ripping your DDR4-compatible CPU and motherboard out of your PC anytime soon, get some more memory while it's cheap. View Deal -
You'll find all the hints and tips you need to successfully solve today's Wordle at your own pace just below, and if you'd like to simply read the answer to the October 11 (479) puzzle as quickly as possible then that's just a quick scroll or click away too.
I played this one a little too carefully, too focused on what letters were statistically likely rather than what I could create using the letters in front of me, and that meant I struggled more than I had to. A little bravery goes a long way with Wordle.
Wordle hint
Today's Wordle: A hint for Tuesday, October 11
The exact meaning shifts around depending on the subject, but generally speaking today's answer refers to something being true or acceptable. Cinema tickets, serious contracts, and even someone's reasoning can all be this word. There are two vowels to find 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 479 answer?
Time for you to win. The answer to the October 11 (479) Wordle is VALID.
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 10: ENJOY
- October 9: HOWDY
- October 8: VIGOR
- October 7: DANDY
- October 6: SLOTH
- October 5: MARSH
- October 4: BOUGH
- October 3: STING
- October 2: TWINE
- October 1: LEAVE
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.
Forget Prime Day, Criterion's 50% off sale is the real steal today
in Gaming News
Posted
Forgive me, PC gamers, for bringing a deal to your attention that has nothing to do with PC gaming. I've spent much of the day browsing Amazon to find the Prime Day PC deals that are actually worth your attention, but what I wanted to be doing was scrolling through the Criterion Collection library, because today is a special day: for 25 hours, everything Criterion sells is 50% off. It's a 24 hour flash sale, so these deals won't last long.
The Criterion Collection is known for producing pricey, but lavish, disc releases of acclaimed movies, usually with tons of extras that movies rarely come with anymore. They often include new and archival interviews, audio commentary from film scholars or directors, and film-to-digital restorations that look far better than older transfers.
Most exciting, Criterion recently started updating its library to include 4K Blu-rays. There are only 24 so far, but there are some greats on that list already. Why spend time arguing about the Citizen Kane of videogames when you could watch the Citizen Kane of movies in 4K UHD?
Everything in the Criterion Collection is 50% off, from 4K discs down to old DVDs. This strikes me as an especially good time time grab some of Criterion's extra deluxe collections, like:
If you have a Blu-ray drive in your PC or run your own Plex server, this is kinda sorta a PC-related sale. But honestly, I think Criterion is missing a trick by not having a single videogame movie in its collection. The Super Mario Bros. live action film starring Bob Hoskins? That's art, man. The Castlevania Netflix series? Okay, not a movie, but still: Criterion-worthy. Fatal Fury: The Motion Picture? Not a masterpiece, but I guarantee you it's better than Armageddon, and that's somehow in the Collection. Games will get their artsy film collection due someday.
The Criterion Collection 50% off flash sale is running now, and ends at 9 am PST on Wednesday.
View the full article