A GitHub user has built their own GeForce Now client, giving gamers the option to connect to Nvidia’s cloud gaming service while also adding a few features that aren’t available on the original client. OpenNOW is available for download to anyone on GitHub, although you’d still need an Nvidia account to use it. The biggest advantage that OpenNOW has over Nvidia’s own client is that it removes AFK limitations. The original client will kick you from the connection if it detects eight minutes of inactivity, meaning you’ll have to reconnect again. While this is supposed to conserve bandwidth, ensuring that only gamers who are actually playing will only use Nvidia’s resources, gamers who want to leave their game running in the background would have no choice but to go back every five minutes or so, so that they do not get booted.

Aside from that, this open-source client does not gather tracking and telemetry data, making it perfect for more privacy-conscious gamers who do not relish the idea of a big tech company knowing about their hardware, software, and other habits. The creator also said that OpenNOW natively supports Linux, which Nvidia itself just officially supported this year. Just like the GeForce Now client, which technically supports Snapdragon X Arm processors (but still in Beta), OpenNOW is also working on Linux Arm64 support. This means that more enterprising users can use it on Arm-powered laptops and gaming handhelds.

OpenNOW can stream games up to 4K@240 FPS, giving you smooth gameplay at high resolution (provided your internet is fast enough to support it). It also gives you mouse sensitivity settings, as well as clipboard paste, which is something that you won’t find with Nvidia’s client. More importantly, since it’s open-source, you can create your own forks and apply modifications, allowing you to customize it and give it features that you want, provided you know your way around programming.

The open-source client does have some limitations, though. This includes the lack of flight controls, no Discord integration, and no compatibility with Android, iOS, and smart TVs. The first two might be an issue for some gamers, especially those who are into flight sims and prefer communicating with their friends using a third-party platform. However, the lack of compatibility with mobile devices and smart TVs will likely not be an issue for most users, especially as OpenNOW is likely designed for enthusiasts who’d like to enjoy cloud gaming while retaining a little bit more control over their data.

Nvidia's cloud gaming service, GeForce Now, has finally received a native Linux install for Linux gamers. Announced by Nvidia, the new version is designed around a Flatpak installer and has official support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or newer. However, Flatpak is Linux OS agnostic, so you can run the Flatpak build of GeForce Now on Linux operating systems and distros other than Ubuntu.

GeForce Now was already accessible on Linux through web browsers, but having a native app offers better input latency, performance, and unlocks features present in the native app on other operating systems. For instance, the native app offers substantially more resolution options and 5K resolution support, frame rates of up to 360FPS (depending on resolution), and Reflex enablement within the app. With the web browser version, you are limited to 1440p as the maximum resolution and frame rates of up to 120 FPS.

Phoronix reports that the native app will require a GPU that supports H.264 or H.265 video decoding for the native Linux version. However, AV1 support is not available in the current version of the Linux app. There are some Linux quirks worth watching out for. Nvidia recommends graphics drivers R580 or newer when using an Nvidia GPU and using the X.org display driver only when running the GeForce Now native app. Intel and Radeon users are recommended to use Mesa 24.2 or newer and the Wayland protocol.

Another quirk you'll need to pay attention to if you are going to use the GeForce Now native app is that Nvidia is reportedly not distributing it through Flathub (the app store for Flatpak apps). The only way you can install it is through Nvidia's official download link on the website and by following the installation instructions.

Nvidia's new native app represents the seventh platform GeForce Now supports with native integration featuring, Windows, Mac, Chromebook, Android, iOS/iPadOS, and Linux. There is also a plethora of TVs that support GeForce Now. Unsupported platforms can access GeForce Now through the web browser. NVIDIA also announced Amazon Fire TV stick support in conjunction with the launch of the Linux native app.

GeForce Now can be accessed for free with basic gameplay functionality, but the platform is capable of outputting a flagship PC-like gaming experience with its RTX 4080/5080 Ultimate plan, with support for ultra-high refresh rate monitors and ultrawide monitors.

Nvidia is treating new Chromebook owners to a gift this holiday season — an exclusive GeForce Now subscription with special privileges.

Starting on November 20th, GeForce Now Fast Pass will provide Chromebook customers priority access to Nvidia's cloud servers without ads, Google announced on its blog. The new subscription will be free for one year.

The subscription takes some perks from Nvidia's outgoing "Performance" subscription, giving Chromebook gamers the plan's ad-free experience and priority access, and combining it with 10 hours of game time per month. The allotted time can peak to 15 hours per month, but only if five of those hours were unused during the previous month and rolled over.

With Fast Pass, Chromebook owners will be able to stream over 2,000 PC titles from a plethora of supported existing libraries, including Steam, the Epic Games Store, Xbox, and more. It is likely the Fast Pass subscription will inherit the same hardware access as the free plan with the "basic rig" since Fast Pass's game accessibility matches the free plan. By contrast, the Performance and Ultimate subscriptions get access to more than 4,000 games and the service's new "Install-to-Play" feature.

With Fast Pass, Chromebook gamers will be able to play PC games on their device, which Chromebooks can't do without Cloud gaming. These laptops don't run on Windows and typically boast low-power SoCs that prioritize battery life over raw performance, making them only good enough (usually) to play web or mobile games natively.

GeForce Now is Nvidia's cloud gaming service, which gives gamers access to a fast virtual machine linked to a dedicated GPU from almost any device imaginable. The base plan offers a 1080p 60 FPS experience, but the ultimate plan provides support for up to 360 FPS with up to a 5K resolution (but not at the same time).

We were impressed with the quality and performance of Nvidia's ultimate plan when its RTX 4080 tier first launched. Nvidia has since updated its flagship plan with its RTX 5080 upgrade, boasting improvements to quality, latency, and enabling Blackwell features like DLSS 4 multi-frame generation. Surprisingly, Nvidia claims input latency with its RTX 5080 servers is so low that multi-frame generation is feasible.

We've heard rumblings of a free version of Xbox Cloud Gaming for years at this point, but it seems like that's finally becoming a reality. According to The Verge, Microsoft is currently testing a limited version of Xbox Cloud Gaming, which will be offered for free without requiring a Game Pass subscription. Historically, Xbox Cloud Gaming has been limited to Game Pass Ultimate members — which recently saw a very controversial price hike — and was expanded to Essential and Plus tiers of Game Pass a few days ago.

The main caveat with free Xbox Cloud Gaming will be the presence of ads. Sources close to the matter tell The Verge that two-minute-long pre-roll ads will play before each gaming session, which will be limited to just an hour. A monthly cap of five hours will be imposed, meaning you cannot simply start new one-hour sessions each time your previous one expires. What's funny, though, is that ads seem to permeate Xbox Cloud Gaming in the Game Pass Ultimate tier as well, as one user on Twitter angrily pointed out.

X user Natalya Sirinova, a Game Pass Ultimate subscriber, reportedly discovered an ad while loading Gears of War: Reloaded. Since we can't verify the authenticity of the video, we recommend taking it with a grain of salt. The alleged 30-second ad, which corresponds to Dior Men's Spring 2025 Campaign Video, seemingly appeared right before the game finished loading to the main menu. The placement of the words at the bottom appears off, and the fonts seem different, suggesting a poor edit. You can expand the tweet below and judge for yourself.

Nvidia's GeForce Now service has been streaming the PC gaming experience to a wide range of devices for over ten years. Today at Gamescom 2025, the company announced the arrival of Blackwell-powered instances on its streaming service, along with a swath of other improvements that are meant to improve latency and image quality.

The biggest upgrade coming to GFN is the deployment of new Blackwell SuperPod servers to the GeForce Now network. The company is promising an RTX 5080-class experience on its Ultimate service tier, compared to the RTX 4080-class experience currently in the top spot. The move to this more powerful shared GPU enables all the features that gamers already expect from Blackwell GPUs, including the full suite of DLSS 4 features and Multi Frame Generation in supported titles.

The company claims its RTX 5080 instances are good for up to a 2.8x increase in output FPS from GeForce Now Ultimate instances compared to the current RTX 4080 hardware, though that figure relies on Blackwell's Multi-Frame Generation capability for part of the overall boost.

That performance boost is good for new 5K output settings at 60 and 120 FPS, as well as a new 360Hz low-latency mode for competitive gaming.

Beyond the GPU, Nvidia is upgrading the host systems that power GeForce Now instances. Each Ultimate server is now built around a "new Ryzen Threadripper Pro CPU" that will provide each instance with eight cores and 16 threads of CPU horsepower. Nvidia says this upgrade also allows it to double the system memory per server.

Low latency is key to a good GeForce Now experience, and Nvidia highlighted all the ways it's keeping latency low from server to client. The higher performance of Blackwell GPUs and Threadripper Pro CPUs in each GeForce Now server offers one level of latency reduction, and each server uses the company's ConnectX 7 smart NICs and Rivermax packet pacing to further minimize latency at a rack level.

NVIDIA has also partnered with Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, and BT Group to take advantage of L4S (Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable Throughput) network architectures where they're available to further reduce lag.

Since GeForce Now is so sensitive to low latency, we asked the company how it considers the input latency added by Multi Frame Generation in its overall evaluation. Nvidia believes that the higher performance of each GeForce Now server for this generation and the full-stack improvements it's incorporated will help offset the latency added by MFG.

Nvidia emphasizes that gamers have full control over gaming settings on GeForce Now, and if a given player decides that MFG is adding too much latency, they can turn it off.

Nvidia is also introducing a new global quality setting for GeForce Now gameplay called Cinematic Quality Streaming, or CQS. This feature wraps up a whole bundle of improvements, key among them YUV 4:4:4 per-pixel color data, use of the efficient AV1 codec with Reference Picture Resampling support, and up to 100 Mbps of streaming bandwidth.

The company says this suite of improvements should deliver much clearer moving images for discerning users, especially in foliage-heavy scenes that tend to demolish the output image quality of many video encoders.

Install-to-Play and hardware-specific features

Most of Nvidia's GeForce Now game streaming tiers are currently unavailable, reportedly due to high demand. Gamers looking to opt for Nvidia's cloud gaming platform will be left disappointed, as five of the eight subscription tiers are currently sold out. Nvidia (via ComputerBase) attributes the current unavailability to high subscriber demand.

Further investigation suggests this is likely a global issue, as the same tiers remain inaccessible for several regions. Last year, Nvidia introduced Day Passes, which provide 24-hour access to Nvidia's high-performance machines without the commitment of a long-term subscription. Likewise, Nvidia also offers one-month and six-month memberships. These one-month and six-month plans are divided into Free (Basic Rig with Ads), Premium (1440p + RTX ), and Ultimate (4K HDR + 240 FPS + RTX) packages.

The affected plans include all the Day Passes, Free, and Performance tiers of the 1-month and the Free tier of the 6-month plan. The free-tier users are the most affected, as Nvidia is likely prioritizing premium users first. Nvidia says they are restricting supply so existing users can enjoy a seamless experience. GeForce Now isn't accepting new customers across several tiers to prevent the servers from being overloaded.

There could be several possibilities, but based on the given statement, it is fair to assume that Nvidia's servers are likely at full capacity and unable to keep up with the influx of new users. Back in November, Nvidia introduced a 100-hour limit per month for all tiers, roughly equivalent to around three hours per day. Any more, and you'll have to pay extra: $5.99 for 15 additional hours on the Ultimate tier, down to $2.99 for the Performance tier.

Thinking out of the box, if this was a capacity problem, it's improbable all servers would be affected similarly. Nvidia may be upgrading the underlying hardware while the existing hardware continues to function in parallel, but that's speculation.

While this may inconvenience newcomers, Nvidia is prioritizing service quality for existing subscribers. Moreover, this isn't the first time this has happened. Similar issues arose in 2020, so it's likely only a matter of time before Nvidia resolves this problem. It could be as simple as upgrading the existing infrastructure to accommodate more users, but we'll wait for more information from Nvidia before jumping to conclusions.

Nvidia is clamping down on playtime for players of its GeForce Now cloud gaming service. The trillion-dollar company announced it will introduce a "100-hour monthly playtime allowance" at the start of next year. Hardcore gamers who might hit the 100-hour limit can extend their playtime with a small fee.

This change is purportedly designed to help keep GeForce Now's "exceptional" quality and speed consistent and provide short queue times specifically for Performance and Ultimate players. Nvidia says the 100-hour limit is generous, with only 6% of its entire GeForce Now user base actually being impacted by the change. 100 hours of playtime gives players three hours per day of game time if they play every day for an entire month.

For anyone who manages to hit the 100-hour monthly limit, Nvidia is charging its customers $2.99 for an additional 15 hours of playtime for users on its Performance tier and $5.99 for the same playtime extension for Ultimate tier players for anyone who wants to bypass Nvidia's 100-hour limit. Nvidia will provide the ability to monitor your playtime in GeForce Now so users can monitor how close they are (or aren't) to the 100-hour limit.

Nvidia has also announced some upgrades to its current GeForce Now membership plans. GeForce Now's previous "Priority" plan has been replaced with the "Performance" mid-tier plan, which sees an upgrade to 1440p. This enables gamers to play games at up to 1440p native resolutions; previously, gamers were limited to 1080p on the Priority plan. In-game graphics settings can also be saved during streaming sessions. The Ultimate and free plans see no change.

As a thank you to its concurrent player base, Nvidia is offering active paid members, as of December 31 of this year, the ability to continue with unlimited playtime for all of 2025. This effectively delays the 100-hour monthly limit by a full year for users with an active plan as of December 31, 2024, or earlier.

Nvidia is also offering a temporary 25% discount on its Day Passes. The Performance Day Pass will drop to $2.99, and the Ultimate Day Pass will drop to $5.99. Day passes offer 24 hours of access to either the Ultimate or Performance plans before you have to pay again, switch to a monthly subscription, or revert back to the free plan.

Hero Wars: Dominion Era is an online RPG game that combines action, strategy, and an engaging storyline, and since the launch of the original Hero Wars game in 2016, it's gathered a huge following (now over seven million monthly active users) thanks to its addictive gameplay and challenging mechanics.

Developed by Nexters Global Ltd, Hero Wars: Dominion Era is set in a fantastical world where you control a squad of powerful heroes in order to battle enemies and complete missions – and if you want to join in the fun and see what the hype is all about, there has never been a better time to jump in. 

Boasting impressive graphics and animations that bring the characters and world to life, you get to choose from a roster of unique heroes, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Not only is it free to play (all you need is a web browser), but new players who sign up to play Hero Wars: Dominion Era can get 100,000 coins and 100 emeralds to spend on in-game effects and perks. You also get 10 free EXP Potions to help you earn experience points and upgrade your character quickly, and a powerful Mage hero named Lian, who can join your team and help you on your adventure.

Game modes

Hero Wars: Dominion Era is an epic online fantasy roleplaying game with PvP (player versus player) ranked battles where you earn rewards and climb the leaderboards, plus a huge campaign that sees you battling foes and annihilating bosses over 15 chapters and 218 missions.

Meanwhile, Guild Wars mode offers you the chance to join a guild and participate in cooperative battles against other guilds to prove your dominance. Also, keep an eye out for regular special events that offer unique challenges and rewards.

Character building

Hero Wars: Dominion Era is packed full of memorable Characters that will help (or hinder) your adventure – and their stats and class can dramatically change the way you play the game.

For example, Tank characters absorb damage and protect teammates with their high health and defensive abilities. 

Meanwhile, Damage Dealers focus on dealing heavy damage to enemy heroes, helping secure quick victories. Support class characters provide healing and buffs to allies, maintaining team health and boosting performance, and then there are Control class characters, which can be used to disrupt enemy strategies through crowd control abilities like stuns.

Combat 

Combat in Hero Wars: Dominion Era involves a combination of strategy and timing. Each hero possesses a unique set of abilities that can be activated at the right moment to turn the tide of battle. 

Using your knowledge of each hero's strengths and weaknesses you can create powerful synergies and defeat your opponents.

There are also daily bonuses which give you important resources such as gold and Hero Soul Stones (used to upgrade the power levels of your heroes) – so make sure you claim those each day to help you with your campaign progress.

Hero Wars Community

The Hero Wars: Dominion Era community is a vibrant and friendly group of enthusiasts sharing strategies, discussing updates, and engaging in ‘friendly’ competition. 

Joining the community provides the opportunity to learn from experienced players, find new teammates, and make friends from around the world.

All-in-all Hero Wars: Dominion Era is a must-try for anyone seeking an entertaining and engaging RPG experience, and because it's free - and all you need is a web browser - it means pretty much anyone can play.

Its diversity of heroes, challenging gameplay, and enjoyable game modes, means it’s something you’ll likely keep dipping into - so what are you waiting for? Fire up your web browser, head to the Hero Wars: Dominion Era website and sign up (and remember to claim those free bonuses as well!).

Nvidia has a limited-time summer sale going on for its GeForce Now cloud gaming service. The sale sees prices of all its paid membership subscriptions cut in half, making it the perfect time to try out Nvidia's cloud gaming service.

GeForce Now's Priority membership and Ultimate membership have been discounted by 50% for the summer sale. That brings the Priority membership's pricing from $9.99 a month to just $4.99 a month. The 6-month Priority membership sees the same discount, going from $49.99 down to just $24.99 for six-months' worth of playtime. The Ultimate membership, Nvidia's highest end offering, has been discounted from $19.99 down to $9.99 a month, and for the 6-month plan a discount from $99.99 to $49.99.

Nvidia's membership sale only applies to its membership plans. If you were hoping to get a 50% discount on Nvidia's day passes, you are out of luck. The Priority Day pass is still going for $3.99, and the Ultimate Day pass costs $7.99. These 24-hour passes are decent if you want access to Nvidia's cloud servers temporarily, but if you plan on using GeForce Now for even just two days, buying the 1-month Priority or Ultimate memberships at their respective 50% discounts right now is the cheaper option.

The Priority plan is perhaps the best way to take advantage of Nvidia's cloud service. The mid-tier plan offers ray tracing capabilities roughly equivalent to an RTX 3080, there are no ads and it supports 6-hour session times at up to 1080p resolution and frame rates up to 60 FPS. If you want all the bells and whistles, Nvidia's Ultimate plan provides several big improvements, including 8-hour session lengths, 4K resolution support via an approximate RTX 4080 cloud equivalent, and up to 240 FPS framerates. Of course there's also a free tier, ad-supported, which you can try in a pinch. That's limited to 1-hour sessions and gives you 720p60 with approximately an RTX 2060, but without ray tracing support.

The hardware requirements for GeForce Now are quite low. All you need to run GeForce Now is a 64-bit version of Windows 7 or MacOS version 10.11 or higher. On the Windows side, you'll need a 2GHz dual core, 4GB of memory, and a DX11-capable GPU/integrated graphics. On the Mac side, you'll need a Mac system made in 2009 or later. Chromebooks, Android devices, iPhones/iPads, handheld devices, smart TVs, and browsers are also supported.

While the hardware requirements are quite lax, the internet requirements are more demanding. For basic 720p60 playback you'll need at least 15 Mbps of download speed, 25Mbps for 1080p60, 35 Mbps for 1440p120, and 45Mbps for 4K120. For an optimal experience you'll also want 80 ms or lower network latency from Nvidia's cloud servers. Wi-Fi users will also want to use a router with at least a 5GHz connection.

Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is a popular subscription service allowing you to play hundreds of first- and third-party games (which are rotated regularly) for $16.99/month. One key component of the service included is Xbox Cloud Gaming, which, while still in beta, allows you to stream Xbox games using an Xbox app on supported devices. Today, Microsoft announced two new devices coming to the Xbox Cloud Gaming support list: the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K and the Fire TV Stick 4K Max.

This announcement is crucial for Microsoft and its goal of spreading the Xbox ecosystem to as many people as possible, because it lowers the cost barrier for gamers. The Fire TV Stick 4K and Fire TV Stick 4K Max retail for $49.99 and $59.99, respectively. In addition, Amazon frequently discounts these devices, with the former selling for as low as $24.99 and the latter selling for just $39.99 in recent months.

Previously, if you wanted to access Xbox Cloud Gaming on a TV, you’d need to fork over big money for a Samsung Smart TV (2020 or later), which comes preinstalled with the Xbox app. Now, you can add a supported Fire TV Stick to spare HDMI port on any monitor or TV to enjoy Xbox Cloud Gaming. Getting started is as simple as launching the Xbox app, signing into your Microsoft account, and connecting a wireless controller via Bluetooth with the Fire TV Stick. Microsoft specifically mentions that the Xbox Wireless Controller, Xbox Adaptive Controller, and PlayStation controllers are supported. However, plenty of other Bluetooth wireless controllers are available that will work just as well (see the complete list of compatible hardware here).

“This integration brings the vast Xbox Game Pass Ultimate game library to your TV with just a compatible Fire TV Stick and Bluetooth-enabled controller, making gaming more available,” Amazon explained in a blog post. “From epic RPGs like Starfield and Fallout 4 to high-octane racers like Forza Horizon 5, you can experience console-quality gaming through cloud gaming.”

For those eager to try the new feature out, note that the Xbox app isn’t available just yet for the Fire TV Stick 4K and the Fire TV Stick 4K Max. Instead, Amazon says that support will come at an unspecified date in July. There is no word on whether Xbox Cloud Gaming access will be extended to cheaper members of Amazon’s streaming stick family, like the Fire Stick and Fire Stick Lite.

Interestingly, news of the unlikely partnership between Microsoft and Amazon comes just 24 hours after Microsoft’s canceled Xbox “Keystone” streaming console was leaked via a patent filing uncovered by Windows Central. Xbox Chief Phil Spencer had envisioned the device coming to the market with a $99 to $129 price tag, but the project was canceled after Microsoft reportedly couldn’t meet those aggressive price targets. However, today’s announcement effectively is the realization of Spencer’s original goal for an affordable streaming platform for Xbox.

Nvidia has added an adaptive refresh rate to GeForce Now, called "Cloud G-Sync." Contrary to Nvidia's nomenclature, this update supports not only GeForce-powered Windows PCs but also Apple PCs with supported Apple Silicon, Intel CPUs, and even Radeon Pro GPUs.

Nvidia's cloud-based G-Sync solution works with Reflex technology to reduce system latency. Variable refresh capabilities are accomplished through Nvidia's native GeForce Now app, which tells the monitor what refresh rate it should be running based on in-game frame rate. 

As a result, the system requirements are very strict at the moment. To enable G-Sync support, you must have either the native GeForce Now app for Windows or macOS. You must also be running Nvidia's highest-end RTX 4080 Ultimate tier to access G-Sync. In addition, you'll need a system sporting either a GTX 16 series or RTX 20 series GPU or a Mac system sporting supported hardware. The good news is that on the Windows side, you can use a G-Sync, G-Sync Compatible, or FreeSync display with GeForce Now's flavor of G-Sync.

For more details, check out Nvidia's support page, which is dedicated entirely to Cloud G-Sync.

Nvidia is also now providing day passes for its GeForce Now cloud gaming service, allowing gamers to test drive Nvidia's more premium subscription for a minor cost or use the service temporarily when they are away from their main gaming PC. 

Day passes represent the first significant change in Nvidia's pricing model since GeForce Now came out of beta. Nvidia provides two tiers for its day passes, featuring Priority Day and Ultimate Day. These two passes are direct copies of Nvidia's Priority and Ultimate memberships reduced to a 24-hour access window. Priority gives you access to RTX-enabled cloud gaming servers, a 6-hour session length, and 1080p 60 fps gaming. The Ultimate pass provides access to RTX 4080-grade servers featuring up to an 8-hour session length, 4K/ultrawide resolution support, and up to 120 fps support.

Nvidia's new Day Passes are a great way for gamers to get their feet wet in Nvidia's cloud streaming service if they have never tried it before. It is also a great middle-ground for people who don't game all the time or are temporarily away from their gaming PC and need a powerful cloud solution for just a day or two. The Priority Day pass is $3.99, and the Ultimate Day pass is $7.99. For reference, Nvidia's monthly Priority membership starts at $9.99, and its monthly Ultimate membership starts at $19.99.

Nvidia will display advertisements for free users of its GeForce Now game streaming service, beginning March 5, 2024 (the date has been corrected). The ads will be displayed while gamers wait in the queue. It shouldn't be too surprising as cloud streaming services need to offset costs on free accounts, and Nvidia claims the funds will provide better access for all users.

Nvidia spokesperson Stephanie Ngo says, "Free users will start to see up to two minutes of ads while waiting in queue to start a gaming session." Nvidia also added that since ads are paying for free user service, it expects that it will reduce the average wait time for free users over time. Nvidia will be notifying its free users via email.

Displaying advertisements for cloud gaming service makes plenty of sense, considering other streaming services like Spotify do the same thing. Free users still get access to a cloud gaming service, and Nvidia hopefully can further improve and expand on its service. The paid 'Priority' and 'Ultimate' tiers will continue to enjoy the ad-free gaming experience. Note however that Nvidia increased its subscription pricing in certain regions a few months back, and it also introduced daily rates in January. Clearly, it's looking for ways to better monetize its GeForce Now service.

The Priority package costs $9.99 per month with RTX features, priority access, and 1080p resolution up to 60 fps. Ultimate tier costs $19.99 per month with performance equivalent to an RTX 4080, and it supports 4K and ultrawide resolutions up to 120 FPS. GeForce Now requires at least 15Mbps for gaming at 720p at 60 fps, and 25Mbps for 1080p at 60 fps with less than 80ms latency. 

Challenges with Cloud Gaming

Cloud gaming has its benefits when done right, with attractive price plans for different regions. But a free service will inevitably face certain challenges, just like with any other streaming service. In October 2022, Nvidia withdrew from Russia but had its GeForce Now services available via a partnered company until October 1st, 2023.

Nvidia also needs nearby data centers to provide the best quality experience and low latency for GeForce Now users. Despite making important partnerships, having cloud gaming run via your phone's internet data plan can also come at a higher premium. The combination these and other problems ultimately led to Google Stadia's demise.

The main benefit of game streaming, more so with Nvidia, is that it enables many internet-enabled and supported devices to enjoy a high-end gaming experience on otherwise low-cost hardware, providing access to Nvidia's proprietary features like DLSS. Nvidia says GeForce Now provides access to over 1,800 games, and Apple also altered its rules, enabling Nvidia to include GeForce Now through the official app store.

With these and other changes, Nvidia hopes to grow its GeForce Now user base, as well as enticing developers and publishers to jump on the bandwagon.

Nvidia GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming and other game streaming services could be making their way to the Apple app store, thanks to changes that Apple has made to its developer rules. Apple's new regulations enable games to be streamed, which wasn't previously allowed. If Nvidia makes a GeForce Now application or Microsoft makes one for Xbox Cloud Gaming, it could make it easier to access cloud gaming and unlock special features and abilities that might not be present in the web-based versions of these services.

"Today, Apple is introducing new options for how apps globally can deliver in-app experiences to users, including streaming games and mini-programs. Developers can now submit a single app with the capability to stream all of the games offered in their catalog," Apple wrote in a blog post. That also added that apps will need to "maintain an age rating of the highest age-rated content included in the app" as part of the App Store rules.

Previously, any publisher that wanted to support cloud gaming libraries needed to jump through tons of hoops; Apple's old regulations specified that publishers needed to pass each game in its cloud service as an individual app on the store. On top of this, any additional games that get added to the cloud service would need to be published as dedicated apps on the App Store.

The work required to get the 1,500+ games available on the GeForce Now library, for example through Apple's qualification processes would have taken an incredibly long time to finish, if it was possible at all.

Thankfully Apple's latest regulations are substantially less demanding no longer requiring the addition of each game offered in a cloud gaming app to be passed through the Apple store as an independent entity.

For now, though we'll have to wait and see if Nvidia, Microsoft, and others decides to make applications for the Apple App Store. Apple's new rules just came out today so it will be some time. Nvidia's dedicated GeForce Now applications have always been superior to their web-based counterparts, including better system latency, higher resolution support, and more features in general. 

The good news is that Nvidia and Microsoft already have web-based versions of GeForce Now and Xbox Game Streaming that iOS and iPhone users can use in the meantime. Mac users get their own dedicated version of the GeForce Now app, which you can download from Nvidia directly

Valve was quick to push out a remedial fix centering on the Steam Deck’s expandable storage capability. As Gaming on Linux noticed, the recent stable Steam Client Update for desktop and Steam Deck broke the handheld device’s microSD card handling. Valve issued a new client update on Sept. 12 to directly address the issue.

The microSD card jinxing updates were delivered alongside the recent SteamOS 3.4.10 release. Shortly after they brought their systems up to date, Steam Deck owners started to report that their microSD cards weren't being mounted by the system.

According to reports, the microSD card issue was annoyingly inconsistent. For example, users could sometimes get their microSD card readers to work again if they pulled out and reinserted their microSD cards. Some users had to resort to a system reboot to get it to recognize an inserted microSD card.

Valve’s update page offers no background detail regarding the underlying problems fixed, nor any details about how the bug occurred. A single bullet point on the Steam Deck Client Update: Sept. 12 page says “General: Fixed a failure to recognize the microSD card after a system reboot.”

We don’t recall any prior issues with the Steam Deck’s handling of microSD cards. The same cannot be said for the Asus ROG Ally, though. The Asus handheld’s design seems to have located the microSD card reader hardware in a particularly hot area of the PCB — with unfortunate but somewhat predictable results.

To get the best performance from their games, users of these handhelds are steered to get the biggest built-in SSDs they can afford when buying their device. However, sometimes it might make sense to just upgrade the storage yourself — check out our roundup of the best M.2 2230 SSDs for handhelds (such as the Steam Deck).

Nvidia may have withdrawn from Russia back in Oct. 2022, but its cloud-based game streaming service GeForce Now continued to operate through a partner company — GFN.ru — or it will, until Oct. 1, 2023, according to a recent announcement. The service will stop accepting new registrations on Sept. 1, 2023, and will shutdown entirely by Oct. 1. 

According to the announcement, the decision comes amid concerns that the team is unable to meet their preferred standards of quality in current conditions. But some — specifically, Overclockers.ru — believe the political climate and current sanctions against Russia are what's fueling the shutdown. 

If you’re not familiar, GeForce Now is Nvidia's game streaming service, which offers games for users to play in a cloud-based environment. You can also link existing libraries to the service from other platforms such as Steam, Epic Games, and (later this year) Microsoft Game Pass. GFN.ru made its debut in the Russian market back in Oct. 2019, and also currently operates in Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. 

Without delving into too much detail, the blog post states that the team is unable to offer the service quality they would like to given “current circumstances”. As such, the GFN.ru division will no longer allow new users to register starting Sept. 1, 2023. They will also stop selling 30-, 180-, and 365-day subscriptions at this point.

The shutdown will continue until Oct. 1, at which point the GFN.ru servers will shut down. Any member who has a subscription active beyond this date will automatically receive a refund. The team asks that users to allow up to two weeks for the refund before contacting support.

The official blog post doesn’t give a clear reason for the move to shut down operations in Russia, but Overclockers.ru has speculated the reason is a combination of both political sanctions and the lack of popularity for cloud gaming services. Nvidia stopped selling products in Russia in March 2022, and closed its Russian offices in Oct. 2022.

If you’d like to read more about the GeForce Now closure in Russia, you can check out the official blog post detailing the announcement.

Intrepid Steam Deck modder Balázs Triszka has shared news of an impressive feat of handheld device enhancement. In a recent Tweet/X by Triszka (h/t Overclock3D), we see that they managed to boost the Valve-made x86 PC gaming portable to 32 GB of RAM. That’s double the RAM quota this SteamOS handheld is factory configured with.

Upgrading the RAM on a Steam Deck is definitely not for everyone. Unlike your desktop, and many laptops, the RAM in these devices is soldered directly to the system PCB, like on a graphics card. These RAM chips will be attached with a plethora of tiny solder balls (ball grid array, BGA) to the mainboard of the Steam Deck. You'll need a one of the best hot air rework stations to make this possible.

Sometimes memory module replacement, for repair or expansion, is hindered by glue under the BGA chip. However, Triszka confirmed that Valve hasn’t done this. To double the memory quota of the Steam Deck, the modder simply switched the existing RAM chips for similar ones with double the capacity / density.

Triszka shows the flux-strewn aftermath of his de/soldering of the system’s RAM chips. A bath of isopropyl alcohol will soon have this mod looking factory fresh. This high-temperature molten metal surgery was just the beginning of the demonstrably effective mod. Very often hardware needs a firmware modification to enable this kind of upgrade, and this is true of the Steam Deck memory doubling mod. However, the satisfying conclusion is that this mod works, and you can see evidence of the system reporting an available 32 GB of RAM, below.

The Steam Deck is one of the most popular of the new wave of PC gaming handhelds, which is understandable given that it invigorated the segment with a uniquely compelling software / hardware combo in 2022. One of the good things about a leading and popular device is that it attracts the most developer attention.

We have already documented the arrival of a multitude of upgrades and mods like: an enhanced screen replacement, liquid cooling, a transparent shell, and we have tested lots of SSD upgrades. But be warned, RAM upgrades like Triszka are far from trivial, with soldering equipment and skills required in abundance. Modders also need a strong disposition and steady hands.

The Steam Deck is at its lowest price ever, thanks to a discount of up to 20% as part of the Steam Summer sale.

This is only the second time Valve has put the Steam Deck on sale (the last time was a blanket 10% discount as part of the Steam Spring sale). This time, the amount you get off depends on the model.

The cheapest option, with 64GB of eMMC storage, is $359.10, the same as we saw last time around. Things get more interesting with the 128GB option at $449.65 (15% off) and the 512GB version with anti-glare screen at $519.20, a full 20% off. Valve sells the Steam Deck directly, so you can find all of the discounts on Steam or on the Steam Deck website.

While Valve has set a precedent to drop the price of the Steam Deck during its store-wide sales, it is notable that this further drop is occurring so quickly after the release of the Asus ROG Ally, a Windows-based handheld using a faster AMD processor.

Valve's docking station is also seeing a cut. It usually retails for $89, but is down to $71.20. That's nice savings if you want the official dock, but you can still find third-party alternatives for less if you look around on Amazon.

As usual, there are also a whole bunch of games included in the Summer Sale, which goes through July 13. Standouts include Elden Ring for 30% off ($41.99), Sonic Frontiers for 50% off ($29.99), Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered for 33% off ($40.19), Hades for 50% off ($12.49), Cyberpunk 2077 for 50% off ($29.99), and PowerWash Simulator for 20% off ($19.99).

It's unlikely that Valve is using this sale to clear out Steam Decks for a successor. Earlier this year, Valve developers suggested that "a true next-gen Deck with a significant bump in horsepower wouldn't be for a few years."

Microsoft has announced that it will bring PC games from its Game Pass library to Nvidia's GeForce Now service later this year. As a result, owners of a Game Pass subscription will be able to play their games on (presumably) superior hardware in the cloud without having to purchase titles on Steam or Epic Games' Store services.

"Game Pass members will soon be able to stream select PC games from the library through Nvidia GeForce Now," wrote Joe Skrebels, Xbox Wire Editor-in-Chief, in a blog post. "This will enable the PC Game Pass catalog to be played on any device that GeForce Now streams to, like low-spec PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, mobile devices, TVs, and more, and we will be rolling this out in the months ahead."

Nvidia's GeForce Now is a gaming service that offers the most advanced gaming hardware — such as the GeForce RTX 4080, one of the best graphics cards available today — in the cloud and therefore promises to provide the best experience. Of course, cloud game streaming has its peculiarities, like increased latencies and longer loading times. It does not provide the same experience as a local high-end gaming PC. Meanwhile, The Verge discovered that the GeForce RTX 4080 tier of GeForce Now significantly outperformed Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming service in terms of performance and latency.

It should also be noted that for now, Microsoft only promises that select Game Pass PC titles will be playable on GeForce Now and it is unclear whether EA Play titles will be supported. Therefore, it remains to be seen how many games from Microsoft's subscription will actually and eventually be supported by the GeForce Now service.

Bringing Game Pass games to Nvidia's GeForce Now service certainly makes both services more attractive to gamers. Because if enough games are supported, it will be possible to enjoy high-end titles on high-end hardware for about $30 per month without making any additional purchases.  

This move could also more cynically be seen as a part of a wider initiative to placate regulators regarding Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, to show that the company is open to offering its services and titles on platforms other than Windows and Xbox.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 40-series products are some of the best graphics cards available. Nonetheless, that doesn't mean that business has been good for retailers. In the case of Micro Center, the retailer found it necessary to include a small incentive to help bolster sales.

Micro Center is currently bundling a $100 free Steam gift card for all GeForce RTX 40-series graphics card purchases, whether the flagship GeForce RTX 4090 or the latest mainstream GeForce RTX 4070. The retailer has 73 different custom models available, although only 17 are available for shipping. Micro Center is one of the few retailers with a brick-and-mortar presence. If you have a nearby Micro Center, you can get an additional discount of up to $85, depending on the model of the graphics card.

The $100 gift card is an excellent stimulus since consumers can choose the title they want from Steam rather than receiving free copies of games that may not interest them. In addition, there are many interesting upcoming games on Steam, such as Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Redfall, and Street Fighter 6, that buyers can use the gift card on.

According to a DigiTimes report, Nvidia isn't in a hurry to increase GeForce RTX 40-series graphics card production. The Ada Lovelace graphics cards carry premium price tags, which hasn't helped user adoption. Furthermore, many of Nvidia's partners still have an excess of GeForce RTX 30-series supply that they still need to sell. For example, MSI recently launched new GeForce RTX 3060 Ti models, an SKU that launched almost three years ago and recently refreshed a few months ago.

Unlike Micro Center, other retailers, like Japanese store NTT-X, have gone as far as giving away an Arc A750 with GeForce RTX 4090 purchases.

Micro Center's $100 Steam gift card is an added value on top of Nvidia's current Overwatch 2 Ultimate Battle Pass Bundle for GeForce RTX 40-series purchases. The promotion, which runs from April 12 to May 8, applies to the GeForce RTX 4090, RTX 4080, RTX 4070 Ti, and RTX 4070. The gaming bundle has a value of $29.99, so it's pretty cool if you're an Overwatch 2 player. However, it may not have the same value for gamers that are not into the game.

Cyan, the developer behind Myst and Riven, is building a new first-person steampunk puzzle game called Firmament that will apparently destroy high-end gaming hardware. The game has unusually daunting system requirements, starting at 16GB at a minimum for RAM, while a whopping 32GB is recommended.

32GB is a very rare requirement to see; only a handful of titles originally had 32GB recommended requirements while in development, including Forspoken, Hogwarts Legancy, and the PC port of Returnal. However, all three eventually changed their recommended requirements to 16GB or 24GB at launch. The same could apply to Firmament since the game won't be released until May. However, if the game does launch with the 32GB requirement, it will be one of the only games with such a high memory requirement.

Thankfully Firmament's 32GB requirement appears to be more specific than what the Steam page leads people to believe. According to a dev response by PCGamer, the developers wanted to ensure Firmamenent runs as smoothly as possible, especially in VR. As a result, they decided to increase the memory requirements to 32GB so users better understand what the game requires to achieve the game's maximum possible graphics fidelity.

The devs go on to say that the game will run perfectly fine on 16GB of memory and even supports M1 Macbook Airs with just 8GB of RAM.

This is good news and means the game will run smoothly on mainstream hardware. Conversely, the 32GB is more of a "high-end" system requirement, aimed at users who will be cranking up the visual quality settings as high as possible. Cyan's explanation also proves why Valve should incorporate entry-level, mid-range, and high-end system requirements into the Steam page, instead of limiting the requirements section to a minimum and recommended requirements alone.

We don't know how graphically demanding the game will be, but based on what the devs have said, the game appears to be intense. The Steam page screenshots demonstrate this well, with extremely high-resolution objects, textures, and superb lighting effects.

Firmament will launch in 4 weeks, on May 18th, 2023.

Steam, the world’s most popular PC gaming client, community, and store, will shut its doors to Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 users next year. The cut-off date for Windows upgrade holdouts is January 1, 2024. To be clear, from January 2024, Windows 10 will be the oldest Windows OS that is compatible with the Steam Client.

In a short blog post on Windows 7 and 8 support today, Valve states that users will have to upgrade to a newer version of Windows “in order to continue running Steam and any games or other products purchased through Steam.”

Some reasoning behind the support policy is revealed. It turns out that the newest Steam features “rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome” that offers limited functionality on older Windows versions. It is thus at least partly due to this software embed that Steam must enact a Windows 10 or newer policy. However, with the transition now set in stone, future versions of Steam are also set to rely on feature and security updates that are only present / destined for Windows 10 or above.

While it is somewhat sad that Valve is dropping support for the older Windows OSes, we must remember that Windows 10 was launched in July 2015. At nearly eight years old, with widespread use in schools, homes, and businesses, it is long past any teething troubles. It is admittedly more of a heavyweight than Windows 7 and 8, but there’s a Tiny10 lightweight version of it (and Tiny11 version of Windows 11) for those worried about the impact on their hardware resources.

In the latest Steam Hardware Survey, Windows accounts for 96.4% of gamers. Windows 10 and 11 are by far the most popular versions, with 62.3% and 32.1% of users, respectively. Meanwhile, earlier versions of Windows (7 and 8.1) add up to just 1.9% of all users — and continue to slide in the popularity stakes. There are even 0.09% of surveyed Steam PCs that are still running the 32-bit version of Windows 7.

Those with old machines that users resolutely want to remain Steam connected may be tempted to switch to Linux, or even HoloISO — a PC version of the portable Steam Deck’s SteamOS. However, please remember that despite large strides in game compatibility made since the arrival of the Steam Deck, there are still some Linux and PC Steam games wrinkles.

Regardless, Valve is set to move on from the Windows 7/8 era. Windows 7 originally released in 2009 and was well received (especially compared to its Vista predecessor). Windows 8 came out in 2012, and many disliked the new Start Screen along with other aspects. Windows 8.1 followed a year later, with an attempt to right the wrongs of Windows 8.

Microsoft officially discontinued support for Windows 8 in January 2016, while Windows 7 reached end of life in January 2020. Windows 8.1 joined them at the start of this year. As such, it's understandable that Valve would want users to upgrade to Windows versions that are still supported by Microsoft.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 40-series (Ada Lovelace) GPUs are among the best graphics cards, and it looks like they're finally getting some love from gamers on Steam. The latest Steam Hardware Survey confirms that the GeForce RTX 4080 and GeForce RTX 4070 Ti are starting to climb the ranks, albeit slowly.

The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti has shown the most significant growth out of the three Ada Lovelace graphics cards. The graphics card currently sits in the 77th position and improves its participation on the Steam Hardware Survey by 0.14%. The GeForce RTX 4080 occupies the 74th spot, but its popularity has only grown by 0.07%. Meanwhile, the GeForce RTX 4090, which debuted on the Steam hardware charts last month, has now settled in 53rd place on the ranking. That card's share increased by 0.08% over the month.

The GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards are admittedly far from breaking into the top ten most popular models. However, the big takeaway is that Ada is on the main page now. The GeForce RTX 4080 and GeForce RTX 4070 Ti were previously on the API page.

At the same time, things haven't changed much at the top. The four-year-old GeForce GTX 1650 (Turing) is still the most prevalent graphics card for Steam gamers. The Turing-based graphics card recently dethroned the GeForce GTX 1060 (Pascal), which had been the reigning champ for quite a while now. Nvidia's GeForce RTX 30-series (Ampere) graphics cards have also gained significant traction. The GeForce RTX 3060 was the star of the survey, exhibiting a 0.72% improvement. The GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile also increased by 0.32%.

DirectX 12 Systems (Windows 10/11 With DX12 GPU)

On the other hand, AMD doesn't have any representation in the top ten. The best performer seems to be what Steam labels as "AMD Radeon Graphics," which probably groups up all the different AMD iGPUs that didn't qualify elsewhere. Unfortunately, it has stagnated and only showed a -0.09% variation over the month. The Radeon RX 580 (Polaris), which came out in 2017, is the only long-standing AMD graphics card on the Steam Hardware Survey. The aging performer is down at the 23rd position with a 1.2% share.

AMD's last-generation Radeon RX 6000-series (RDNA 2) products revealed modest gains. The Radeon RX 6600 XT and Radeon RX 6600 improved their shares by 0.01%. Although the Arc A770 and Arc A750 have been out for some time, Intel has yet to appear on the graphics card ranking on Steam. As a result, we suspect that Intel Arc likely has less than 0.01% participation. The same goes for AMD's latest Radeon RX 7900-series (RDNA 3) graphics cards, which arrived after Nvidia's Ada-powered offerings.

The 1080p (1920x1080) resolution (64.6%) remains the prevailing choice. However, Steam gamers are starting to get into higher resolutions. Steam's statistics show that the 1440p (2450x1440) resolution grew 1.27% over February.

Regarding processor trends, 67.17% (up 0.04%) of Steam users own Intel processors, whereas 32.8% use AMD chips. Hexa-core processors (33.42%) are the leading configuration among Steam gamers. As for operating systems, gamers continue to favor Windows 10 (62.33%), but Windows 11 (32.06%) adoption is gradually improving. Keep in mind, however, that not all Steam gamers participate in the survey.

Whether you're dealing with internet data caps, you just got a new Steam Deck, or your internet is just insufferably slow (or some combination of the three), you'll likely find Steam's latest feature exciting. A recent update of Steam's beta client adds support for transferring game install files from one system to another over your local network. That means, in theory, that once you've downloaded a game on one of your machines, you won't have to grab it from Steam's servers ever again.

There are some caveats though, at least for now:

• You'll need to have the Steam Beta client running on both systems.
• If both systems aren't logged in to the same account, you can also allow for transfers with devices owned by friends or anyone on your network, depending on your settings.
• The source system's Steam account needs to be idle – that's not running or downloading a game or game updates. Also, the game needs to be up to date on that system.
• Both systems will need to be online and on the same network.
• Only a PC in desktop mode can send files. So no sharing between Steam Decks or PCs in Big Picture Mode – yet. 

Beyond that, Steam's local network game transfer feature is surprisingly simple to get going. We'll show you how below.

Note that this tutorial shows local transfer between two PCs running Steam. If you are going to transfer games to a Steam Deck, the menus might be slightly different, but the process should still essentially be the same.

Get Steam's Beta Client

1. Launch Steam and select the Steam menu option in the upper-left corner, then select Settings.

2. From the Account page in the Settings Menu, click the Change button in the Beta participation section.

3. Select Steam Beta Update from the button menu under Beta Participation, and then  click OK.

Steam will then prompt to restart, and after a quick update / install process, you can relaunch Steam, now with the beta client enabled.

Note that Steam says both systems need to be running the beta client. So you may have to do the above steps more than once, but it only takes about a minute to switch to Steam's beta client and about the same amount of time to switch back. So if you're worried about stability, you can flip the switch just to grab a few games from another system, then jump back to the more stable build.
 

Install Your Games as Normal

Once the above steps are done, try installing a few games on your new system. In the background, Steam will check if there is another system on your local network that has the requested game files. If the title is present on your network and up to date, it will start pulling the files from that system rather than the cloud.

Of course, how much faster this will be than downloading files from Steam's servers will depend both on how fast your internet and  your network are. And if you're transferring via Wi-Fi, a lot will depend on how far away your systems are from your router or access point. Using the gateway from my T-Mobile 5G Home Internet (I've had better luck with it than my colleague did), which was in the same room as one of my machines and one room away from the other, Steam was able to grab the Elden Ring files from my old AMD AM4 machine and move them to the AM5 / RTX 4090 system I just built at roughly twice the speed that I could download the game, or about 45 MBps.

Had I connected both systems to Ethernet, that speed would undoubtedly be significantly faster than over Wi-Fi. Because even the ho-hum Gigabit Ethernet that ships on mainstream systems these days (those that still come with Ethernet ports at all) offers a theoretical bandwidth of 125 MB. And there are plenty of newer motherboards with 2.5 Gb Ethernet ports. With 2.5 Gb-equipped systems and one of the best gaming routers with a 2.5 Gb Ethernet port, you should be able to install games across your local network at roughly 300 MB per second. This suddenly makes me a lot more interested in the possibilities of 10 Gb Ethernet.

Those looking to speedily move titles on and off their Steam Deck may want to consider Valve's Steam Deck dock – or any USB-C dock or dongle with Ethernet – to get the extra wired bandwidth. Because as nice as the Steam Deck is, its Wi-Fi radio is limited to older, slower 802.11ac / Wi-Fi 5. The 45 MBps speed I achieved in the image above was on a Wi-Fi 6 network, between two Wi-Fi 6 client PCs that were one room apart. Your Wi-Fi bandwidth may (and probably will) vary.

The Nvidia RTX 4090 launched on October 12, 2022, laying claim to the performance throne and ranking as the most desirable (if not at all affordable) queen of the best graphics cards. The RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 Ti followed, on November 16 and January 5, respectively. The AMD RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT also launched on December 13, adding some Team Red competitors. But how many of the various cards have actually been sold? It's been difficult to get any clear indication, but the latest Steam Hardware Survey provides some intriguing insights.

We're looking at the API page and focusing specifically on the DirectX 12 GPUs, then scaling all of the percentages so that the totals for each month sum up to 100%. That reduces the cruft, so to speak — if you look at the Vulkan API list, in addition to showing about twice as many GPUs, note that the figures are all basically doubled. (Fun fact: The "NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080/4060/4050 Laptop GPU" all appear on the Vulkan list, though they're all at 0.00%.) Again, caveats are warranted. Here's our adjusted table:

There are presently 213 distinct GPUs being tracked, some desktop and some mobile. The most popular GPU, by the numbers, is Nvidia's GTX 1650, but it's worth noting that the GTX 1650 line includes both desktop and mobile 1650 chips, as well as GDDR5 and GDDR6 variants. If we perform similar grouping of data for some of the other GPUs, the RTX 3060 (laptops and desktops combined) accounts for nearly 9% of the total, making it the most popular chip overall.

But perhaps more interesting than the top-ranking GPUs, which rarely change positions, are the newcomers. It seems like Valve decided to add a bunch of new chips to the list this month, some of which aren't even out. The new GPUs include the RTX 4090 at 0.26% of the total, RTX 4080 at 0.15%, RTX 3090 Ti (finally!) at 0.14%, and RTX 4070 Ti at 0.05% — the GTX 1630 also appears at 0.02%, a fitting result for one of the most lackluster 'new' GPUs launched in the past year.

Based on the raw numbers, that means there are five times as many RTX 4090 cards "in the wild" as there are RTX 4070 Ti cards, and three times as many RTX 4080 cards. That's among Steam gamers, naturally, so an RTX 4090 used purely for professional work or AI training and inferencing wouldn't have the potential to show up. But consider also that the 4070 Ti only became available last month, so it's already doing pretty decent in terms of overall percentages.

Meanwhile, AMD's RX 7900 cards haven't shown up yet. Presumably, they're still lumped into the "Other" category, along with dozens of other chips. Or maybe not — who can say for certain, other than Valve? But all indicators suggest that Nvidia continues to sell far more top-tier GPUs than AMD. The RX 6900 XT for example is at 0.25% overall, while the competing RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 that also launched two years ago account for 2.08% and 0.60%, respectively. AMD's RX 6950 XT on the other hand sits at just 0.04%.

What do these percentages even mean in terms of total graphics cards sold? Not much. There are likely many GPUs from the past couple of years that have been used exclusively for mining purposes, or maybe even just professional work. Even among Steam users, though, we don't know if 0.26% means roughly that many of the more than 132 million Steam users have an RTX 4090, or maybe it's 0.26% of a much smaller subset.

Even if it's only 0.26% of the peak concurrent users, though, that's still a sizeable number — Steam regularly has around 30 million peak concurrents on any given day, according to the Steam charts. That would mean at least 78,000 RTX 4090 cards, and 45,000 RTX 4080 cards. Food for thought, at any rate.

Looking at the other charts, Nvidia still accounts for 75% of all GPUs, with AMD at 15.3%, Intel at 9.4%, and "other" (Imagination?) at 0.24%. The CPU data also still heavily favors Intel, but it's only by about 2-to-1 — AMD has made some serious strides in consumer CPU market share over the past five years.

There are of course the usual disclaimers about how Valve goes about collecting these statistics. The short answer: We don't know. The longer answer: We don't know, but there have been oddities in the past, and there are still concerns... but this is the best source of data that's readily available on the public.

Valve provides this data as a resource, but it's likely more to help game developers decide what hardware to target rather than to inform enthusiasts exactly how many of any particular GPU are in use. I'd still love to see RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT cards listed as separate items, but maybe they're currently less than 0.01% of sampled users. Maybe they'll get their own spots next month (don't hold your breath).

Think PC gaming, think Steam. There is no getting away from Valve’s behemoth, especially since the Steam Deck arrived on the scene. But Steam is not the only outlet for games. GoG, Epic, Amazon, Origin (EA) are all well established names in the field, all with their own launcher.

Hidden in plain sight, Steam has a feature that enables us to launch non-Steam games without opening a plethora of launchers, and best of all, these games may also work with Steam Link on your mobile device, Chromebook, laptop or even a Raspberry Pi.

In this how-to, we will show you how to add your games to Steam and how to add custom backgrounds and logos to match the Steam games in your library. We successfully tested Cyberpunk 2077 via GoG, Star Wars: Squadrons via Origin (EA) and Redout via Epic. All of these games ran perfectly on our desktop, A Ryzen 5 5600X with 32GB of DDR4 and an Nvidia  RTX 3060 Ti. Steam Link was successful for two of the three tested games, with only Redout failing to start via the Steam Link on our Samsung TV.

Add a non-Steam Game to Steam

Steam has long supported non-Steam games, and the feature to add them is baked into the Steam app. It only takes a few minutes to add your Origin, Epic,GoG games to the Steam library.

1. Open Steam and click on Add A Game, then select Add a Non-Steam Game.

2. Click on Browse to search for the game. If the game is automatically detected, select it from the list. Our games are stored on another drive, and were not automatically detected.

3. Select the executable for the game and click Open.

4. Ensure that the entry is highlighted in the list and click Add Selected Programs to add the game to your Steam Library.

5. Go to your library and click on the game. Our test involved Star Wars: Squadrons, an Origin / EA game.

6. Click on the Settings cog and select Properties.

7. Change the name of the game and close the window to save. The name is inherited from the executable file for the game.

Adding a Custom Background and Logo

The non-Steam game is in your games library but right now it doesn’t look the part. It’s missing a custom background and logo to make it fit in with its Steam peers. Thankfully this is a quick task requiring just a few clicks.

1. Download a custom background for your game. We used SteamGridDB to search and download a background for our non-steam games.

2. Click on the game in your Steam Library, then right click on the banner and select Set Custom Background.

3. Select the downloaded background image and it will replace the blank banner.

4. Right click on the background and select Set Custom Logo. This will add a logo to the bottom left of the background banner image. This will not change the game icon in the library. That is set via the executable file.

5. Select the logo image and it will appear in the bottom left corner of the background banner. Again we used SteamGridDB as the source for the image. 

Steam broke an important milestone this weekend. The gaming portal registered over 30 million concurrent users for the first time. At around 14:00 UTC today, 30,032,005 gamers were using the platform. Most will have been enjoying some spare time at the weekend playing their favorite PC games, but a large number would also be busy in the community, or browsing and purchasing more games through the storefront.

During weekends in 2022, concurrent users of Steam have typically peaked in the region of 27 to 29 million. The last highest concurrent user quota was at the end of March 2022, when 29,986,681 users were busy on the platform. However, as we all know, better weather in the northern hemisphere means that people get out more during the weekend, leaving their gaming dens or fortresses of solitude to gather dust. The night is again starting to draw in, and with this, Steam concurrent user figures have already nudged past that 30M milestones, even before we hit Halloween.

The PC platform is remarkable for several things, like its versatility, potential for massive amounts of CPU and GPU processing power, openness, and more. This latest Steam data, though, illustrates its durability in the face of better competition from consoles, mobile, and streaming game platforms. Moreover, there is a lot of news about PC and component sales slipping as the recession bites, but we see PC gaming is probably stronger than ever.

Should the new Steam record sheer PCs and components companies? To some degree, yes, but we have seen PC enthusiasts and DIYers that like to invest and upgrade shrug at some new releases due to pricing. In other words, PC and components makers can't just carry on like there is still a crypto-boom. Some may enjoy selling flagship components at the top of the market now, but many mainstream users will remain price sensitive.

Finally, congratulations to Steam, and we look forward to the following milestones - perhaps just after Xmas, then before the good weather returns in 2023.

Cloud game streaming services have been quite a popular topic in the game industry in the past 15 – 20 years, as the perspective of playing a high-end game on a mediocre device with a good Internet connection sounds very alluring. But after numerous major game companies have invested hundreds of millions in their cloud gaming platforms, Microsoft says that the technology is still in its infancy and its prime time is nowhere close.

At least, this is what the software giant wrote in response to the U.K.'s Competition and Market Authority this week. Among the significant concerns CMA has regarding Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard are withholding popular games like Call of Duty from competing platforms (namely Sony's PlayStation) and subsequent monopolization of the emerging market of cloud game streaming services. As a result, CMA launched an in-depth investigation of the proposed transaction earlier this month to learn more about the matter.

"This is a new and immature technology which the CMA has recognized faces significant challenges, particularly on mobile devices," Microsoft wrote in its 33-page response to CMA's concerns (via PC Gamer). "Microsoft agree that in future cloud gaming services may mean that hardware distinctions will become less important. However, the reality is that today cloud gaming remains in its infancy and unproven as a consumer proposition."

Back in the 2000s and for the better part of the 2010s, cloud game streaming services suffered from major technology limitations, starting from the imperfection of data centers and servers on the cloud side and a slow Internet connection on the client side. By now, many technological limitations have been largely overcome. Yet, local rendering still provides the best and most consistent visual quality and the lowest input lag, which is particularly important for avid gamers and something most gamers know.

Since Microsoft, Sony, and Nvidia continue to invest hefty sums of money in improving their cloud gaming services and providing an experience that is on par with that offered by local PCs or consoles, cloud gaming services are still not quite there. Meanwhile, they can enable playing PC or console games using smartphones, a type of experience that has not been available before and which is something that numerous companies are putting their money on (e.g., Qualcomm, Razer, and Verizon). But to compete against traditional games, streaming services will need to offer visual quality, latencies, and loading times comparable to those of downloadable titles.

"While this may grow, particularly on mobile devices, adoption is not expected to be rapid as it requires a significant change in consumer behaviour," Microsoft explained. "Gamers care about subject matter, storylines, graphical performance, speed (e.g., loading times and latencies), mechanics, game selection, and game cost. […] Streaming services therefore need to compete effectively with downloadable gaming options across these metrics if they are to grow."

Because cloud game streaming services are not popular among consumers, Microsoft says that it is not in its interest to harm competing for game streaming services or withhold popular Activision Blizzard games from rivals as it is interested in promoting cloud gaming in general.

"Consumer adoption of cloud gaming remains low," Microsoft said. "Harming or degrading rival services would significantly set-back adoption of this technology – protecting market-leading incumbents (i.e., Sony on console, Apple and Google on mobile, as well as Steam on PC). […] Instead, [Microsoft Xbox's] incentive is to encourage the widespread adoption of cloud gaming technologies by as many providers as possible to encourage the major shift in consumer behaviour required for cloud gaming to succeed."

Cloud gaming has the potential to bring games to devices incapable of rendering high-end titles locally, which will expand the global gaming market. Many technologies required for competitive cloud gaming platforms are already here, so the question is when cloud gaming will become a mainstream phenomenon. Yet, keep in mind that right now, Microsoft needs to convince the CMA and other regulators of two things: that they should not be concerned about cloud gaming today as it is an immature technology, but that the proposed takeover of Activision Blizzard will enable Microsoft to increase adoption of the technology.

A Netflix VP has confirmed that the firm has ambitions to offer a cloud gaming service to subscribers. At the TechCrunch Disrupt event on Tuesday, vice president of gaming, Mike Verdu, said that Netflix is "seriously exploring a cloud gaming offering." In related news, further signalling Netflix’s serious intent regarding the gaming industry, the firm opened its fifth games studio, led by former Blizzard Entertainment (Overwatch) executive producer, Chacko Sonny.

There has been talk about Netflix entering the gaming industry before, but its initial venture targeted the mobile games space. It must have gained confidence from the mobile gaming venture, as it sounds like it will follow a similar modus operandi into cloud gaming. “We'll approach this the same way as we did with mobile - start small, be humble, be thoughtful,” explained Verdu, at Disrupt. “The extension into the cloud is really about reaching the other devices where people experience Netflix.” Moreover, the service is hinted to move beyond casual gaming titles.

You may be wondering about the viability of another cloud gaming entrant, with Google Stadia so recently deceased.  Thankfully, the question of the struggles faced by Stadia, and Amazon Luna, were raised at the Disrupt event. Verdu’s response to the failings seen by rivals was that Stadia, for example, was “a technical success,” but that Google’s business model didn’t work out.

Netflix has released 35 mobile games since the service went live, and it let investors know that there are 55 more in the pipeline. The streaming media giant says that 14 of the new titles have come from its four games studios. To bolster its gaming output, and perhaps range, it announced that a fifth studio would be opened in Southern California shortly. The unnamed new studio is to be led by Chacko Sonny, an executive producer who worked on the very popular Overwatch franchise. As for partners, Ubisoft recently announced that it was producing three mobile games for Netflix, based on popular IPs such as Assassin’s Creed and Valiant Hearts.

Google has announced a new idea in its search for success in the lucrative gaming market. Today, Google and a trio of hardware partners launched “the world’s first laptops built for cloud gaming,” also known as Gaming Chromebooks. With Google Stadia’s death sentence certain, the cloud gaming services that the new offerings will embrace are Nvidia’s GeForce Now (preinstalled), Microsoft’s  Xbox Cloud Gaming (web app Beta now ready), and Amazon Luna (U.S. mainland only for now).

The reasoning behind Gaming Chromebooks is that Google has now established Chromebooks as the go-to devices for those seeking “fast, secure and easy-to-use” computing. With compact and robust hardware now more readily available than ever, Google and its partners want to extend the Chromebook universe with gaming features and fast, easy access to “cutting-edge graphics through the cloud.” Google boasts that Gaming Chromebook compatibility with the aforementioned services means owners could have a library of up to 1,500 games at their fingertips.

Regular readers will be aware that one of the most significant benefits of cloud gaming is that it doesn’t require powerful hardware. However, that isn’t to say that any old device will excel at the job – game streaming undoubtedly benefits from faster device networking, and brighter and faster screens. These points seem to have influenced the hardware recipe adopted by Acer, Asus, and Lenovo.

The three Gaming Chromebook launch devices are the new Acer Chromebook 516 GE, the Asus Chromebook Vibe CX55 Flip, and the Lenovo Ideapad Gaming Chromebook from Lenovo, which are all expected to be available this month. Google offers this trio via its Chromebook web store, and you can learn more about each device there. A quick check of the specs of these three reveals quite a varied CPU/memory configuration – they have a mix of Core i5 and i7 CPUs, but RAM quotas vary widely from 4GB to 16GB. However, they all have 120 Hz+ screens, with two models sporting 16-inch 1600p displays while the other has a 1080p touch panel. Two have anti-ghosting technology keyboards, but they all have RGB backlighting capabilities. Pricing varies from $399 to $699.

Another interesting commonality we see with these launch devices is that if the RGB gaming keyboards aren’t set to stun, they won’t look out of place in a corporate or business environment. Moreover, they all seem to have benefitted from some minimal and sleek design. Remember, without particularly beefy CPUs and GPUs on board, these are all pretty slim portables.

In addition to the  laptop hardware, or should we say Gaming Chromebook hardware, Google lists a number of certified for Chromebook gaming peripherals on its new ‘discover gaming’ microsite.

It is easy to be cynical about Google starting a new project, particularly with Stadia in the rearview mirror. In our report on the death of Stadia we mentioned that KilledByGoogle reckons Google's game streaming service was the 274th project shuttered by the company. Logically, such a fate shouldn’t face Gaming Chromebooks unless all Chromebooks get the chop. Prerequisites such as faster networking and more responsive displays are already becoming mainstream, as are keyboard backlighting implementations. Therefore, it could be possible in the not too distant future for Google to claim all Chromebooks are Gaming Chromebooks.

The monthly Steam Hardware Survey provides insight into the current gaming trends, showing which products are gaining steam, if you will, and which are losing it. The statistical methods may be somewhat opaque, but at present, it's the best we have. The month of August 2022 shows some significant milestones in the GPU realm, as well as some noteworthy trends in the CPU and OS areas. Sprinkle with salt as needed, but here's how things now stand.

Nvidia RTX 30-Series Takes the Pole Position

Starting with the best graphics cards, or at least the most popular options, we've used the data from Steam's API page as it's more granular than the main GPU page. We've also normalized the column values based on the total sum, so all columns add up to 100%. (Without that adjustment, the columns sum to anywhere from 90.05% to 92.92%, possibly due to different OSes or other factors that aren't immediately clear.)

There are two big pieces of news. First, the Nvidia RTX 30-series cards have surpassed any other GPU family in total survey share for the first time. All RTX 30-series GPUs combined now account for 21.65% of the August total, up 1.90% compared to July's data. On the flip side, the GTX 10-series dropped 2.15% and now sits at 22.09% — still the second most popular GPU family, though. AMD's RX 6000-series also saw a slight gain of just 0.03%, taking it to 1.84% overall. Every other family of GPUs saw a decrease.

(And before you ask: Yes, you could technically group the RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series under the Turing banner. The problem is that the feature sets are completely different. RTX 20 supports DXR and DLSS, GTX 16 does not, so we consider them as separate families.)

The other big news is that Nvidia's GTX 1060 no longer ranks as the most popular single GPU. Well, technically it still ties for first place at 6.88% of surveyed PCs, but the GTX 1650 has now climbed into the top slot as well — that's not even a GPU we liked, though it's undoubtedly helped by its use in budget gaming laptops. More notably, GTX 1060 dropped by 0.53% compared to July, while GTX 1650 increased by 0.07%.

The single GPU that saw the most significant jump in share over the past month is the RTX 3060, which gained 0.77%. "AMD Radeon Graphics" saw the second largest increase, of 0.44%, and that name likely applies to various integrated graphics solutions — probably including Valve's own Steam Deck. RTX 3050 came in third with a 0.31% gain. However, there's plenty of room for fluctuations, as evidenced by Intel's UHD Graphics 620 ranking fourth with a 0.23% gain in share.

Big Changes in OS Share and CPU Manufacturer

The other two interesting pieces of news come from the OS and CPU pages. Our list of the best CPUs for gaming has been dominated by Intel's Alder Lake offerings since they arrived, though the Ryzen 7 5800X3D also makes an appearance as a pure gaming solution.

Steam's CPU vendor share has been holding somewhat steady at around the 67% Intel, 33% AMD mark for a while now, give or take a few percent. This past month, things took a swing in Intel's favor with gains of 1.65% and a commensurate loss of 1.67% for AMD (those are relative percentages rather than absolutes, which is why they're not the same).

How meaningful of a change is that? It's probably more margin of error on sampling, as we've seen AMD gains in May and July, with Intel gains in April, June, and now August. It would make more sense if these figures were skewed toward new PCs, which are more prone to fluctuations than the PC market as a whole, but we'll take it as an interesting piece of data and move on.

Wrapping things up from the OS and API page, Windows 11 saw another decent bump in overall share, improving to 24.71%. Windows 10 still accounts for the majority of all PCs, however, with 71.76% of surveyed systems. It's also interesting that Windows 7 and Windows 8 saw slight gains over the past month. We doubt that many PCs are actually replacing Windows 10 with Windows 7, so these are likely just variations in sampling, but we can't say for certain.

Looking Forward

Over the past several months, there have been numerous reports of lower PC and component sales and inventory bloat. As a result, consumers and businesses aren't buying hardware as fast as it's being produced, and the near-term outlook isn't good. That comes from JPR reports and IDC reports. The result has been falling hardware prices, and retail GPU prices continued to fall.

The situation isn't helped by all the next-generation hardware slated to launch in the coming months. On the GPU side of things, Nvidia RTX 40-series cards are expected to arrive by October, and AMD RX 7000-series RDNA 3 GPUs will likely land in November. Intel's Arc Alchemist GPUs for desktops are also expected in October, with improved drivers relative to the Arc A380.

Things are just as exciting over in CPU and motherboard land. AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs using the Zen 4 architecture officially launch on September 27, accompanied by 600-series chipsets and motherboards. That will usher in the era of DDR5 memory for both AMD and Intel platforms, though Intel continues to offer DDR4 support as an alternative.

Intel Raptor Lake CPUs should also launch by October (rumor of October 17 launch), adding more efficiency cores across the stack and providing renewed competition for AMD's Zen 4 chips. The 13th Gen Intel CPUs will also have new 700-series chipsets, though they're also socket compatible with LGA1700, and existing 600-series boards should work with a BIOS update.

All of those changes likely won't show up on the Steam Hardware Survey for many months, but come next year, we should see the new hardware start to pop up.

Microsoft is making significant additions to its Xbox Cloud Streaming service and Xbox Game Pass. The company today announced plans for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers to stream games that they already own or buy that aren't on Game Pass.

Details are slim, other than that "select games" will be included in the program. It's unclear if games will be limited to those bought on an Xbox, or if it will include PC purchases from the Microsoft Store and other digital storefronts.

The other big cloud gaming announcement the company made today is that an Xbox App is coming to Samsung's 2022 lineup of smart TVs and monitors starting on June 30. This, too, will require a Game Pass Ultimate subscription. 

Players will need to download the Xbox App from the Samsung Gaming Hub, log into their Microsoft account, connect a Bluetooth controller (including Sony's DualSense), and then stream games from the library. You’ll also be able to use a Bluetooth headset for both game audio and chat. This is likely to be as close as you can get to playing an Xbox console without the console. Of course, you’ll be limited to the Game Pass library, and there’s a risk of potential latency.

Microsoft is also expanding Cloud Gaming to two new countries: Argentina and New Zealand. Players in those countries will be able to stream games on consoles such as the Xbox Series X and Series S, PC, tablets, phones, and Samsung TV's later in the month. 

Lastly, the company announced a new program that will let Game Pass Members play demos of upcoming games. Dubbed Project Moorcroft, this program is aimed primarily at independent developers looking to promote their work early and to get some feedback. Microsoft says it will provide compensation for those who create these demos for Game Pass due to the extra work it requires as part of development. No specific time frame was provided for when Moorcroft will launch.

Popular durability tester and YouTuber JerryRigEverything recently tested Valve's new Steam Deck and took the device through a wringer of scratch, fire, and bending tests. Valve's gaming console survived Jerry's bending and fire tests with relative ease. The only component of the Deck which failed Jerry's tests was the screen, which suffered damage at several levels.

Jerry found the $649 Steam Deck model featuring an anti-glare screen to be sensitive to scratches under the lightest pressure tests from his Mohs' Hardness picks, with extensive damage occurring under heavier pressures -- but this part is normal.

Jerry notes that the standard Steam Deck displays which do not feature anti-glare protection, will not be as sensitive to scratches as the anti-glare model. So for buyers looking at Valve's Steam Deck options, you'll have to choose anti-glare capabilities over the best durability (or vice versa) apparently.

Fortunately for the Steam Deck, the screen was the most sensitive component to Jerry's durability tests. Scratching the hard plastic shell of the Deck, along with its rubberized buttons and plastic buttons, showed no loss in functionality and only left ugly scratches to look at. In fact, the rubberized buttons themselves feature lettering that is embedded all the way through the button. So it will be impossible for gamers to rub the lettering off the buttons after years of use.

Under the fire test, Jerry pressed a lighter directly against the console's IPS panel for a solid 20 seconds to see if any thermal damage would occur. The pixels surrounding the flame did turn black under the immense heat for several seconds, but the pixels returned to their default colorful state after just a few seconds. This test demonstrates that the IPS display can deal with some high temperatures without permanent damage.

The Steam Deck passed Jerry's bend test as well with flying colors. Jerry tried his best to break the handheld in two by bending the Deck as hard as he could, but it turned out to be impossible. The Deck did flex a bit under the immense pressure, but that is all that happened. There was not even a slight cracking sound to be heard from the console's plastic shell.

Jerry's plethora of durability tests show us that the Steam Deck can take quite a beating, and may be able to take on years of hardcore gaming use, with some accidental drops and the occasional rage quit thrown into the mix. The only exception to this is the screen on the anti-glare model. In this instance, it would be best to stick to the mousepads and thumbsticks for gaming as much as possible to prevent scratching. Or buy an external screen protector to add another layer (literally) of screen durability.

Steam Deck owners must be feeling rather pleased with themselves right now. First, most pre-ordered a device before the reviews, and it has turned out to be a solid gold buy. Secondly, if you wanted to buy one right now, you would have to run the gauntlet of scalpers. And Valve has done a good job getting hundreds of Steam games verified for the fledgling platform. Now there is some more good news, as Microsoft today announced support for Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate through Microsoft Edge (Beta) for the Steam Deck.

Microsoft Edge community manager MSFTMissy posted on Reddit about Edge now being able to facilitate Xbox Cloud Gaming on the Steam Deck. Missy sounded rather excited as she explained how the Edge team worked closely with Valve and the Xbox Cloud Gaming teams to achieve this game streaming feat. She went on to say how today's news of Xbox Cloud Gaming on Steam Deck will "open new opportunities in the Linux gaming community." The Edge CM also assured readers that "this is just the beginning of the story for gaming on Edge."

Double Beta Alert - Cross Your Fingers and Toes

With two major enabling pieces of software still in beta, you shouldn't be surprised to hear that getting Xbox Cloud Gaming working on your new Steam Deck isn't exactly consumer-friendly. After a bunch of routine settings and app menu fiddling tasks, you must dive into the command line chomping Konsole and input some lengthy commands. Please head on over to the Reddit link in the previous paragraph if this is something you might do in the immediate future. For the less tech-savvy readers, Microsoft has a dedicated support article featuring more detail and some screenshots to guide you through.

There seems little point in replicating the methodology of wrangling Xbox Cloud Streaming onto a Steam Deck here, as the apps, install, and preparation method should be finessed over the coming weeks - and methods could (and should) change. Suffice to say, you need both Microsoft Edge (Beta), Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta), as well as an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription to go through the process.

Before signing off, it is worth reminding readers that you can still play a range of titles from Xbox Game Studios natively on Steam Deck. A list of compatible titles is available here. Some notable non-working omissions, which have anti-cheap issues at the time of writing, include; Gears 5, Halo MCC, Halo Infinite, and Microsoft Flight Simulator X.

Valve and Microsoft are also working on getting Windows 10 and 11 on the Steam Deck. You can test it, but it isn't quite ready for prime time.

Valve has published its annual year in review for 2021 (yes, it is March already). So, please brace yourself for some astounding statistics covering data downloaded, active user counts, user time spent in-game, cash spent on this absorbing entertainment medium, and more.

Before drilling down into the figures, Valve was keen to note the overall gaming industry growth spurt, established during pandemic lockdowns, didn't seem to decelerate. In other words, "2021 was successful even in comparison to 2020's unprecedented growth." Please ponder the infographic below for some other user/time/spending highlights.

Valve seems pleased with some of the above statistics, especially the playtime data. In 2021, it says, "players spent almost 38 billion hours on Steam in 2021 - a 21% increase over 2020," and equivalent to 4.3 million years. Of course, another important metric to the business involved spending, and Steam raked in 27% more income from games sales than in the previous year.

Probably the most eye-watering statistic, and thus the one that caught our attention, was the assertion that Steam delivered nearly 33 exabytes of content to customers in 2021. This colossal figure represents a 30% increase over 2020. In attempting to help readers understand this figure, Valve said 33 exabytes is equivalent to all 330 people in the United States downloading a 100GB game.

Steam Trends

Beyond the key stats above, Valve noted some interesting underlying trends. On the business side of things, it saw its Steam Gift Cards enjoy a boom in popularity. Last year more than 2.6 million digital gift cards were sent, and the dollar value of those gift cards increased 43% compared to 2020.

A PC gaming trend welcomed by some was the growth in console ports, from both Microsoft and Sony, which came to the Steam PC platform. Steam was also pleased with the progress of its Next Fest events through 2021, as this is considered to be a "seasonal focal point for upcoming games and demos."

Other stats/trends in 2021 that stood out were the use of 48 million controllers by the Steam populace and information that these ergonomic devices were used in 10% of all Steam game sessions.

Valve reckoned that 2021 was one of steady progress in VR. New VR users grew 11%, and this was against a backdrop of no new Valve-made games for this futuristic gaming platform.

How Steam Plans to Keep the Ball Rolling

There is a lot of impressive progress for Steam outlined above, and interestingly Valve sketched out ideas and strategies that will keep its foot on the accelerator through 2022. Many of the plans are just 2021 initiatives extended, which is a reasonable strategy, as it sounds like a considerable success on all counts.

There are three major prongs to Valve's Steam growth strategy which it shared in the 2021 review. These include maintaining a low-friction store to make purchasing as easy as possible, working hard on an ever-improving ecosystem to keep users onboard, and behind the scenes work on improving the quality and quantity of the Steam infrastructure.

On infrastructure/server upgrades, Valve said that a major priority in 2021 was server optimization and efficiency work. It began an upgrade process to reduce the physical footprint and power usage. It has already achieved this goal while providing increased CPU capacity and capability for a quarter of its servers. In one example, server upgrades in LA reduced power use by 50% while boosting faster downloads to reach more customers than ever. By the end of 2022, Valve aims to have rolled out these same upgrades to 50% of its servers worldwide.

We already feel that 2022 will be a tremendous year for Steam, partly due to the Steam Deck and the coordinated hardware and software development that is being steered to make this project is a success.

MSI today launched a new addition to its Trident gaming desktop PC range. This popular and well established range usually mixes an impossibly slim build with full-sized desktop class graphics. However, the newest entrant to the series, the MSI MAG Trident S 5M, is entirely AMD APU powered with no option or room inside for a discrete GPU add in card. MSI says this is still a great gaming PC choice, as it is targeting the "cloud gaming and mobile gaming markets."

The lack of discrete GPU option means MSI has been able to create probably the smallest Trident PC yet, at just 2.6 liters and measuring 13.17 x 7.3 x 3.66 inches (334.7 X 185.4 x 93 mm). Previous MSI Trident PCs with discrete GPUs are compact, but nearer to 5 liters in volume at best. The form factor busting size may be appealing, but the AMD APU-only formula could cause some head scratching regarding its gaming prowess. AMD APUs are widely regarded as the best for iGPUs but their 3D acceleration capabilities pale against some of the weediest GPU add-in-boards. It hasn't helped MSI's case that, as some systems have started to ship with AMD APUs including RDNA2 iGPUs, MSI is still using yesteryear's Ryzen 5000G APUs with integrated Vega 8 graphics at best.

In the olden days, a gaming desktop without even the option to add a graphics card would not be viewed as an entirely serious proposition. In 2022, with the GPU drought ongoing, and causing supply shortages and indecently high prices - plus the rise of cloud gaming - MSI thinks it has a chance to sell such a machine. It also highlights the expected growth of Android gaming on PCs with Windows 11.

Other hardware features worth noting are the slick looking "motherboard quick slot mechanism," which allows you to slide the innards out of the MSI MAG Trident S 5M for RAM or storage upgrades. For cooling MSI mentions just a "fan cooler," but we can see a pleasing array of copper heatpipes on show in the promo images.

To get your cloud gaming and mobile gaming started, MSI has included a 30-day free xBox Game Pass Ultimate through the Game Stadium software (which has an easy joypad controlled UI), as well as the MSI App Player - an Android system emulator. Yes, Windows 11 is introducing its own Android App service, but it isn't ready for prime time, at the time of writing.

For the best cloud gaming experience you will want speedy networking, and MSI promises its Lan Manager software is adept at "enhancing the network performance for mobile games, cloud games, and PC games."

If you still find the MSI MAG Trident S 5M desktop appealing, but don't want to bother with cloud or Android gaming, the Radeon Vega 8 iGPU should be expected to perform nearly as well as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 laptop GPU, depending on game/application.

Will MSI want to charge the gaming PC premium here? We don't have pricing as yet, and it of course depends on the region. MSI said that its MAG Trident S 5M desktop is shipping now. 

Elon Musk has asserted that development work to get the PC's Steam library of games working in Tesla vehicles is in progress. In a tweeted reply to CD Projekt Red's official Cyberpunk 2077 account and IGN's Ryan McCaffrey, Musk said that Tesla was working to make Steam games available to its vehicle owners in general, rather than just supporting one-off titles. This level of support is almost up there with the promise of the Steam Deck - in other words if any particular Steam game isn't supported, it will be regarded as a bug.

In a follow-up quip on Twitter someone asked whether there was a Cyberpunk on the Cybertruck guarantee, to which Musk simply replied "100%." Elon Musk has previously stated that users will be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 on the revamped in-car entertainment system, so that much was known before today's Tweet. However, the goal of wider compatibility with the full gamut of the PC Steam library is the big news today.

Tesla pushed the boundaries with in-car infotainment possibilities right back when the first Model S premium electric sedan was launched in 2012. However, the entertainment potential of these big screens is being given a significant lift with Tesla moving on from systems running Intel Atom chips to AMD's modern Ryzen APUs, wielding powerful multi-core CPUs and GPUs. Vehicles with the new AMD processors are already rolling off the production line, as we reported at the New Year.

So, what kind of performance might a Steam gamer expect from their new Tesla with an AMD APU literally under the hood? Some early tests we have seen showed the AMD powered infotainment system performing three or four times faster in general application usage, compared to the Intel based system of old. For gaming, we have to take Tesla's word for it for now, and the company has said that the revamped infotainment system has more muscle than a PlayStation 5.

The latest specs we have for the AMD APU being used, suggest it is a custom Ryzen YE180FC3T4MFG with a quad-core 12nm 3.8 GHz Zen+ CPU with 4MB of L3 cache, with a 3D accelerated helping hand provided by built-in RDNA2 graphics cores. Tesla systems use a customized Linux OS.  

Even with its powerful driver assistance system, we don't expect drivers to be indulging in Steam gaming while in control of a vehicle. However, the in-car entertainment system could be a boon for passengers, and for times when drivers are making a charging pit stop.

In a press release shared earlier today, the company announced a new program called Project Endgame that will give users an "always-accessible, low latency" computing experience, powered by its own Arc GPUs. Details on the program are very minimal, but it seems Intel is trying its hand at a new streaming service similar to Nvidia's GeForce Now cloud gaming service.

The biggest question is what  the target audience will Project Endgame is. On the surface, Endgame appears to be a game-streaming solution, but Intel's wording could also mean it's a cloud streaming service designed for professional users needing a Windows-based workstation on the cloud.

If Intel goes the gaming route, then we are looking at a future competitor to platforms such as GeForce Now and Google Stadia (or what's left of it), where gamers can stream games to almost any device that has an internet connection. 

Intel will have to choose how the platform is oriented, whether it'll go the GeForce route and stream PC games from customers' own personal libraries, or go the Stadia route and build a completely new platform with games and peripherals custom-tuned to the service. Hopefully, it's not the latter, since that means you'll probably have to buy games that only run on Intel's streaming service.

But, Intel could also and make Endgame a workstation-oriented service. Giving customers a complete Windows desktop experience with a discrete Arc GPU streamed directly to their local devices. This would be optimal for users who need to do GPU-intensive tasks from a machine on the cloud.

Intel could even expand upon this idea by optimizing the service for gaming as well. Since this theoretical service would have a high-end Intel GPU paired to a Windows operating system, there's no reason it wouldn't be capable of gaming.

We don't know what GPUs Intel will be using for its Endgame project, but we guess it'll be one of Intel's Xe datacenter GPUs, probably Arctic Sound-M. Even if Endgame is designed only for gaming, there's little chance Intel will use a desktop gaming GPU in its servers. Since desktop cards aren't designed for server environments. Even Nvidia uses data center GPUs exclusively in its GeForce Now service.

We will know more soon enough, Intel says Project Endgame will be available for use later this year.

The Epic Games Store (EGS) appears to have enjoyed a banner year in 2021. For many, the EGS is better known for its giveaways than for being a game buying destination, and the figures show this feeling rings true. To sum up its extraordinary year, Epic Games says that it gave away 765M games (with an average price of $23.82), which means it gave away about $18 billion worth of games. However, its income from game sales in 2021 was just $840 million – which is less than 5% of the total giveaway value it claims.

While we might have nitpicked at the giveaways versus cash generation figures in the intro, the EGS has some great numbers that it can boast about for 2021. To grow and compete with the likes of Steam on PC, the EGS obviously needs to be 'stickier' so those millions of freebie seekers stick around to play the games and add paid titles to their collection.

"There are now over 194 million Epic Games Store PC users, an increase of 34M from 2020," boasts Epic in its year in review blog post. "Daily active users peaked at 31.1M, and peak concurrent users reached 13.2M. December's monthly active users peak reached 62M users, an increase of 11% from last year's peak of 56M." 

As a point of reference, earlier this week, we reported that Steam achieved a record 29.2M+ concurrent users. So, EGS is where Steam was (using this metric) in Q3 2016.

On the topic of free games, Epic Games gave away 89 free games during 2021, which it says were worth $2,120 in total – an average of $23.82 per game, as we mentioned in the intro. With over 765 million free games claimed by players, we calculate an incredible giveaway total value of somewhere around $18 billion. Epic seems to be particularly happy about its most recent sale over Christmas and New Year's, where it saw 31 million people participate in the event. Gamers acquired 159 million items, which was 14% better than the previous year's sale event.

Improvements Delivered in 2021

Epic set aside a portion of its blog to talk up the EGS platform and its development. The immaturity of the EGS client and limited features compared to competitors are frequently highlighted as criticisms. Critical introductions in 2021 include improved navigation, social panel tweaks, improved wishlist support, fuller product previews, and new views to discover new releases, among other highlighted store sections.

Weekly Free Games Will Continue in 2022

In 2022, Epic wants to reassure gamers that "weekly Free Games will continue." Remember, last year we got 89 giveaways, which is more than once a week, due to special events timed with sales and holidays. The better, bigger name giveaways tended to also tie in with these events. We would wager that this promotional giveaway activity will follow a similar pace in 2022. In fact, there is yet another sale now celebrating the Chinese New Year period.

Lastly Epic promises the release of "a number of huge games," through 2022 to get you to visit its store. It name checks the likes of Forspoken, Dying Light 2 Stay Human, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Extraction. But of course, some of the biggest games of the year are still probably yet to be revealed.

Is Steam Your Biggest Foe – or Xbox Games Pass?

It would be ironic if, as Epic almost grasps Steam's coattails, the industry and gamers pivot to gaming subscription services. Whenever news about Microsoft's Xbox Games Pass (for example) bubbles up, it always seems relatively positive, and Microsoft's investments in it look to have paid off over recent years. If the games industry is going to finally have its Blockbuster Netflix moment with games subscriptions and streaming, Epic better start making some Plan B and Plan C contingencies, and it isn't the only one that needs to do this.

Sometimes Steam is used as a key indicator of PC hardware trends. For example, reports might pick apart its monthly hardware survey data to see the state of play in the battle between AMD and Nvidia, comment on the ascent of 6-core CPUs, or illustrate a step-change in the VR headset market. However, Steam also offers an overview of the popularity of PC gaming as one of the biggest, if not the biggest, destinations for gamers. Today, we're focusing on these figures as Steam edges inexorably and steadily towards breaking the 30M concurrent user milestone.

In a blog post today about the latest record-breaking concurrent user figures, TheGamer remarks that Steam started 2022 with nearly 28M and has now breached 29.2M. This recent spurt marks a pretty swift move up in numbers. A concurrent record was announced at the start of the New Year with 28.2M users, and two weeks later, Valve is eating into the last million before the 30M milestone is breached.

If you are wondering if there are any specific triggers for the recent growth, there are several factors at play, as usual. First, the post notes that Valve's CS:GO and Dota 2 are entertaining an ever-growing, highly engaged section of users, with these games achieving over 900K and 787K active gamers, respectively, within the last 24 hours.

Another significant impactful event spurring recent growth might be the recent move of PUBG: Battlegrounds to the F2P model. This already popular foundational Battle Royale title surely gained many new fans after becoming a freebie. In the last 24 hours, Steam says PUBG engaged over 600K Steam gamers.

Finally, it is worth repeating TheGamer's observation that it often notes a tapering off of peak user figures after the holiday period, but that is yet to happen this year. Steam's answer to the continued progress as we move into late January basically amounts to mentioning "the ongoing pandemic and perhaps a few late Christmas presents." Now place your bets on the Steam concurrent user record as we end 2022.

Thanks to Valve's ProtonDB compatibility layer, 80% of Steam's top 100 games are now playable within Linux operating systems. The new milestone was achieved today and shows how committed Valve is to get as many games as possible to run on Linux from the Steam library. That's due in no small part to the new Steam Deck running on Valve's own Linux-based SteamOS.

But the accolades don't stop there. If you go to protondb.com you can see that 75% of the top one-thousand most popular Steam games are also playable within Linux. This means there's a good chance most of your favorite Steam titles are probably playable on Linux already, making Linux adoption even easier than before.

ProtonDB was started by Valve several years ago as a new way to get Windows games to automatically work within Linux operating systems by combining several other open-source compatibility tools such as DXVK and Wine together. Its growth was slow at first, but as the years went by and ProtonDB matured, it's now become one of the most popular ways to get Windows games to work in Linux either perfectly or nearly flawlessly.

Valve's largest hurdle now is protonDB's inability to run many of Steam's top ten most popular titles, of which only 40% of the games are currently playable on Linux. This is a big deal, considering the impending launch of the Steam Deck. Many gamers will undoubtedly want to play one or more of the most popular games on Steam, but only three — CSGO, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2 — rate as green (native) support, with one more (GTAV) getting a gold rating. The other six are "borked," most likely due to DRM issues.

Still, having hundreds of Windows titles playable on Linux is a big milestone. It wasn't too long ago that getting even a handful of Windows games playable within Linux was a big hassle, especially if you had to run it through the Wine compatibility layer. Now, with Valve and ProtonDB, hundreds of games are playable within Linux at the push of a single button, or with very little tweaking required.

Valve continues to work hard to get as many games as possible within the Steam library compatible with Linux. Valve has even said it has a goal of getting the entire Steam library to run on Linux specifically for owners of the Stream Deck. We aren't sure if this is possible, and it will likely depend in a large part on just how popular the Steam Deck ends up being. Success begets success, in other words, but there will be benefits even for those who don't plan on using a Steam Deck.

Valve has updated its Steam Hardware Survey with the latest data from November 2021. Perhaps the most interesting piece of information is that Windows 11 now accounts for 8.6% of all surveyed PCs, up from just 1.9% in October. We'll also look at the data on the best graphics cards and best CPUs for gaming to see what else has — or hasn't — changed.

Quick disclaimer: Valve has never fully disclosed how its sampling and data collection is done, and many have questioned its validity, but we still think the information is interesting even if we don't have confidence intervals or margins of error.

Windows 11 Picks Up Steam

The biggest news for this update is that Windows 11 usage among surveyed gamers accounts for 8.3% of all PCs. That might not seem like much, but the OS has only officially been out for two months, so that's a pretty fast uptake and more than quadruple the number of Win11 users in October. By comparison, only 2.7% of all surveyed PCs ran OSX, and 1.2% ran some flavor of Linux. Of course, Windows 11 still has a long way to go, with Windows 10 sitting at 83.4% of surveyed PCs. However, it's now surpassed Windows 7, which sits at 3.3%.

It will also be interesting to see how these breakdowns change once the Steam Deck launches. That could cause a spike in Linux usage, but Steam Machines never made much headway, and it's not clear how many Steam Decks have actually been sold.

Nvidia Continues to Dominate the GPU Landscape

Moving on to the graphics card breakdown, we're going to pull the data from Steam's API usage page, as that lets us see GPUs that account for less than 0.15% of the total. There's plenty of fuzziness in these numbers, but we've elected to use the DirectX 12 figures (which, interestingly, sum up to about 90% rather than the expected 100%). That omits a lot of older Intel GPUs, which we feel is reasonable considering the number of DX12 games and how poorly those older GPUs perform. Here's our adjusted breakdown of the numbers from the past several months.

We've included the past several generations, more or less, and you can see that despite some gains in overall share, Nvidia's GTX 10-series graphics cards remain the most popular GPUs by far, followed by the GTX 16-series, RTX 20-series, and RTX 30-series. AMD's most popular GPU series (on Steam) is still the RX 500 cards, which basically match Nvidia's GTX 900-series in terms of market share. The RX 6000-series, meanwhile, still accounts for a bit more than half a percent of surveyed PCs.

Nvidia's RTX 30 cards continue to gain ground, and at this rate, we can reasonably expect RTX 30 to surpass RTX 20 within the next month or two. That's despite the continued difficulty of finding any of the latest graphics cards in stock at reasonable prices. Our latest look at GPU prices on eBay indicates many models are still selling at close to double their MSRP.

Of course, that mainly applies to desktop graphics cards. While some have apparently tried to build GPU mining farms using laptops, the costs and risks of killing the hardware are too significant to go that route, so gaming laptops with the latest RTX 30 GPUs are pretty reasonably priced by comparison. Corroborating that, according to the survey, the single most popular RTX 30-series GPU is the "Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU," which now represents just over 2% of all surveyed PCs. Meanwhile, the RTX 3050 and 3050 Ti laptop GPUs only account for 0.42% and 0.38%, respectively. The RTX 3070 comes in just behind the laptop 3060, though, with 1.99% of the market.

The most popular individual GPUs continue to be the GTX 1060, GTX 1650, and GTX 1050 Ti, with the RTX 2060 coming in fourth place. Perhaps that's part of the reason we're getting an RTX 2060 12GB refresh. Hopefully, the price and availability of that part will prove to be more than a token effort to meet the demand for new graphics cards, but I'm not counting on it. AMD's single most popular GPU is still the RX 580 from 2017, coming in at position 13.

You can check the rest of the numbers yourself, if you'd like, but one final interesting piece of information is that AMD APUs with integrated Vega graphics solutions account for just 2.67% of all GPUs. Likewise, Intel graphics solutions (again, the DX12 requirement eliminates anything older than Skylake chips from 2015) represent just 3.73% of surveyed PCs. Intel might account for the largest number of graphics chips as a whole, but in terms of Steam gamers, UHD Graphics 620 only comes in 29th place. We'll see if the upcoming Arc Alchemist can do anything to change that in 2022.

AMD CPU Continue to Gain Market Share

Given Intel just launched the Alder Lake Core i9-12900K and related CPUs, they're not yet part of the survey. That should change in the coming months, but unfortunately, the Steam Hardware Survey provides virtually zero insight into what specific CPUs people are using — we don't even know the generation of CPU. What we do know is the overall market share, and we can also see data on the number of cores and clock speeds, but that's not particularly helpful given the different architectures.

That's unfortunate, as we'd love to see how Ryzen 5 5600X compares to Core i5-11400 as an example. Prior to Alder Lake, we rated Ryzen 5000 series CPUs as being the better overall choice in our AMD vs. Intel CPUs faceoff. It would be very interesting to see how many PCs are running the top-rated processors, but that's not happening.

What we do know is that AMD CPUs accounted for 31.53% of surveyed PCs, compared to 68.45% for Intel (and 0.02% for "MicrosoftXTA," a new addition to the survey). That represents a 0.69% increase in market share for AMD and a commensurate drop for Intel. Outside of an unexplained drop in August (statistical variation?), AMD CPU share has been steadily increasing for much of the past year thanks to Ryzen and Ryzen 5000 in particular.

The other data point we can gather from the CPU aspect of the survey is that the vast majority of PCs are still running 4-core and 6-core CPUs. Together, those account for 68% of all PCs, with 8-core CPUs representing another 16.5% and 2-core CPUs still surprisingly accounting for just under 12%. 10-core, 12-core, and 16-core CPUs combined only represent 2.32% of surveyed PCs, with 12-core (most likely Ryzen 9 3900X and 5900X) accounting for about half of that number.

I feel bad for anyone using a 2-core CPU, as it's been more than a decade since I regularly used a dual-core processor. Most are probably on laptops, though, which is a bit more understandable. Intel didn't move to 4-core CPUs and above as standard for its ULV parts until 8th Gen Coffee Lake parts in 2019, and Core i3 parts with only two cores are still being sold in the 11th Gen Tiger Lake family.

With current generation consoles still being hard to come by, even a year after launch, game streaming services have become quite popular. For a few dollars per month we can stream a curated library of games to our laptops, desktops and mobile devices.

With the recent release of Raspberry Pi OS, based upon Debian 11 “Bullseye” we find that the Chromium web browser now supports hardware acceleration and this means that we can finally use streaming games services with the Raspberry Pi 4.

In this how-to, we shall set up a fresh Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye install, overclock our Raspberry Pi 4 to 2 GHz and finally we will automate the process, turning our Raspberry Pi into a 1080p games console.

For This Project You Will Need

• Raspberry Pi 4 4GB
• 16GB Micro SD card
• Keyboard, mouse and 1080p screen for your Raspberry Pi
• Ethernet Internet connection
• Cooling for your Raspberry Pi 4. We used Pimoroni’s Fan Shim but passive cooling would be best.
• Xbox Game Pass Platinum
• An Xbox Controller

Installing Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye on Your Raspberry Pi 4

We start the process by installing the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS onto a fresh micro SD card. 

1. Download, install and run Raspberry Pi Imager. 

2. Click the Choose OS button. A menu appears. 

3. Select Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit) from the OS menu.

4. Click Choose Storage and select your card from the menu. 

5. Click Write. This process will take several minutes as Raspberry Pi Imager downloads Raspberry Pi OS and burns it to your microSD card.

6. Remove the SD card and place it into your Raspberry Pi and then boot to the desktop.

7. Open a terminal and update the software on your Raspberry Pi.

$ sudo apt update$ sudo apt upgrade -y

Overclock your Raspberry Pi 4

To ensure that you get the best performance, overclock your Raspberry Pi 4 to 2 GHz. It is easy to do, and gives you a free performance boost. Ensure that you have adequate cooling for your Raspberry Pi 4.

1.  Power off your Raspberry Pi and attach your cooling option if it’s not already there. Boot up.

2. Open a terminal and use this command to open the config.txt file.

$ sudo nano /boot/config.txt

3. Scroll to the bottom of the file and make a new line. This will be a comment, used to identify what the code under it will do. 

#Overclock to 2 GHz

4. Use these settings to set the overclock. Press CTRL + X, then press Y and Enter to save and exit.

arm_freq=2000gpu_freq=750over_voltage=6force_turbo=1

5. Reboot your Raspberry Pi for the changes to take effect.

Running Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) on Raspberry Pi 4

This is truly the easy part! The latest version of Chromium (v92) which ships with Raspberry Pi OS “Bullseye” comes with hardware acceleration baked in. This means YouTube video playback is much smoother than previous, and more importantly our games play better than ever.

1. Plug your Xbox controller into a spare USB port. At this time, Raspberry Pi OS cannot use the controller via Bluetooth.

2.  Click on the browser icon to open a new browser window.

3. Go to https://xbox.com and sign in to your account. If prompted to save your login details, do so as later we will automate a large part of this process.

4. Click on Play to start the Cloud Gaming service.

5. Using the controller, select a game and start playing.

Automatically Starting Xbox Cloud Gaming on Boot

Playing games should be fun, so plugging in a keyboard, mouse etc just to login each time is a chore. What if we automated the process? In the previous section, we asked the browser to remember our login details, so now let's have the browser open as soon as the Raspberry Pi desktop starts.

1.  Open a terminal window and create a file called xbox.sh. This file in your home directory (/home/pi)  will store all of the steps necessary to run the gaming service.

$ nano xbox.sh

2. Add a line that tells the system what language we are using, in this case a Bash script. Add a second line to force the system to pause for five seconds before moving on.

#!/bin/bashsleep 5

3. Use xrandr to force the display to use a 1080p resolution. This is a tweak that will override a bug in Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye which forces the default resolution to match the display. For users with 4K displays, this is an essential step.

xrandr -s 1920x1080

4. Add the final line, which is the command to be executed. In this case it opens Chromium in fullscreen, and goes directly to the xbox.com play site (in our case the en-GB site for the UK, but change this to the URL for your region). The last part of the line is “&” and this tells Linux to run the command in the background.

Exec=chromium-browser --start-fullscreen https://xbox.com/en-GB/play &

5. Press CTRL + X, then press Y and Enter to save and exit.

6. Convert xbox.sh into an executable file.

chmod +x xbox.sh

7. In the terminal, create a file called xbox.desktop which will run when the desktop starts.

$ sudo nano /etc/xdg/autostart/xbox.desktop

8. Create two lines inside the file. The first is a description of the file. The second line is the command to be executed. In this case, it will call the Bash script that we have just written.

[Desktop Entry]Exec=/home/pi/xbox.sh

10. Press CTRL + X, then press Y and Enter to save and exit.

11. Reboot your Raspberry Pi for the changes to take effect.

Your Raspberry Pi 4 will now boot straight into the Xbox Cloud Gaming service, and you are ready to game!

To exit a game via the controller, press the Xbox logo and select Quit game.

Hot on the heels of Nvidia's new RTX 3080 Cloud Gaming announcement, AMD has revealed that its Ryzen Threadripper Pro processors will be powering Nvidia's new RTX 3080 Superpods. Threadripper Pro will give Nvidia the CPU horsepower and PCIe bandwidth it needs to help drive the 39,200 TFLOPS of gaming performance each Superpod server will provide.

AMD did not specify which Threadripper Pro CPUs would be used in Nvidia's Superpods, however, we assume the servers will be equipped with AMD's latest Threadripper Pro products based on the Zen 2 architecture. AMD's Zen 3 based Threadripper CPUs are still in development.

“The Ryzen Threadripper Pro lineup was designed to offer users incredible performance and unrivaled bandwidth and sets the industry standard for extreme computing performance across a range of use cases, including the rapidly-growing cloud gaming space,” said Chris Kilburn, corporate vice president and general manager of the client component business at AMD said in a statement. “Working with Nvidia, it is clear that the expansive feature set of Ryzen Threadripper Pro is the perfect platform to power their next-generation cloud gaming experience.”

Despite being an architecture behind, the current Zen 2 Threadripper products are no slouch, and still one of the best CPUs for heavy multi-core workloads. The top tier 3995WX comes with 64 cores, 128 threads, and a clock speed of up to 4.2GHz, along with 128 lanes of PCIe Gen 4 bandwidth and 8 memory channels. The 128 lanes and 8 memory channels, in particular, is a trait found in all Zen 2 Threadripper processors.

The vast amount of memory and PCIe bandwidth will arguably be the more important features for Nvidia's Superpods. With all that bandwidth, Nvidia can power multiple RTX 3080 virtual machines off of one Threadripper CPU without sacrificing memory or PCIe bandwidth.

With further optimizations from Nvidia, we expect the Threadripper Pro CPUs to perform even better to ensure each cloud gaming server meets the 120 fps target consistently.

Nvidia's new RTX 3080 cloud gaming plan will start at $99.99 once released and give you the best cloud gaming experience Nvidia can provide right now. Each gaming instance will come with RTX 3080 graphics and run at a very low latency of 56 ms at 120 fps. Plus, there are more benefits like built-in G-Sync support (tusable on static refresh rate displays) and 1440P support.

Microsoft has today announced that the company is finally pushing Xbox Cloud Gaming, which is in beta, to the Xbox app for Windows. More specifically, it is available for Xbox insiders.

Microsoft's xCloud project is a game streaming service powered by Xbox consoles in the company's data centers. Currently, over 100 games are supported if you have an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscriptions.

Today's announcement allows Microsoft to finally give Xbox Insider program users the ability to run the xCloud gaming service on their Xbox App. Beforehand, PC players had to use the browser. The same games that Microsoft makes available on the browser will be available in the "cloud games" portion of the Xbox app.

Jason Beaumont, partner director of Xbox experiences, wrote that the Xbox app will provide some feature to differentiate it from the browser, "including
easy-to-access information on controller and network status, social features to stay connected with friends, and the ability to invite people – even those also playing on cloud without the game installed – to join you in a game."

The Xbox Cloud Gaming service allows gamers to stream more than 100 games. Whether you have an older machine, or the latest PC without a strong GPU, all you need is a compatible controller and internet connection to run the service.

In case you are not part of the Xbox Insider Program, you can check out this website to get information on how you can access the xCloud service on your device. In case you are not a part of the supported 22 countries listed on the website here, you would have to wait until Microsoft rolls out the service to your region as well.

Thanks to the modding community, MD's FideliltyFX Super Resolution (AMD FSR) is now usable in SteamVR and Vulkan compatible games if you are willing to follow some steps and implement it manually. Due to the open-source nature of FSR, this has allowed gamers to effectively build an FSR "patch" for both SteamVR and Vulkan.

The Vulkan modification was built by Georg Lehmann (@DadSchoorse); and works in both the dxvk shader and Steam's Proton layer by installing FSR into FSHack -- a technology that allows for lower in-game resolutions without changing the native resolution of your monitor.

This mod will allow you to use FSR in almost any Vulkan-supported game and gives you more control than AMD's normal FSR implementations. You can choose any resolution you want to upscale from, and choose a sharpness value to your own liking. 0 is maximum sharpness, and any higher number results in lower sharpening of the game.

But there are several caveats that can make adding FSR a headache, some of which include automatic upscalers which don't work at all with FSR, and the patchset can be a headache on its own to install.

You can check out the Vulkan FSR mod here.

SteamVR implementation, built by Frydrych Holger (@fholger), is a bit simpler to work with. All you need to do is download a modified .dll file and install it directly into the game's file directory.

The FSR implementation here is the same as Vulkan, allowing you to change resolutions specifically and change sharpness at will.

You can check out the SteamVR FSR mod here.

The modding community has shown us how powerful FSR's open-source nature can be, making it easy to add FSR into any game you want. This should hopefully accelerate FSR's adoption rates even more and give DLSS some extra competition.

Valve has released the results for the May 2021 installment of its monthly Steam Hardware & Software Survey. The biggest takeaway is that AMD took one step forward by claiming 30% of the CPU market, at least as represented by Steam users, but it also took one step back by ceding more of the GPU market to Nvidia.

The survey results showed that AMD‘s share of the CPU market rose from 29.48% in April to 30.13% in May. That follows the same pattern as previous months: The popularity of AMD processors among Steam users has risen by roughly half a percent throughout 2021. Now those incremental gains are starting to add up.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if AMD continued its rise up the Steam survey’s results in the future. The company actually has more entries on our list of the best CPUs for 2021 than Intel, and several of them are more affordable than their Intel counterparts, which could help convince more gamers to give AMD CPUs a shot.

AMD has failed to make similar headway in the graphics market, however, and the  survey results showed that its share fell to 16.18% in May. That isn’t a drastic drop—AMD graphics cards have powered roughly 16% of survey respondents’ systems since late 2019—but it does highlight the company’s struggle in that segment.

This isn’t for lack of trying. AMD’s latest Navi offerings are still found in some of the best graphics cards for gaming; at least part of the problem is that they are in short supply. The company said in April that it would increase GPU supply, but that’s going to take some time, so that promise probably didn’t affect these survey results much.

Of course, some of these results do need to be taken with a grain of salt. The Steam hardware survey may not be taken by every user and can't be completely representative. Still, it provides an idea of trends.

Not that many Steam users are quick to adopt the latest hardware. The most popular GPU on the platform is the GeForce GTX 1060, according to the survey, and 1% of Steam users are somehow continuing to get by with CPUs featuring clock speeds lower than 1.4 GHz. It takes a while for the survey results change much.

Valve officially released its China-specific version of Steam today. The storefront's launch doesn't exactly come as a surprise—Niko Partners senior analyst Daniel Ahmad predicted this version of Steam's debut last week—but its lack of content might. There are currently only 41 games (and 12 pieces of DLC) on the platform.

That number pales in comparison to the 48,615 titles listed by the U.S. version of Steam if you search for all of the games on the platform (to say nothing of all the DLC that accompanies those games). Valve explained the discrepancy between Steam and Steam China's wares via its Steamworks documentation for developers: 

"A prerequisite to publishing games on Steam China is receiving Chinese government approval for your game. Upon receiving approval, the Chinese publisher of your title will be issued an ISBN number, which will be displayed on your Steam China product page. Please note this prerequisite does not apply to non-gaming applications, which can be directly self-published."

Chinese law also requires foreign businesses to work with a local company before they can operate in the country. Valve's partner for Steam China is Perfect World, which also helped bring DOTA 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to China, and will be the go-to for Western publishers looking to release their games on Steam China.

It's not yet clear how publishers are expected to contact Perfect World about selling their games via Steam China, however, with Valve only saying that "more information will be available soon." We suspect that lack of information combined with the need for Chinese government approval will keep Steam China's numbers down for quite a while.

Steam China is also missing community features present in the international version of Steam. PCGamer reported that message forums are inaccessible, and we couldn't find any community features in the website navigation, either. It seems the only user content available on Steam China are reviews for the games themselves.

These limitations make Steam China a clear downgrade from the international version of Steam. There are fewer titles, harsher restrictions, and much less community content on the Chinese version of the platform. It's not clear why anyone would choose Steam China over Steam if they're given the option between them.

That choice is made even stranger by the fact that regular Steam is currently available in China. Ahmad said last week that "it remains to be seen whether China's government will block access to Steam International in the future," however, and the country's track record with foreign platforms suggests Steam proper might disappear soon.

Valve will potentially release a public beta for a Chinese-specific version of Steam starting on February 9th, according to Niko Partners senior analyst Daniel Ahmad, who specializes in the Asian and especially Chinese game industries. This would be the culmination of efforts Valve began in 2018 alongside Chinese developer Perfect World and would see the fulfillment of a promise the company made earlier this January to launch Steam China in 2021.

Valve is positioning Steam China’s release as an opportunity to “bring Steam onshore into China,” which subtly hints at the impetus behind the launch of a Chinese-specific version of the client. While Chinese citizens can currently access the international version of Steam in China, Ahmad points out that the platform offers many games that haven’t been licensed by the Chinese government, which technically makes them illegal and means that Steam is currently operating in China in an unofficial, “gray area” capacity.

As such, Steam China will be Valve’s “official” entry into the Chinese market. This also explains the partnership with Perfect World, as foreign companies can only legally enter the domestic Chinese market by partnering with a Chinese entity. For instance, Valve and Perfect World have worked together before to distribute DOTA 2 and CS:GO in the Chinese market.

All of this probably explains why Valve’s announcement acts as if Steam hasn’t been present in China for years now.

As for what end users can expect to see from this change, it seems as if the transition will start slow but could ramp up in time. Ahmad writes that Steam China will be a separate application from the International version of Steam and will only offer government-approved games. However, he also states that current Steam accounts will work on both versions, as will current Steam games, provided they have a Chinese SKU.

“It remains to be seen whether China’s government will block access to Steam International in the future,” Ahmad explains. It’s not an unfounded risk, though- Apple removed 39,000 games from the Chinese App Store at the end of last year due to not having ISBNs from the Chinese government.

There will likely, however, still be immediate differences. For instance, Ahmad also says that Chinese players will need to use Steam China to play CS:GO and DOTA 2 going forward, although all their data will carry over from their Steam International accounts.

This could also point to another reason behind the development of Steam China
- monitoring and censoring in-game chat. CS:GO and DOTA 2 are both communication heavy games, and it’s possible that Steam China might be just as, if not more interested in what players are saying in-game as it is in which games they play.

For example, popular Chinese game Genshin Impact attracted notable controversy after its release late last year for censoring the words “Taiwan” and “Hong Kong,” even in its international version. Since then, much of the game’s community has been split on the developer Mihoyo’s intentions here, with players who are aware of the developer’s foreign influences (the company’s splash screen opens by referring to the Mihoyo devs with Japanese slang) arguing that the filter was probably enforced on the company by the Chinese government.

Ahmad, in particular, also commented on the controversy, saying that “China’s laws and games regulator state that games cannot contain ‘Anything that threatens China’s national unity’” and thus that “All Chinese games censor phrases such as Taiwan/Hong Kong.”

Despite the potential for Steam China to be used to more heavily regulate what Chinese players have access to, there could be a potential, albeit unlikely side benefit for foreign players: we could perhaps see games that were once pulled from Steam to appeal to Chinese influences restored to the app’s international version. For instance, the Taiwanese horror game Devotion was famously pulled from Steam and other gaming storefronts last year for containing jokes at the expense of Chinese president Xi Jinping. If the international version of Steam becomes no longer accessible to Chinese audiences, maybe such games could be restored.

In the case of Devotion, it’s unlikely, as the Chinese government still technically sees Taiwan as Chinese territory. But for other games made further outside of the Chinese government’s reach but still containing content objectionable to it, the segregation of Steam China and Steam International might allow them to release elsewhere without risking blowback from Chinese officials. 

Granted, there’s also a social pressure to maintain a friendly relationship with the Chinese government and audience, both to maintain healthy business and because China represents a large part of the market (the country generated more than $32.54 billion in gaming revenue the year before the development of Steam China became public knowledge). 

As such, it’s also still uncertain how much of an effect Steam China will have outside of China as well. Hopefully, however, you’ll still be able to team up with Chinese friends to play DOTA for years to come.

Ubisoft and Google today announced that Ubisoft Plus (formerly UPlay Plus) will be available in beta over Google Stadia starting today and rolling out through December 16. The Ubisoft Plus service beta will also be available on Amazon's Luna game streaming service.

Stadia users won't need a paid Stadia Pro subscription to access Ubisoft Plus titles, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Immortals Fenyx Rising and Watch Dogs: Legion.

Those interested should head to the Ubisoft Plus site, subscribe, and link their Google Stadia accounts.

The beta will include playing Ubisoft games across multiple devices, as well as cross-platform saves on newer games, like Assassin's Creed Valhalla.

On PC, Ubisoft Plus includes over 100 games, including much of the company's back catalog.

Last night, I sat down at my computer, and, like many hyped gamers around the world, pressed play for the first time on Cyberpunk 2077. But while many of them did so on PCs or consoles, I clicked through my web browser to play it on Stadia.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a huge moment for Stadia to prove that its game streaming service can hang with local play. It's the most hyped launch in years, after all.

Let It Rip

While one of my colleagues was telling me that they were waiting on downloading Cyberpunk 2077 and the day zero patch, I was already playing.

Easily the biggest benefit of my entire time checking out Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia is that there was no installation process. At all. Once the game was in my library from the Stadia store, one-click loaded the game. I waited a few seconds, and it started. While others were downloading, I was customizing every aspect of V (and I mean every aspect. My wife was shocked) while they waited.

This isn't a one-time benefit, either. The next time there's a major update, it will be applied automatically. Google and CD Projekt Red take care of that. I won't have to think about it.

Stadia vs. PC 

In some ways, Stadia almost fooled me into thinking I was playing on my own PC. That's the first place I tried the game, as I've got that PC connected to the internet over Ethernet; that's the best chance for streaming.

Stadia has reached a point where in many cases, it can accept just about any input you want (as long as you're not using a Chromecast Ultra, which still requires the Stadia controller). On Chrome, it immediately detected my keyboard and mouse, and played like any other PC game.

The part that's most definitely not like a PC game are the graphics options.  

Instead of the usual low/medium/high settings, there's a choice between "High Framerate" and "Visuals." Chromatic aberration, depth of field, lens flare and motion blur are all on by default no matter which you choose.

It's hard to get an exact frame count from Stadia, but from a fairly trained eye, the action felt like it was between 50 and 60 frames per second on High Framerate, but were clunkier - but still playable, on Visuals, which felt like 30 fps. I heavily recommend the High Framerate option.

You'll notice there's no option for resolution. That's controlled entirely through the Stadia platform side of things. If you have a Chromecast Ultra and are a Stadia Pro subscriber, you can go up to 4K. Sadly, mine is locked in an office that hasn't been open since the middle of the pandemic, along with its controller. On Stadia.com or a phone, you get to go up to 1080p at 60 frames per second.

Of course, the other thing that performance depends on is your internet connection. While wired in, I had no issues, appearing to be at a solid 1080p60 for most of the time I've played thus far. On Wi-Fi, things were shakier, with some artifacting and pixelation. It also appeared to drop down to 720p a few times. But this will depend on your connection, and let's just say I've had my share of issues with my ISP in the last few months.

If you have a solid connection and don't have a powerful PC, Stadia may end up being a great way to play, as long as you're not running up against a data cap. Console versions for the PS4 and Xbox One are reportedly a bit underbaked, 

The Stadia graphics are most definitely of the console version of the game. You're not getting ray tracing, and I've seen some screenshots from my colleague Jarred Walton, who is benchmarking Cyberpunk 2077 on PC, and Stadia's graphics just aren't as crisp and detailed.

In theory, I could use Stadia to play on Android phones (and, in a few weeks, iOS devices). But there is so much going on in this game between the HUD and constant text that the small screen doesn't' do it justice.

I've only had one major hiccup thus far, beyond some issues over Wi-Fi. The first time I booted the game up, I was told that user settings data appeared corrupted. 

Sure? I guess? I hadn't played the game before. That hasn't happened again since, and the game has been incredibly quick to load exactly where I am in the game ever since.

The Big Questions

Cyberpunk 2077 just came out last night (at least, if you're like me on the east coast of the United States), and I've still got a lot of game to go. If something major changes, we'll update this story. But first impressions, at least on the best connection I have to offer, are surprisingly good. I am missing the detailed graphics and ray tracing that my colleagues have told me about (and that I could get, to some extent, on my own PC), but the game plays fairly well  here. 

Multiplayer is a long time out, but I know no one else on Stadia. I have reached out to Google to see how many people have played Cyberpunk 2077 on the service so far but a representative said the company wasn't offering that information.

Unlike other services, like GeForce Now, you pay for the game and it lives on Stadia. The service recently passed its one-year anniversary and doesn't show signs of slowing, but there is the question: Google has pulled services before. Will this last the years that people will likely play the game?

But for those playing right now, if you don't have that powerful console, don't have a data cap and do have a strong connection, you can do far worse than playing on Stadia. At times it may even fool you. It's not the PC experience, but if you don't need that (or couldn't afford it anyway), Stadia proves a surprisingly solid way to play Cyberpunk 2077. 

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