A Grand Theft Auto (GTA) modder has developed a mod that lets you run Grand Theft Auto III (GTA 3) and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (GTA VC) as mini games right inside Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA SA). The modder, DryxioGTA, demonstrated the feat in a video posted on YouTube on Thursday, running the game on a Windows virtual machine on macOS.

In the video, GTA SA’s main character, CJ, can be seen stepping up to a TV, apparently inserted into the game by the mod. Once in front of the TV, the option to start either GTA VC or GTA 3 appears. The selected mini-game immediately starts running on the TV.

Gamers can switch between controlling the main GTA SA game or the mini game, using the F10 key. When controlling the mini-game — say, GTA 3, as in the video — players can play it as normal while the rest of the outer SA game continues to run, with characters roaming about. Similarly, switching control back to the outer SA game leaves the mini-game running on the TV.

Just a few hours after uploading a brief gameplay video, the modder released another video demonstrating an even more mind-blowing mod, this time running GTA Vice City inside GTA 3, inside GTA San Andreas!

As shown in the clip, the game starts with GTA SA, where players can walk up to a large screen to activate and start running GTA 3. Within GTA 3 — now running on the large screen inside San Andreas — gamers can drive to another specific screen and launch GTA VC. So you can be playing GTA SA, switch to a fully functional GTA 3 within SA, and then switch again to play Vice City right inside the GTA 3 sandbox, all while the other games are simultaneously running.

The remarkable mods are just one of thousands that developers have created since the game was first released on PC over 20 years ago in 2005. There are also several Mods for other GTA titles. Older GTA games have seen renewed interest as anticipation builds for GTA 6, which is scheduled to be released on consoles on November 19 after several postponements.

A PC gamer has created and demonstrated a handy Steam Game Cartridge system. Over on PCMR, Jibril-sama introduced the system, which blends the old-school console convenience of cartridges with Steam’s awesome and agreeably flexible games library. Ingeniously, it upcycles a bundle of old SATA SSDs into Steam-ready game cartridges using a disk mount detect and execute script on the software side and a SATA dock on the hardware side. Icing on this already tasty cake is provided by Jibril-sama’s colorfully encased and custom-labeled Steam Game Cartridges. Nice.

Steam Game Cartridges from r/pcmasterrace

“Got a couple of used 2.5" SSDs for cheap so I decided to make a Game Cartridge system,” the Redditor casually informs the PCMR masses in the post embedded above. “Games are actually on those SSDs with a script to auto-navigate Steam to the game's page. Auto-starting the game right away is also possible.”

Further comments by the OP explain that all the drives bought for this project were 128GB in capacity, and €7 a piece ($8). That’s not bad in the current RAM and NAND crunch, and keeps these files off your built-in primary storage. As many readers will know, PC game libraries can easily grow to hog a lot of storage.

We reached out to Jibril-sama for some more background info about how the Steam Game Cartridge system is designed to work with as little user friction as possible. They informed us that the system in the video runs Linux and Valve’s Steam URL Protocol is leveraged to navigate to the game's page or launch the game.

“All it needs is a systemd template to check for a script on the SSD and launch it. And a udev rule to trigger the system,” Jibril-sama told Tom’s Hardware. “So basically: Plug in SSD -> udev rule sees the event -> triggers the systemd daemon -> systemd daemon looks into the SSD and finds the script -> execute the script.”

Commenters on PCMR have overwhelmingly welcomed the Steam Game Cartridge future teased by this system. Some want to see the system extended to include GOG game libraries. Others query how the system handles the inevitable hefty multi-gigabyte updates that are pushed (even to older games) from time to time. Jibril-sama told Tom’s Hardware that they didn’t plan to deal with updates often, as they didn’t use cartridges for ‘live service’ titles, and they are mostly used for the “games that I want to replay once in a while.” If and when updates have been flagged, “I just let Steam handle the updates and wait a bit before I can play,” they added.

I’ve had repeated firsthand experience with Steam Games libraries being fussy when moving across different PCs, so stretching the library system this way could reveal cracks and wrinkles as more games are tested. We shall see.

Hopefully, fuller implementation guides, scripts, and resources to help others purchase or 3D print their own Steam Game Cartridge shells will be shared in due course.

Nvidia's RTX Spark platform arrives later this year, and the company is hard at work building the partner ecosystem around the GB10 Superchip to ensure that Windows and applications are ready for its agentic AI PC vision. As part of that groundwork, the two companies announced today that Sega will support the RTX Spark platform with its upcoming Virtua Fighter Crossroads, coming in 2027.

The two companies also committed to RTX Spark support for "future Sega titles,” meaning that we might see official support for other evergreen franchises like the Yakuza series, the Persona games, and the upcoming Alien: Isolation 2 and Total War: Warhammer.

Although the companies didn’t go into detail about exactly what full support for the RTX Spark means for Sega games, one would expect that the developer’s titles will be natively compiled for Windows on Arm instead of relying on the Prism x86 emulator for compatibility.

It also seems safe to expect that future Sega titles will incorporate DLSS technologies like upscaling and Multi Frame Generation in order to deliver the best possible experience on RTX Spark systems. Despite having GPU compute capabilities similar to those of a desktop RTX 5070 on paper, the unified memory architecture and relatively limited memory bandwidth of the GB10 Superchip behind the RTX Spark platform present challenges for gaming performance that are likely to make the incorporation of DLSS tech important for the best experience.

The relationship between Nvidia and Sega spans over 30 years, tracing its roots to the ultimately abandoned development of the GPU for the Dreamcast console. Despite its eventual decision to use an NEC-produced PowerVR GPU for that system, Sega offered Nvidia a $5 million lifeline that gave the company the runway that it needed to develop and deliver the Riva 128, its first DirectX-compatible GPU.

That investment proved to be historic, as Nvidia now has a market cap of over $5 trillion and is in the process of shifting the very foundations of computing through its Grace Blackwell and upcoming Vera Rubin AI platforms for the data center.

Whether the RTX Spark platform reshapes the PC when it arrives in the fall of this year remains to be seen. But if you’re a fan of Sega’s IP, this partnership means that you can at least look forward to a first-class experience with its games on RTX Spark systems.

According to new research published by Alinea Analytics, Valve has grossed an estimated 11.1 billion dollars throughout the first half of 2026. If correct, the estimates would make it Valve's most profitable half-year on record, as digital storefronts become the norm throughout the games industry. Earlier this month, Sony announced that it would stop making new physical PlayStation discs by 2028, instead turning its efforts digital.

According to a Substack post from research firm Alinea Analytics, games sold on the platform accumulated $11.1 billion in revenue in the first six months of this year, which is a 14.5% jump compared to the first six months of 2025. Even more impressively, though, Steam's H1 2026 has posted 8% higher numbers than H2 2025, which includes the lucrative holiday season where most of the biggest sales happen. The store generated "only" $10.3 billion in revenue during the latter half of 2025.

Steam has been on a consistent incline for 10 years, boasting record revenue numbers almost every successive year. Even if it hits a slump, the data shows Valve has never had two bad years in a row; a recession is always followed by a boom. Alinea says five main factors contribute to the storefront's growth: a surge in Chinese players, higher prices, viral co-op hits, and smarter back-catalogue categories from big publishers.

The last one is rather ironic, as it involves third-party publishers quietly returning to Steam after their own launchers faltered. Some companies like Activision still inject their proprietary launchers between Steam and the game itself for titles like Call of Duty, but the situation has generally improved.

What display resolution do you use on your primary monitor?

Almost 10 years ago, in the first half of 2017, the platform made a little less than $2.5 billion, which means the H1 2026 revenue is 4.7 times higher, almost quintupling in a decade. Moreover, it's remarkable to believe that Steam also made more in the first six months of this year than it did in the entirety of 2020, when most of us were confined to our homes, free from responsibilities, and with a lot of time on our hands.

Alinea lists Forza Horizon 6, Resident Evil Requiem, and Crimson Desert as the top three games for Steam's explosive H1 2026 numbers — all of them made almost $200 million. Games from prior years also played a bigger role this time since 2026 releases only accounted for 21% of the $11.1 billion, while 27% of H1 2025's revenue came from 2025 launches; 29% of H1 2024's revenue was accumulated from 2024 releases.

Amidst all the data, a clear trend is forming. People are looking back in their libraries and appreciating older games more than ever before, while new releases still make an impact if they're universally acclaimed. With the highly anticipated GTA VI coming soon (with no current PC release date), it'll be interesting to see how these numbers change. Now, if only Valve could make more Steam Machines to play all those older games everyone seems to be playing.

Game anti-tamper app Denuvo has been completely bypassed in pre-release versions of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, allowing pirates to distribute copies of the game days before its official release. A cracked version of the remake has been circulating since June 7 — more than a month before its July 9, 2026, release date. While the game is a remake of the original Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, which launched way back in 2013, it’s still expected to offer new content and enhanced graphics brought by newer, more capable hardware.

This isn’t the first major title to be hit by a leak before its official release day this year. Forza Horizon 6 leaked four days before early access and more than a week before its general launch date of May 19. LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight and Subnautica 2 also suffered similar leaks, with playable versions of the games circulating online even before early access was opened to players. While Forza Horizon 6 and Subnautica 2 aren’t protected by Denuvo, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight and Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced use the controversial anti-tamper DRM tool.

Denuvo has been in hot water among gamers, especially as it was blamed for performance issues plaguing games that used it. Aside from that, many consider its mandatory 14-day online checks as intrusive, especially for story-driven single-player games where cheating won’t affect the gaming experience of other players. While a few users might’ve understood the studios’ need to protect their titles and reduce piracy, the fact that Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games that had it felt like its addition to games is pointless.

This is especially true now that we’re seeing pirated pre-release versions of games that are supposedly protected by Denuvo. While it’s unclear how Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced leaked, the fact that the app that reduces performance and reminds gamers that they don’t own the games they buy has seemingly failed at its one job is making users think that it’s unnecessary.

Game studios need to protect their intellectual property, which is why it’s understandable that they’d want to deploy tools like Denuvo. However, they shouldn't do so at the expense of gaming performance and the user experience, which are some of the primary reasons why gamers are pushing back against Denuvo. If these anti-piracy measures don’t punish legitimate players with reduced FPS and always-online requirements, among other negative side effects, then most gamers will have zero problems with using apps that protect the makers of their favorite titles.

DLSS Swapper is an open-source app that does exactly what it sounds like — it swaps out the appropriate DLSS files for any game, helping downgrade or upgrade its native DLSS version. While the tool itself is safe, along with the verified files it hosts, users can also upload their own DLLs to the app's GitHub repo. Unfortunately, it seems like some of these files can contain malware, disguised as helpful solutions.

To understand how this can even happen, we need to look at the way DLSS Swapper is set up. The app uses a manifest file to dig out DLLs from verified DLSS, FSR, and XeSS libraries. The verification process is thorough, and you won't see any file pop up in-app until its security hashes match official sources. However, it can also detect unknown files from new game releases installed on a user's computer.

These files are automatically uploaded to the repository as "issues," and the app also includes an option to upload your own DLL to help out fellow gamers. As you can probably guess by now, this is where the problem lies. These files are not vetted and remain in a grey area. DLL files are basically executable code, so if any of them were modified to include malware, you wouldn't even be able to detect it before it's too late.

The file would've already executed malicious code and installed a crypto-miner, for instance, in the background that hogs your PC's resources until you finally notice something's off. As such, the creator issues a clear warning to not download random files that show up on the GitHub repo, especially if they include comments that claim some sort of miracle cure. Stick to only the sources you trust if you must go outside of the officially supported libraries.

Previously, the developer already warned against the fake DLSS Swapper website posing as the real thing. Let this serve as your reminder that the app's GitHub page is the only place you should download DLSS Swapper from. Moreover, keep in mind that hardware support is just as important as software support, so if you have an older GPU that doesn't support the latest upscaling tech, a DLL swap cannot magically fix that.

Sony makes some of the best headphones on the market, and some of their recent models even include a myriad of sensors for spatial audio. These are standard gyroscopes and accelerometers capable of precise tracking, so why keep them limited to just audio features? That's exactly what developer Nicholas Slattery has done with his new project called "Sony Head Tracker" — it's an app that turns your Sony headphones and earbuds into a real-time head tracker for PC games.

I made Sony headphones work as a free head tracker for 200+ PC games from r/pcmasterrace

The app essentially acts as a bridge between the hardware and the software, which is OpenTrack. Sony baked the Android Head Tracker protocol into its headphones' firmware, which is what enabled spatial audio to expand the soundstage on supported devices. This data is ignored by Windows, but Slattery figured out a way to tap into the protocol and read everything it's capturing.

That includes rotation vectors, gyroscope fields, and Euler Angles (live calculation of yaw, pitch, and roll). The raw data packets are then packaged into a UDP stream that the OpenTrack software can read and understand. OpenTrack supports over 200 PC games and usually works with phones, webcams, and specialized eye or IR trackers, but Slattery's app opens it to an entirely new and ingenious set of devices.

Currently, Sony's WH/WF-1000XM6, WH/WF-1000XM5, and Sony ULT WEAR (WH-ULT900N) are officially compatible. Older models like the WH-1000XM4 or XM3 won't work because they lack the hardware (sensors) required for the head tracking. Apple's AirPods, which popularized Spatial Audio, use the company's proprietary protocol that doesn't open itself up on any device, as you'd expect, so they're also ruled out.

Once everything is set up, you just wear your Sony headphones and the in-camera will respond to your head movements, turning around with you. If you look to the side or glance up, the camera will peep there as well, as if you were wearing a VR headset. But keep in mind that this is not a VR replacement as the screen in front of you is still stationary. Regardless, this unlocks another level of immersion for race and flight sims.

The creator has tested the app to work flawlessly with Microsoft Flight Simulator, Elite Dangerous, and Assetto Corsa already. For those of us not rocking elaborate multi-monitor configs, something like this can serve as a middle ground between a true 6DoF setup and a simple helmet cam in-game, all for free. Sony Head Tracker is also open-source, so we only expect it to improve over time and expand its compatibility.

Over the years, our internet-surfing machines have evolved to the point that it's now possible to run entire full-length PC games right inside a browser. The latest milestone in this impressive trajectory is a new, unofficial port of Half-Life 2 developed by Slqnt and 98006. It's the complete main campaign of the game, including the two episodic DLCs, accompanied by a host of features that you find on the official release.

The game is, in fact, running natively on your computer; there's no cloud streaming involved. Under the hood, the port is powered by WebGL 2, a JavaScript API that bypasses the browser's typical layout engine and talks directly to your GPU to execute graphics-intensive tasks. Then, WebAssembly helps translate C++ code from the Source Engine into JavaScript that the browser can natively understand.

For storage, the port relies on a virtual file system that calls compressed assets via high-speed web requests. You just need to let the cache build up upon first boot for a few minutes, then you're off to the races. The same method creates .sav files directly in the browser's cache or IndexedDB, which allows you to pick up where you left off, just as if you had actually installed the game on your computer natively.

This port also features the Source console integration, enabling you to pull up a fully functioning developer terminal that can accept classic commands. You can type in cheats to give yourself a gameplay boost or tweak the engine variables as per your liking. While you don't get Steam achievements here (understandably), the game's built-in achievements are still present and accessible through the menus.

We tried the game on three different devices: a Windows PC with a Ryzen 7 7700X and RX 6700 XT, a OnePlus 12 smartphone, and a modded Nintendo Switch running Android. As you'd expect, the computer ran it the best and without any hiccups. Since this is a very old, non-demanding game, we were able to max out all the settings and play in full screen while achieving over 100 FPS. Frankly, it looked beautiful.

The mobile experience didn't work for us, but other users have reported it performing well, so your mileage may vary. Some bugs, however, remain persistent on the ideal desktop experience as well, with many users pointing out a rather hilarious "zombie" glitch where characters' heads render improperly, leaving their eye sockets vacant like a zombie. Certain complex animations also fail to trigger during intense cutscenes.

Overall, this is one impressive project, but it remains unofficial, and that means it's subject to a DMCA takedown from Valve. The port is basically at the company's mercy at this point, but Valve is generally community-friendly when it comes to stuff like this. It took Slqnt and 98006 just three months to develop, and the fact that it has survived roughly two weeks on the internet means it might have precedent to stay.

It's also not the only port of its stature, you can play thousands of old games for free on DOS Zone, including GTA Vice City, and Quake III is also available as a standalone browser project. Copyrighted IP is the only hurdle for retro revivals like these since the talent from the developers, and the grunt from the hardware, is otherwise abundant. If Valve doesn't make Half-Life 3, the fans might as well milk the original games as much as possible

Buying and collecting games on your Steam account can be quite fun, and some people have taken this to the extreme, with the most expensive Steam library worth nearly $750,000 at current prices. Unfortunately, most of us do not have that kind of money to burn on digital games, which is why programmer and web developer Mike Wang built the Steam Summer Sale simulator. This website looks just like the Steam website, and you even have to “log in” with whatever Steam account name you want to make up. Once inside the page, you’ll find $100 in your wallet, and you can just add any game to the cart and check it out.

If you run out of cash, the wallet will automatically refill to $500, meaning you essentially have an unlimited amount of money to splurge on games. You can also click the + Add Funds button as many times as you want to see your wallet grow to millions of dollars. The website makes cute sounds every time you click the Add to Cart button, making it more inviting to keep adding games. And once you’re satisfied (or tired) from all the clicking, head on to the cart and click Continue to payment to see all the games get magically added to your library one by one with matching sound effects that make it feel like you won the jackpot.

Aside from getting the dopamine hit of adding games to your library, there’s also a list of 30 achievements you can hit. You may think these are easy, especially since you’re just essentially adding games to the cart and checking them out, but a couple of them require some dedication. One is the Exact Change achievement, which requires you to zero out your wallet. Since it automatically refills if a game’s “cost” is more than your balance, you have to crunch some numbers to make sure that your cart has the same amount as your wallet. The other one requires you to buy every game on the simulator website, which means a lot of clicking.

While the website might look convincing and have a ton of listed titles, it unfortunately does not have every game available on the Steam store. For example, it’s missing the $999 Steam Game that lasts for just 10 minutes.

The Steam Summer Sale simulator may feel like a nonsensical project, similar to the fake food delivery apps that are growing in popularity in South Korea. However, its creator said that they built it to get the dopamine hit of “buying” games on Steam without actually spending money. It’s also quite entertaining, especially with its sound effects and achievements, and I found myself spending several minutes on the website just trying to hit that Exact Change achievement, which is actually quite hard!

Perhaps the real Steam Machine was the friends we made along the way... is what enthusiast Matthew Brunelle might've said after realizing he already had one at home. Instead of buying Valve's new console for a frictionless experience, Matthew decided to turn his existing PC into the perfect couch-gaming setup, made possible by a really long HDMI cable, a Steam Controller 2, and, of course, Bazzite.

For the expectedly tech-savvy audience reading this, you might already be making fun of this dude for discovering cables, but hold on a second. Matthew's computer sits in his own room, where it serves as a desktop for work, while his TV sits in the living room. The easiest way to bridge that gap is actually wirelessly, streaming the games over Moonlight or Sunshine, or even Steam's native remote play functionality.

There will be a noticeable latency penalty with this setup that may or may not bother you depending on what you're playing. Moreover, you're just mirroring your PC's screen this way; it's not actually a console-like experience where the device wakes up and goes to sleep seamlessly. Not to mention, Matthew is running NixOS, so he has to manually hook up the cable and change the sound and display outputs each time.

In comes Bazzite — Matthew installed the Linux-based OS on a third SSD and plopped it into his computer. Inside, in Steam's "Big Picture" mode, Bazzite automatically handles outputs upon rebooting, switching to the correct display, which is his TV, and remembers to use the HDMI out for sound. This still wasn't enough, however, until two more things came along.

First is the 50-foot-long fiber-optic HDMI 2.1 cable that can carry the signal over long distances without degradation or latency. It costs $75 and sits there, running along the molding of the house. On the other end, it plugs into a TCL Roku TV that's limited to 60 Hz, but Matthew plans to upgrade to an LG C5 OLED really soon, which should help saturate that cable's bandwidth, especially now that HDMI 2.1 officially supports AMD GPUs on Linux.

The last piece of the puzzle is the new Steam Controller, which ticks all the boxes for our resident MacGyver. It features symmetrical sticks, large touchpads, back buttons, and excellent compatibility with Steam and Linux. Matthew even mentioned that the DualSense was already good enough for him in this regard, but the Steam Controller 2 is even more comfortable and more reliable, since it doesn't drop the connection at all.

With everything in place, here's how the setup works. Matthew still has to boot his PC and select Bazzite in the boot menu. From that point, Bazzite automatically outputs to his TV in the living room and uses the living room speakers for sound. When Matthew is done with a session, he puts the system to sleep, and it wakes back up right where he left it. Sleep states on Linux-based gaming distros feel just like a console.

When it's time for work, he restarts his PC and boots back into NixOS, but Matthew finds himself leaving his computer in Bazzite more and more since it's so seamless. He even suggests switching to Bazzite's built-in desktop mode for work if he can't find a convenient solution to the dual-boot dilemma. Speaking of which, the blog post mentions that he is trying to set up hibernate-to-disk on Bazzite.

If he gets that working, Matthew could save his exact game state, reboot into NixOS to do desktop work, and then reboot back into Bazzite later right where he left off. There's still a manual element, but the transition becomes much more seamless as everything within Bazzite no longer needs to be shut down. Matthew still recommends the Steam Machine for an out-of-the-box experience similar to his, but for him, "a 50ft HDMI cable will do."

The Entertainment Software Association has told a California Senate committee that private and community servers are illegal and amount to piracy, which would be news to anyone who has downloaded Minecraft's server files from the official website. The ESA gave its opinion while opposing AB 1921, the state’s “Stop Killing Games”-backed preservation bill, with ESA vice president of state government affairs Jennifer Gibbons making the claim about software that publishers provide themselves, since Mojang offers a Minecraft server for free download on its own site. The bill then failed the committee by four votes to three with four abstentions, though it was granted reconsideration.

AB 1921, the Protect Our Games Act, would require publishers of server-dependent games to give players 60 days’ notice before shutting one down, then provide a playable version, a patch, or a refund. Assemblymember Chris Ward, who authored the bill, raised community servers during the hearing as one way to keep games running after support ends. The California Assembly passed it 43 to 16 in May before it moved to the Senate. Gibbons said the ESA considers such servers “piracy,” and argued that community servers are not affiliated with the publisher and don’t uphold the same trust and safety standards.

Mojang publishes a dedicated Minecraft server as a Java file and documents how to run it, while Valve distributes SteamCMD and dedicated-server tools for hundreds of titles, letting players run their own match servers on their own systems. Running a server for a game you’ve bought obviously sits inside what those publishers permit, and for Minecraft, it’s Mojang’s own recommended setup for free multiplayer.

Minecraft isn't the exception here. Palworld, Valheim, ARK: Survival Ascended, and Counter-Strike 2 all ship official dedicated-server software that runs on a spare PC or a rented VPS. The line the ESA steps over is a technical one, since running a publisher's own server binary is a licensed activity, not the unauthorized copy its piracy comparison implies.

Gibbons cited the U.S. Trade Representative’s Notorious Markets reports as precedent for the piracy claim, which have named private servers as infringement hubs. Those entries, such as Warmane and Firestorm in the 2018 report, were World of Warcraft servers that let players skirt past Blizzard's subscription, which is an entirely different scenario from running a free-to-play multiplayer server on a game that’s already been paid for.

Those WoW servers exist only because Blizzard never released its own, leaving operators to rebuild the backend from scratch through reverse engineering, which is what drew those copyright claims. AB 1921 compels nothing of the sort; its remedies let a publisher comply by releasing official server tools — exactly what Mojang already does with Minecraft — and a company distributing its own server software obviously can't be infringing its own IP.

Responding to comments made by Ward that private servers help to keep games alive, Gibbons said, “They’re illegal. They are not in any way affiliated with Microsoft. Microsoft, for Minecraft, has gotten a lot of criticism because of those community servers not employing the same safety standards that Microsoft does on their Minecraft servers.”

Gibbons also referenced two pending lawsuits against private servers, but didn’t name them, nor did the ESA identify the cases in its written statement, which said private servers infringe publishers’ IP rights and that they reserve the right to act against them.

AB 1921 builds on California's earlier AB 2426, which requires sellers to disclose that digital purchases are licenses rather than owned copies. Back in April, a brief 30-day DRM check-in left some PlayStation buyers facing lost access to games that they had paid for due to this.

Riot Games has announced that it plans to let players stop its Vanguard anti-cheat from loading at Windows start-up, the company has announced, ending the boot-time behavior the kernel driver has had since 2020. The new mode, Vanguard On-Demand, loads the driver only when a Riot game launches and unloads it on exit, made possible by a Windows 11 25H2 feature that records driver activity even while Vanguard is dormant. It works only on PCs that also have UEFI Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity (HVCI), and IOMMU switched on. Riot anti-cheat lead Phillip Koskinas said roughly 35% of players already clear that bar, while about 3% are running incompatible hardware.

Riot calls the qualifying checklist Vanguard Pre-Check, and many prebuilt PCs and laptops sold in the past couple of years ship with the features on by default, and Koskinas estimates the share of fully secured machines at 34.33% and rising one to two percentage points a month. Everyone else will need to enable the settings manually, and most are UEFI options that Vanguard can’t change, meaning a trip into BIOS for those who want to do so.

The feature leans on Microsoft's Runtime Driver Attestation Report, built with the company's Xbox OS Security team and new to Windows 11 25H2. It records every driver loaded since boot as a running, append-only hash kept in the TPM, which is the same measured-boot method the Windows Boot Manager already uses for boot-start drivers. Vanguard can then confirm at launch that no vulnerable driver slipped in while it sat idle, closing the gap that forced the always-on design before. Older Windows releases lack that reporting hook, however, so 25H2 is a baseline requirement.

Riot Games has spent years pushing the same security stack as a barrier to play, having begun enforcing TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot on Windows 11 in 2020. The company drew backlash when it brought it to League of Legends in 2024, and in December, flagged a pre-boot motherboard flaw across Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock boards. Last month, a Vanguard update bricked DMA cheat hardware in a move that was likely tied to stricter IOMMU enforcement.

VBS and HVCI are likely to become sticking points for users who are most likely to want the option to toggle Vanguard’s anti-cheat. Both run parts of the kernel inside a hardware-isolated enclave, and benchmarks have long since shown a small but noticeable degradation to frame rate, which is why many gamers leave them off. Turning VBS on also activates Microsoft's vulnerable driver blocklist, which can disable older peripheral drivers.

Alternatively, payers can leave Vanguard as-is, with Riot saying it’s not “making anyone change anything” and is willing to wait until the ecosystem matures.

The preorder pages for GTA will drop at midnight local time in the US tonight, and you can buy both the Standard and Ultimate editions at the links below. Digital preorders of either variant get a month of GTA+ subscription as a preorder bonus.

Hype is cyclic. Once upon a time, there was Daikatana, the game that would have John Romero making us his female canine, but flunked hard. Then there was Half-Life 2, a game that still begs for a third installment today. Spore showed us how excellent ideas still need equal execution. In modern times, No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 both had massive hype and massive flops, turned around with many years' labor. And yet to this day, there's nothing quite like the buzz surrounding Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto VI, or as it'll be forever known, GTA 6.

The Standard edition goes for $79.99 and has the base game, the Vintage Vice City Pack with retro-themed cosmetics, and the '55 Vapid Stanier vehicle. The Ultimate Edition goes for a cool $99.99 and contains extra side missions and activities, additional vehicles, guns, and a truckload of outfits and other cosmetics for Jason and Lucia both.

These preorders at retailers mean you purchase a physical box that has a slip of paper inside with a download code, but not physical media. As such, this is for collector's item purposes. Without further ado, click away to your favorite e-tailer.

• Amazon
  • Standard Edition
  • Ultimate Edition
• Walmart
  • Standard Edition
  • Ultimate Edition
• Best Buy:
  • Standard Edition
  • Ultimate Edition

We won't bother rehashing details about the impending sequel to Rockstar's massively successful and still giant money printer Grand Theft Auto V. Suffice to say that the November 19 release is so hotly anticipated that employees are calling sick already, and there are reports of entire workplaces planning to shut down for the day. Many publishers and studios are reshuffling their release calendars so as not to get drowned in what is guaranteed to be the talk of the Internet for at least a few weeks, too.

Meanwhile, PC gamers will have to wait a year to see the game running natively on their systems and will have to drown their sorrows in one of the literal thousands of games that never make it to consoles. Regardless, Take Two Interactive's revenue is probably going to rival that of some AI companies — but in real dollars.

On this day in 1996, id Software unleashed Quake on the unsuspecting public. The game’s influence is difficult to overstate, with its pioneering 3D engine inspiring the first wave of 3D accelerator PC expansion card purchases, the establishment of online multiplayer competitive culture, and much more. Perhaps its impact on 3D gaming can only be matched by the same development team’s previous outing with Doom.

At launch, Quake drew criticism for its intense violence and gore, which also echoed Doom’s path to infamy among media and political pundits, and caused problems for ratings boards and regulators. However, id Software ignored such noise, insisting they simply made games they enjoy playing. Quake would be the last major id Software production with the ‘classic lineup’ due to burnout and various personal conflicts, notes Wikipedia.

Looking more closely at the technology behind Quake, it was clear the dev team eschewed ‘faking it with 2.5D tricks’ like in previous seminal PC FPS titles such as Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, System Shock, and others. Instead, Quake hit the scene with true 3D polygonal worlds and character models. The true 3D transformation meant that for the first time in FPS, games could enjoy real 3D collision and physics, as well as things like fully 360-degree vision and movement, and more.

With id Software’s new game engine arriving in the Pentium era, but still crushing the best CPUs of the time, it made a market for PC 3D accelerators. These add-in cards first became essential to PC gamers in the late 90s with full 3D engine titles arriving, led by Quake. So in the same era, we saw important hardware releases like the 3dfx Voodoo, ATI Rage, and Nvidia Riva cards. QuakeGL became the killer app to drive sales of these products.

As mentioned in the intro, 3D gaming engines and hardware aren’t the only long-lasting legacies we can attribute to Quake. The game also popularized online multiplayer gaming. Another huge influence Quake had was in inspiring (and allowing) the growth of a talented modding community. As well as numerous custom maps and campaigns, the moddability of Quake enabled total conversions like Team Fortress and Quake Rally, to drop a few names.

Quake would inspire imitators, tributes, and influence many more 3D gaming titles in the years and decades to come. There have also been several Quake sequels, remakes, and the game even sparked machinima film-making, where a game’s 3D world becomes a movie set. Many modern developers, including the founders of Valve, first cut their teeth on Quake modding.

Nowadays, folks have the luxury of the complete source code for winquake, glquake, quakeworld, and glquakeworld available on GitHub. It was released “for entertainment and educational purposes,” but under GPL, it can be used for possible commercial projects, too. Those into this kind of digital archaeology may also be interested in the GitHub repositories for Quake 2 and Quake III Arena.

In summary, Quake didn’t just splash down with one big innovation; it was the weight of multiple key advances that made it so important to the history and the future of PC gaming.

A curious new game titled Congratulations On Your Purchase recently appeared on PC digital marketplaces priced at $999. Its main claim to fame is that it is proudly “the most expensive game on Steam.” Buyers who purchase, download, and run this title will enjoy “a first-person luxury experience set inside a palace.” Perhaps most importantly, though, they will collect a ‘golden ticket’ Steam Achievement showing “you are now one of us” with the $999 proudly displayed at its center. It might be a cynical exercise in tapping into those compelled into conspicuous consumption, or it might be satire.

While Congratulations On Your Purchase asks for premium money, viewing the promotional video and screenshots doesn’t really give us palatial, luxury, exclusive vibes. It is more like being transported into a game credits screen where one is being congratulated for completing a Nintendo 64 game. The minimum system requirements of a GTX 1060 or RX 580 definitely seem like overkill for this 3D walking simulator ‘adventure.’

However, the gameplay, which can last about 10 minutes if you stretch it out, isn’t the point. “The most expensive game on Steam. A palace, a red carpet, paparazzi, and a wall where you leave your name — visible to every owner who comes after you. Ten minutes,” reads the Steam sales pitch – which may be AI-generated according to the small print. “The price is not a mistake. It is the point.”

Further insight into how the devs hope to get their hooks into the target audience to reel in $999 a pop is provided by the Steam page. “You paid for this. Not accidentally. Not on impulse. You saw the price. You read the description. And then you bought it anyway. Welcome.”

Towards the end of the Steam page sales pitch, the devs add a paragraph on the philosophical value of this kind of purchase. Of course, the answer isn’t discouraging towards the level of expense. Rather, the choice of how, when, and where to spend your cash is claimed to be “philosophically speaking, unanswerable.”

While Congratulations On Your Purchase may also be satirical, it can be added to your Steam Cart, purchased, and thus might raise a nice bit of pocket money for the devs at Minimum Viable Prestige and the publishers Worth It Studio. Visiting the game's associated website at www.steamelite.zone seems to confirm there have been two buyers, so far, leaving two personalized messages on the Congratulations On Your Purchase wall. We'd also grumble that this Steam game isn't even original in its satire/cynicism, as it shares much in common with the $999 Apple iOS app from the noughties dubbed I Am Rich.

Our conclusion is that you should definitely spend your money elsewhere this Amazon Prime Day week.

Earlier this year, Epic Games admitted its launcher sucked and committed to building a newer one that's much more competitive with Steam. Yesterday, at Unreal Fest, the company unveiled a roadmap for the next 12 months, promising significant upgrades in the form of Epic Games Launcher V2. The platform is being rebuilt internally so it's faster and includes a lot more features that will bring it up to parity with Valve's offering.

The biggest change is a redesigned storefront that's truly personalized to the individual user. Games will be recommended based on taste and playstyle, while the game pages will try to do more than just show the price, title, and cover. Epic Games Store already looks more modern than Steam, so the visual efforts are appreciated, but it's the underlying speediness and a sense of curation that will really matter.

The v2 launcher will supposedly open up 5x faster on average upon cold boots, while restoring it from the system tray will be 6.5x faster on average. That's a huge improvement, but keep in mind that Epic got these numbers from a ridiculous test bench comprised of a 32-core AMD Threadripper, an RTX A6000, and 128GB of RAM. Not exactly consumer-grade hardware, especially during these times.

There's a lot more coming apart from the upgraded storefront. For instance, Epic will finally add sprawling player profiles with avatars and your game activity. That will enable everything from DMs to better voice chat and game-independent parties. You'll be able to write manual reviews for games instead of relying on star ratings. Developers will be able to add their own patch notes, directly integrated inside the store, aided by a new notification system that'll inform players of the coinciding update.

The roadmap itself is split into three distinct categories: Up First, Up Next, and On Deck. Chunked installation of Fortnite is among the first new features we'll see, along with cross-region gifting and a private beta for Epic Games Launcher V2. Then, some of the aforementioned improvements are mentioned in the Up Next list, which will also bring the public beta of the new launcher for everyone to try.

Finally, things like universal controller support, akin to Steam's extensive toolset, will debut toward the end of the next 12 months. New APIs meant to help developers better understand the player base will be part of this update. The redesigned storefront is also part of this timeframe, so don't expect it in the following months. Perhaps the most interesting feature mentioned here is third-party communities, which, if implemented right, could be as useful as Steam Forums.

All of these little changes, along with the more prominent ones, will combine to form the Epic Games Launcher V2. If this timeline is to be believed, by this time next year, we'll have a much more competitive and robust EGS than ever before. Steam is a great platform in its own right, but competition is always important to drive innovation. Regardless of what you feel about Epic, the company's efforts to rebuild its launcher are ultimately better for the consumer.

Valve is bringing an end to one of Steam's longest-running payment options. On its official Steam support page, the company has confirmed that it will be discontinuing Steam gift cards by the end of 2026. It will no longer be restocking physical gift cards at retail stores and expects existing stock to wrap up by the end of the year. Customers with existing Steam gift cards will continue to be eligible to redeem them at any time, subject to applicable local laws.

For those interested in grabbing one of the last remaining physical Steam gift cards, several retailers should still have them in stock, including Best Buy. Users who prefer gifting Steam Wallet funds will still be able to purchase and send digital Steam gift cards directly through Steam, meaning the gifting option itself isn't going away, only the physical retail cards are being phased out.

• Buy Steam gift card from Best Buy

According to Valve, ever since the launch of physical Steam gift cards in 2012, scammers have increasingly used them to defraud unsuspecting victims. Over the years, the company has taken several measures to combat the problem, including working with retailers and law enforcement agencies, adding warnings to gift cards, restricting redemption to the currency of a user's Steam Wallet, and even removing cards from sale in regions where suspicious activity was detected.

Unfortunately, scammers have continued to adapt despite these safeguards. "As we have continued to put more and more restrictions in place, scammers have adapted. They continue to have an impact on Steam customers and other unsuspecting individuals. So we've made the difficult decision to end the Steam Gift Card program at retail stores," the company notes.

Valve's decision comes just a few weeks after it introduced a reservation-based system for its newly launched Steam Controller to combat scalpers and automated bots. The $99 controller sold out almost immediately after pre-orders opened, with some units quickly appearing on eBay for as much as $300. In response, Valve restricted reservations to eligible Steam accounts with a purchase history and good standing, helping ensure genuine customers received priority over resellers.

The Steam Machine seems to be everything that the gaming world is talking about right now, partially because PC building took a nosedive thanks to high prices, and also because it's a Valve product. The console/PC hybrid (PConsole, maybe?) remains a highly anticipated product despite rumors of a price hike. The release is now set in stone and imminent, as Valve has officially confirmed the summer 2026 launch window and expanded its Verified program to include Machine and Frame alongside the Deck.

"Today we are expanding the Verified program to include Steam Machine and Steam Frame, both of which are shipping this summer," the company stated. The news should ease the worries of many an expecting gamer, given today's constant worries about AI servers slurping every RAM and NAND chip on the face of the earth, as well as Valve's own statements about component scarcity delaying the release. Plus, the company always works on its own schedule, so much so that Valve Time is a term.

The release of the Machine has been taking flak, given that while Valve was initially hoping for an estimated $600 to $800 price — in the ballpark of the higher-end consoles — the rumored pricing is climbing around or over $1000. This fact is somewhat corroborated by a February statement from a Valve executive who, like most anyone in the world, stated the price revision was due to the AI-driven component shortage.

No manufacturer can escape that particular black hole, as even the PlayStation 5 Pro is currently going for $899. Paying a slice more for seemingly superior hardware and a gigantic library of cheap games arguably makes more financial sense if you're a frequent gamer.

Steam Verified is a developer-focused program where game makers ensure that their titles are capable of running on the Deck (meaning they'll run fine under Linux), that the UI elements and text are readable at standard resolutions, and that sensible default graphics settings are used. The baseline performance target was 30 FPS at 1280x800 resolution for the Deck, and now 30 FPS at 1920x1080p for the Machine.

Since those latter figures are bound to cause some confusion, it should be double-noted that they're a baseline — the Machine is advertised as capable of 4K, 60 FPS gameplay with the use of upscaling, or in other words, business as usual. The specifications bear this out, as the CPU therein is a six-core unit with a 30 W TDP target, and the GPU is an RDNA3 design with 28 CUs, a 2.45 GHz clock speed, and a 110 W TDP. For comparison's sake, the entire Steam Deck has a 15 W maximum TDP. The rest of the Verified recommendations for the Machine are exactly the same as the Deck's.

Despite price hikes, Steam hardware remains popular. Just recently, the Steam Deck instantly ran out of stock even after its price was bumped up to $789 and $949, depending on the version. Given that zeitgeist and the general thirst for new hardware, it looks like the Machine will do just fine. We just hope that Valve makes enough of them and does its best to prevent scalping.

Nvidia has been releasing major improvements to its DLSS suite of neural rendering tech throughout 2026. The first major update came at CES with DLSS 4.5 upscaling (or "Super Resolution"), which introduced a more advanced and more computationally intensive transformer AI architecture for better image quality at lower input resolutions. The second was DLSS 4.5 Multi Frame Generation, which introduced 5x and 6x multipliers along with a dynamic mode that shifts multipliers on the fly for the smoothest gameplay experience.

Now, at Computex 2026, Nvidia has revealed DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, its advanced denoiser for better ray-traced and path-traced image quality in games.

For a refresher, DLSS Ray Reconstruction replaces hand-tuned denoisers with a neural rendering model that both infers what pixels should look like in noisy areas where light rays weren't cast and upscales the resulting image to a higher-resolution output. The model uses temporal and spatial inputs from game engines to produce its sharp, stable, and high-fidelity output images.

DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, coming in August, improves this set of techniques in three ways. Using an improved transformer architecture, it can process 35% more input data and uses 20% more parameters within the same compute budget as the previous-generation transformer architecture.

DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction also inherits better spatial awareness and processing of input data from DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution, resulting in more accurate lighting, more stable images, and clearer motion. Nvidia says the mew model has also been trained on a larger data set to improve its utilization of game inputs and offers developers more control over its temporal accumulation behavior, both of which result in improved image quality.

Unlike DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution, which incurs substantial performance penalties on older hardware, DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction will remain 100% compatible with every GeForce RTX GPU, including RTX 20-series and RTX 30-series products.

Nvidia touts a couple of scenarios where DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction makes a big difference in image quality, and the improved performance of the model is indeed easily visible.

In Pragmata, the flickering of a laser trap becomes much more dynamic, and it doesn't leave persistent artifacts when those same lasers deactivate.

And in Alan Wake II, a wall of TVs displaying nothing but static transforms from a mere suggestion into a crisp, convincing reproduction of CRT snow. And the reflections from those TVs on the nearby floor also becomes much more dynamic and lifelike.

Ray Reconstruction has always been the most specialized of the DLSS model family, so it's perhaps unsurprising that it's the last of the three to be updated this year. Nvidia says it'll come to 27 games in August via the Nvidia App, including hits like Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, Pragmata, and Resident Evil Requiem. And of course, it's fully compatible with the Blackwell GPU on the RTX Spark.

The benefits of Ray Reconstruction will soon move beyond games, too. Nvidia is bringing this model to Blender, where it will replace slow denoisers that incur significant wait times for the viewport to re-stabilize every time the camera is moved. Along with Nvidia Optix, Ray Reconstruction in Blender promises a much more interactive viewport experience and near-final image quality, resulting in a better representation of one's creative vision and less disruption to the creative flow state.

We'll be going hands-on with some of Nvidia's latest products and releases at Computex 2026, and it's likely we'll be able to see DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction in action. Stay tuned for more details as we get them.

Epic Games' outspoken CEO Tim Sweeney has taken to X to criticize Valve over its recent price hike of the Steam Deck. Valve raised the prices ofits handheld this week, with the 1TB model now costing $949. Even though many consoles have seen their prices jump by $50 to $100 in recent months, this is still nothing compared to the extra $240 to $300 that Valve slapped on the Steam Deck. The increases have been driven by the memory and chip shortages stemming from the AI infrastructure build-out, but Sweeney wasted no time criticizing Valve on X for the much higher price increases it applied.

While his post initially mentioned the significant rise in component costs, which everyone is suffering from, he eventually ended it with “severe disruptions in the component parts supply chain for megayachts” in an apparent potshot at Valve CEO Gabe Newell’s penchant for superyachts. While Newell's Valve is behind some of the most notable game franchises in history, including Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, and Counter-Strike, he also has a love for massive sea-going vessels. Luxury Launches reports that he owns six vessels, including the 365-foot (111-m) superyacht Leviathan that he took delivery of in 2025, totaling around a billion dollars in value (and not counting the millions he’s spending on maintenance, crews, and other costs). He uses the vessels privately, but also for marine research and ocean exploration.

Valve’s hardware is generally designed to compete against gaming PCs and does not face off with dedicated gaming consoles that have their hardware costs subsidized by sales of gaming titles. So, if we compare the 512GB Steam Deck’s $789 against the Lenovo Legion Go 2 and the Asus ROG Xbox Ally, you’d find that it’s still within the same price range.

As for the rumored Steam Machine, the company hasn’t announced the living room PC console’s price yet, but Valve said that it won’t subsidize it to make its price closer to the PlayStation or Xbox. Instead, it will be priced similarly to other gaming PC builds — and with memory and storage chip prices the way they are right now, it's possible the Steam Machine may be priced at or above $1,000. But, at the very least, you’d own the hardware you buy, and you can freely replace SteamOS with another operating system should you want to do so.

Call of Duty has a massive gravitational pull. With Modern Warfare 4, developer Infinity Ward has detailed performance optimizations and extensive graphical options for the PC port. Infinity Ward went as far as saying this title has a "focus on PC." The studio also dropped support for older consoles for this release, too — only PlayStation 5/Pro, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2 owners need apply.

For this entry, Infinity Ward promises a "major leap in visual quality," and says the game was "built natively for current-generation consoles and PC", something many might take to mean that the graphics engine is now free from whichever technical shackles kept it bound to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

When it comes to PC specifics, the studio had a lot to say, namely that there will be platform-specific performance optimizations, and that MW4 will include "multiple upscaling and frame generation options" among "extended graphics options" including support for Nvidia's excellent DLSS 4.5.

Any AAA release on PC is now expected to have extensive graphical options, upscaling, and frame generation from the get-go, but Infinity Ward's statement is very much welcome regardless — particularly in a landscape of high-budget releases that don't even look all that great while having downright unreal system requirements to run halfway decently.

The studio says the PC version of the graphics engine offers better ray-tracing and faster-performing ray-traced reflections (all likely due to Ray Reconstruction features of both Nvidia and AMD cards), as well as higher-quality ambient occlusion, shadows, and volumetric effects. Infinity Ward also calls out "competitive-focused settings" to prioritize FPS during intense matches.

Should it pan out as advertised, Infinity Ward's efforts will be a breath of fresh air. There's no denying the graphical brilliance of the games, but broadly speaking, the PC releases of contemporary entries have been mixed when it comes to performance. While the multiplayer portions are generally well-optimized due to the hyper-fast nature of the gameplay, the single-player campaigns have long been plagued by stuttering, mainly induced by on-demand shader compilation, eliciting entire treatises on how to tune game and driver settings.

There's also the fact that in this day and age, neither new graphics cards nor fresh consoles are bound to happen soon thanks to the AI hardware crunch. In turn, this hopefully forces major studios and publishers to actually devote more resources to optimization, instead of riding the now-flat wave of regular hardware upgrades. The subpar performance and graphics of far too many modern titles can't hold a lumen to efforts like Crimson Desert, Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, and God of War Ragnarök. Maybe studios not having new hardware to play with is a blessing, so they can work on actually making use of the hardware we already have.

DIY gaming enthusiasts have repurposed ASRock’s BC-250 mining boards into “Steam Machines” since late 2025, when the boards started appearing on eBay for well under $150. The board comes equipped with a PS5-derived SoC and 16GB of GDDR6 memory, making it a capable platform for playing PC games via Linux distros such as Bazzite. Now, YouTuber ETA Prime reports that someone has figured out how to unlock the SoC’s 40 CUs, giving the mining blade more GPU cores than a base PS5.

The 40 CU hack comes via a driver-level register patch from a GitHub post by duggasco (via Old Lamer on YouTube). The patch unlocks all 40CUs through a kernel module parameter that writes to two hardware registers during GPU driver initialization. The hack not only unlocks all the CUs on the SoC but also boosts power consumption to 125W at 1,500 MHz. The GitHub poster recommends that users set the GPU at 1,500 MHz at 900 mV to keep temperatures in check. Overclocking the GPU to 2GHz, a common overclock on these boards, overwhelms the cooling system.

Unlocking the full 40 CUs gives the BC-250 nearly double the amount of GPU cores to work with. The mining board comes with B-grade PS5 dies, resulting in only 24 CUs unlocked out of the box to avoid enabling potentially defective cores on the SoC. As a result, switching on all 40 CUs on the chip does not magically make any potentially defective cores functional and should be done with caution.

ETA Prime recorded up to a 28% performance increase with the extra 16 CUs unlocked. In Cyberpunk 2077, the 40 CU configuration achieved 17% greater performance, reaching 42 FPS compared to 36 FPS with the stock configuration. Hitman 3 similarly achieved 19% better performance with the 40 CU configuration, reaching 69 FPS compared to 58 FPS with the stock 24 CU configuration. GTA 5 saw a 24% improvement with the 40 CU configuration, reaching 72 FPS compared to 58 FPS with the console running the stock 24 CU configuration. Finally, Spider-Man 2 achieved 28% greater performance, achieving 46 FPS compared to 36 FPS with the stock 24 CU configuration. All of the aforementioned games were tested at 1080p high settings with the GPU clocked at 2 GHz.

The YouTuber’s benchmarks show that the extra CUs provide a significant performance boost for the mining board. The only caveat is that BC-250 owners will need to win the silicon lottery — having 40 perfectly working CUs to make the hack functional. That said, the hack also supports activating 32 or 38 CUs, so owners who didn’t win the silicon lottery aren’t left completely in the dust. The extra performance only makes the BC-250 an even better option for DIYers to build a cheap, yet capable gaming machine during the RAM crisis. For the uninitiated, the BC-250 does not require dedicated RAM featuring 16GB of GDDR6 memory.

Star Citizen was first unveiled to the world back on October 10, 2012, with a promise to revive the space sim genre on an unprecedented scale. Cloud Imperium, the studio behind the game, initially chose to crowdfund it through Kickstarter but switched to its own platform later once the project expanded in scope. Nearly 14 years later, Star Citizen has just crossed $1 billion in total funding, and there's still no release date in sight.

To be clear, you can play Star Citizen right now; the game does exist in an alpha state with most of the promised features already included, but it's riddled with bugs. Cloud Imperium releases timely updates to add new items and gameplay, along with some very expensive microtransactions. If you back the project, you're given a pledge ship that should be playable in-game... in most cases.

Recently, during the DefenseCon event, the studio revealed the "Anvil Odin" ship that costs $5,000, even though you can't fly it yet. It's supposed to drop via a content patch later on as the team continues development. That's been the story of Star Citizen in general forever — the game seems to be stuck in a perpetual development cycle with over 1,000 employees across various studio locations working on it together.

To put the numbers into context, GTA VI (based on reports) is the only other game in history to have a $1 billion budget. Ubisoft's Beyond Good and Evil 2, originally announced back in 2007, is perhaps the only project predating Star Citizen. It's still unreleased, but unlike Star Citizen's crowdfunded approach, Ubisoft has been working on that game behind closed doors with a private payroll.

Moreover, when Star Citizen was announced, the PS3 and Xbox 360 were nearing end-of-life, and now the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S are nearing end-of-life. This game's development has already spanned across three different console generations. By the time it's out, it would need to be released on PS6 and Xbox Helix as well, which itself raises questions about whether we'll get an outdated product at the end.

Christ Roberts, the architect behind Star Citizen, has hinted at a 2027-2028 release date, saying that the studio plans to formally launch it in a year or two after 'Squadron 42' is out. Squadron 42 is a single-player cinematic adventure set in the same universe. It was announced alongside Star Citizen as a linear, story-focused experience, with both titles originally carrying a 2014 release window.

What changed between now and then is, seemingly, the scale of the project. There was an engine switch from CryEngine to the in-house StarEngine to allow for 64-bit precision. Cloud Imperium added Persistent Entity Streaming (PES) to track object locations in real-time across servers. To make that seamless, Server Meshing was introduced, stitching multiple servers into one universe, dynamically switching players between them as they pass planets.

Squadron 42 is currently aiming for a release sometime in 2026, but there's no concrete release date, which is concerning given its unique track record. Star Citizen is by far the most expensive crowdfunded game in history, but also one of the most successful ones, since people just keep giving these guys more and more money. Fun fact: Tom's Hardware covered Star Citizen for the first time in late 2012, almost 14 years ago.

007: First Light, developed by IO Interactive (of Hitman fame), is one of the most anticipated games coming out this year, but it seems to have hit a roadblock right before the finishing line. The game's Steam listing has just revealed that it comes with "Denovo Anti-Tamper" DRM to safeguard against piracy on PC. As you'd expect, customers who paid for the game in advance are frustrated.

Steam Forums for the latest James Bond adventure are now filled with players expressing their disappointment and, conversely, a few trolls showing gratitude for the DRM's inclusion. To be clear, pretty much every modern game release on PC is protected by DRM to some degree; Steam has a built-in DRM feature that many titles use as a basic precaution, for instance. It's easy to bypass, however, as it usually requires just swapping out a single .dll file with a fake one that passes the ownership check.

That being said, adding Denuvo is a deliberate choice. The software has even been found to affect FPS in certain cases, and it's not free. Studios spent millions to incorporate it in their titles, only for it to end up affecting the people who actually bought the game. The pirates will always find a way, whether it's through hypervisor bypasses or just conventional cracks that break the DRM entirely.

Speaking of which, all current versions of Denuvo have already been cracked by a new voice in the community. Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight was pirated on day one, coinciding with the game's official launch just yesterday. It was in early access for three days before that for those who pre-ordered it, which is likely the window of opportunity the pirate utilized to ready the crack.

Therefore, 007: First Light shipping with Denuvo only hurts paying customers who might experience slightly worse performance because the DRM is consuming CPU cycles. It's one of the most common misconceptions in the community that Denuvo Anti-Tamper runs at the kernel level — it does not; those are anti-cheat programs. Denuvo runs entirely in user space and is embedded inside the game's executable.

That's why mods that alter the game's .exe file in any way are shut down because of Denuvo's strict memory-injecting protections. Also, if your internet ever goes down and the game hasn't pinged Denuvo's servers for more than 48 hours, it may even refuse to launch. There is an entire Steam Forums page dedicated to these lockouts, and we recently saw the PlayStation community fall into turmoil because of a similar policy, too.

Now, we're not going to sit here and pretend that piracy will magically fade away if there's no Denuvo to incentivize the pirates even more. Those familiar with the seven seas will chart that course no matter what, but it ends up being a paradox for the paying customer. From the developers' perspective, it's a no-brainer to use DRM to maximize sales rather than to protect the customer who has already paid.

And it's not like the devs don't have any other choice to curb illegal installs; Cyberpunk 2077 famously dropped without DRM and in a broken state, but it's since established itself as one of the most successful games in recent memory. Of course, we don't condone piracy, but a good game should and will sell on the merit of its quality.

Moreover, piracy is actually shown to increase overall sales, according to a 2017 European Commission report, a few years after Denuvo launched. Illegal users often convert to paying ones. Some people use pirated games as demos before buying the real thing, and many of us pirated games in our childhood, which led us to become part of the hobby as paying adults, adding another customer to the industry.

It has been less than a month since the Steam Controller launch, and the device has already nearly caused a fire for at least one person. Redditor Toikka on the Steamcontroller subreddit revealed a nearly catastrophic incident involving their Steam Controller’s magnetic puck charger arcing electricity after attaching itself to foreign metallic material.

This unfortunate circumstance occurred when the Steam Controller owner was charging their Pixel Watch 3 in close proximity to their Steam Controller charging puck. The puck's magnetic attraction was strong enough for the Pixel Watch’s wristband to contact the puck's pogo pins, causing the device to short-circuit and heat up. Luckily, the owner managed to remove the wristband from the puck before any real damage occurred. The damage was purely cosmetic, consisting of dark spots on the Steam Controller puck and burn marks on the Pixel Watch wristband.

PSA: Watch out for the exposed contacts of the Puck! Almost started a fire due to metallic smartwatch strap from r/SteamController

The event exposed a design oversight in the Steam Controller’s charging puck. The exposed pogo pins will conduct electricity to any metal surface that makes contact with them. Many of the responses in the aforementioned Reddit post highlight this oversight, with several comments recommending that Valve add a data pin to the charger to ensure it knows it is connected to a Steam Controller rather than some random object.

Thankfully, Valve responded to Toikka and is reportedly investigating the charging incident. Valve may release a revised charging puck in the future that addresses this issue, but we’ll have to wait and see.

For now, this story serves as a good lesson to Steam Controller owners to proactively watch where their charging pucks are located, especially surrounding other magically attracted objects and devices. For more details, the Steam Controller’s manual also highlights this problem and warns against putting magnetically sensitive devices near the puck. Valve even mentions possible disruptions to some medical devices if the puck is in close proximity.

The Steam Controller is Valve's latest gaming product that takes the input controls from the Steam Deck and squeezes them down into a controller form factor. The controller is available for $99 on the Steam store and features 35+ hours of battery life.

A retro PC enthusiast has modified the VBIOS of a vintage graphics card to embed a version of Snake – the game everyone used to play on their dumb phones. This tiny dose of serpentum fun is playable whenever the system is booted, and once exited, the PC will continue to boot as normal. Bits und Bolts completed this S3 ViRGE DX mod by hacking the VBIOS and injecting Snake 512, a free version of the game condensed into just 512 bytes and written in x86 assembly.

Before the Snake 512 embed was wrangled, Bits und Bolts decided to mod the S3 ViRGE VBIOS by adding a dynamic (text) splash screen to show the actual GPU frequency. This effort is bolted on to prior work where the TechTuber injected a graphical splash screen, and the task takes up roughly the first half of the video.

From 10 minutes 43 seconds in, we get to see the vintage computing enthusiast inject Snake 512 into the video card BIOS. Snake 512 was designed to fit in the 512 bytes of a disk boot sector and run in x86 real mode. Bits und Bolts thought this OS-independent assembly code was thus a great fit for wedging into a VBIOS.

The intrepid vintage computer fan couldn’t just copy the GitHub code and paste it into the BIOS. So, Claude Code was consulted to prepare the commented GitHub code and turn it into hexadecimal code suitable for injecting into a VBIOS.

With this code ready to be pasted, Bits und Bolts opens up the S3 ViRGE VBIOS in Ghidra, a reverse engineering framework developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States. This tool is now free, open source, and available on GitHub.

Next, an empty section of the target file was found, just after the splash screen, and the new code was pasted. The code block needed referencing / patching, so it would be triggered after the splash screen rather than just be ignored at boot. Then the checksum needed fixing.

The way Snake 512 in a VBIOS was implemented was as follows:

• Power up the system
• Embedded modded image splash screen displays
• Prompt offers option to play Snake (press N) or skip (Esc)
• The prompt also times out, so boot will continue if there is no user input.
• N – play Snake game
• Esc – system reads and shows actual GPU clock
• Booting continues

Please note that USB keyboards don’t work with this implementation of Snake 512. Also, there is no sound. However, with everything running as intended, Bits und Bolts moves on to some further customization - editing the Snake 512 game colors (in Ghidra again). The vintage computing enthusiast had previously bookmarked sections of the code where colors for the border, background, snake head, snake body, and others were defined. Now these were edited to other values from the VGA color palette using hex values for appropriate rows/columns. At the end of the video, with everything working and colored as intended, the TechTuber quips, “Who says the ViRGE can’t play games?”

The last time we wrote about the escapades of Bits und Bolts was when they modded the S3 ViRGE DX VBIOS to disable the ‘pedestal bit,’ which caused S3 graphics blacks to be rendered as a dark grey. We’ve also previously reported on a Doom port that was released as a Coreboot BIOS payload (of course, it is too big to actually go in the BIOS).

As AI buildouts continue to consume the global DRAM supply, and prices of SSDs, graphics cards, and memory continue to hover at vastly inflated prices, 60% of PC gamers have no plans to build a new PC in the next two years, according to data collected by Tom's Hardware. In a survey taken by more than 1,500 readers in May, exactly 60% confirmed that they are waiting two years or more to build their next PC.

It's no secret that the PC gaming industry is on its knees, driven by a global shortage of vital components required for building AI data centers. 32GB of RAM now costs $360, while most SSDs aren't much cheaper. DRAM supply and pricing pressure are also impacting graphics cards, which are succumbing to shortages and pricing increases to match the heady heights of the bitcoin mining frenzy.

Aside from the odd Newegg bundle, building a PC in 2026 is a bleak prospect, and it appears that new SKUs such as AMD's Ryzen 7 9850X3D and Intel's plucky Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs haven't been enough to buoy a stagnating market.

As noted, the vast majority of readers who took the survey indicated that it would be at least two years before they considered building a new PC. Of the remaining 40%, only 15% of our total respondents said they were building a PC in the next two years, while only 25% of readers have any plans to try and attempt a new build in the next 12 months.

As you might expect, the intent and desire to build largely drops proportionately as the timeline shortens, reflecting the grim market conditions. A total of just 15% of respondents will build a PC in the next six months, and a total of only 10% will build one in the next three.

Plenty of our readers are likely rocking potent builds that don't need upgrading in the next two years, but the results more likely reflect a general trend amongst PC builders that the market in its current state is unviable. No doubt, some of you are hanging on for retail events like Amazon Prime Day or, more likely, the Black Friday sales. However, discounts at those events are unlikely to yield anything close to a return to pre-AI crunch pricing.

Android PC gaming is slowly taking off, with apps such as GameNative and GameHub making it possible for everyday Android gamers to install and run PC games from their mobile devices. Now, PC-centric gaming features are also trickling over to Android, specifically, multi-frame generation. A new update for the GameNative Android app has unlocked support for Lossless Scaling's multi-frame generation technology.

LSFG's frame generation tech works a bit differently in GameNative compared to how the app behaves on a normal Windows desktop PC. The tech must be enabled on a per-game basis and requires the user to enable frame generation in the GameNative container settings, after which the app is downloaded through the user's Steam account.

After this initial setup, frame generation can be activated in the quick access menu, where you can adjust the frame generation multiplier, flow scale, and switch to a performance-focused version of the FG-model.

In the patch notes, a demo run of the tech was shown using The Last of Us Part 1, with an OSD showing frame rate, CPU, and GPU utilization. Working off a base frame rate of 30 FPS, the game's frame rate doubled to 60 FPS with LSFG-VK's 2x FG multiplier, 80 FPS with 3x FG, and 100 FPS with 4x FG.

Having multi-frame generation in GameNative will help Android devices achieve triple-digit FPS while playing PC games. Most importantly, multi-frame generation can be used to fully saturate the high-refresh-rate screens found on many mid-range and high-end Android devices. This tech won't improve responsiveness, but games will look smoother.

In the current landscape of PC gaming on Android, multi-frame generation will likely be the only way to achieve triple-digit FPS in heavier PC titles. We've seen AAA titles such as Cyberpunk 2077 run at over 60 FPS on the liquid-cooled RedMagic 11 Pro, but most people don't have this type of hardware at their disposal.

GameNative is one of a handful of Android apps capable of running PC games and comes with the necessary translation layers to do so. We recently tested GameNative but found it has teething issues with driver and API support.

Developers at Respawn Entertainment have fixed a potential performance issue in its popular free-to-play battle-royale game Apex Legends. According to the latest patch notes for the upcoming Season 29 'Overclocked' update, players can expect improved performance with reduced stuttering at high frame rates on some PCs. Somewhat counterintuitively, the patch notes specifically call out the high performance of AMD's V-Cache-equipped Ryzen X3D chips as a reason for the stutter.

Fast-paced shooters running on older engines, like the modified Source engine that powers Apex Legends, aren’t always optimized for high frame rates. In these cases, physics calculations can potentially become a bottleneck. Since physics updates must be completed before each frame is passed off to the GPU to be rendered, complex scenarios like explosions, ragdolls, or multiple object interactions can stall the main thread and lead to inconsistencies.

Respawn specifically calls out stutter at frame rates above 240 FPS, which is something of a special case with Apex Legends because the title has a 144 FPS cap by default. An alternate 300 FPS cap can be applied with a launch option for those with more powerful systems.

With the 300 FPS cap applied, at such high frame rates, the entire render loop has to be completed in under four milliseconds at best, and any time the CPU spends holding up the GPU due to inefficient physics calculations is likely to appear as a stutter or frame rate drop.

Because Ryzen X3D processors allow the latest GPUs to approach that 300 FPS cap in Apex Legends, any such flaws in the algorithms the game uses for physics are more likely to be seen.

In a similar case reported last year, a professional Counter-Strike 2 player highlighted performance issues on high-end hardware, complaining that the game struggled to maintain stable FPS on AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D with frame rates dipping below 200 FPS.

• Improved occlusion data structures that were used by Olympus in the last midseason update are now used for all maps, slightly improving CPU performance.
• Fixed an issue that could lead to an occasional framerate dip when running at very high FPS on PC (e.g., 240+).
• Cleaner Ambient Occlusion, which includes new specular occlusion. This will also be faster than the previous Ambient Occlusion in most cases, except at High or Ultra settings at high resolutions (4K on PC).
• Improved accuracy of cubemap reflection intensity, especially in shadowed outdoor areas.
• Improved accuracy of sky ambient lighting.
• Improved baked lighting accuracy for many props in maps.

The latest season of Apex Legends is out now and introduces a brand-new legend (character) called Axle. The new update also brings changes to existing legends including Vantage, Conduit, Alter and Ash. One of the biggest changes is the brand new deathbox respawn system, alongside a new mythic universal melee, and the usual changes to weapons and map rotation. You can read the entire set of patch notes here.

We've reported previously on the feats of the skull-and-bones community against Denuvo's DRM. The cat-and-mouse game has essentially come to a head for now, as the pirate crew has "officially" reported that, as of yesterday, there were zero games with Denuvo that haven't been cracked or bypassed.

This development should be of little surprise to those following this story along, but here's a quick recap: in late 2025, the MKDev collective and the prolific DenuvOwO came up with a hypervisor-based bypass (HVB) that installs a kernel-level driver to intercept and respond to Denuvo's checks. While that's not an actual crack, it's good enough for piracy work, as the saying goes. Simultaneously, voices38, a well-known cracker, also fully stripped a few choice titles of Denuvo entirely, including recent releases like Resident Evil: Requiem.

As a somewhat predictable response, Denuvo and 2K Games reportedly just added a 14-day mandatory online check to several titles, including NBA 2K25, NBA 2K26, and Marvel's Midnight Suns. This is impossible for the HVB to emulate, as it's a request/response call to Denuvo's servers and thus in practice can't be replicated. At some point, the code that executes this check could be removed, but that requires a full game crack rather than the HBP.

This harkens back to the dark ages of online requirements for single-player games and is likely to pose a problem for gamers with spotty internet connections or who travel a lot. Needless to say, honest gamers will also be locked out of their games if Denuvo's servers experience problems, too. The "new" check differs from the existing one-time activation that Denuvo performs when the game is first launched, which persists until a hardware or software change.

Regardless, it wasn't difficult to imagine that sooner or later, all extant Denuvo-protected games would fall to the pair of proverbial swords. "Sooner" was the safest bet, and its bell rang yesterday, when the list of uncracked or non-bypassed games dropped to zero. Moreover, while the HVB method previously required users to disable most every single one of Windows' security measures, the current "V3" method has a relatively minor impact on prospective gamers' PCs.

As it stands, to run a HVB game, one needs "only" to disable Core Isolation (aka Memory Protection), and then toggle Driver Signature Enforcement off (DSE), run the game, and turn DSE back on. In fact, the most recent version of the famous "VBS.cmd" script is reportedly even easier to use, and game-agnostic to boot.

Although keeping Memory Integrity off still opens up a significant attack surface, and gamers are required to trust pirates with installing a kernel-level driver, the situation is a far cry (pun intended) from the early 2026 days when it was even necessary to fiddle with motherboards' UEFI and disable Secure Boot.

The eyepatch-wearing community is patting itself on the back, with known repacker FitGirl congratulating the collective efforts of DenuvOwO and voices38, as good an endorsement as they come within that crowd. It's also an implicit seal of approval for the relative security of the releases in question, as FitGirl is widely trusted as a release curator.

It is easy to get sucked into Steam Sale fever and end up buying more games than you have the time or the inclination to play. However, it is still surprising to see that at least 120 people have collections with 20,000 or more games, according to SteamDB’s latest figures. Number one on the leaderboard is Sonix, with a Steam game collection of 43,085 Steam games worth nearly $750,000 at today’s prices.

We guess many readers will be familiar with the experience of a digital games library growing into astronomical numbers. But personal three or four-figure game collections are relatively small when you see what the Steam whales are up to.

Three Steam gamers have over 40,000 games in their bulging entertainment libraries. That’s a huge number of games. Last September, we reported on Sonix becoming the first to earn the 40K badge; now, they are one of three to earn that ‘honor.’

So, what of the other 120 folks who have 20,000 or more games in their collection? Number 120, Cheltan, is a Japanese user who has been on Steam for over 17 years. Their 20,005-strong collection is worth $148,596 at today’s prices. Surely they got a lot of the titles in the sales, though, with an average paid game price of $7.47.

Cheltan’s game-playing stats are interesting, but not unusual for this kind of user. For example, they have 'only' played 8,732 out of the 21,938 games they have access to on Steam (paid and free titles). Their average playtime is 4.7 hours, and the average price per hour of gaming fun is $0.92.

The last time we looked at these colossal Steam game collections, we estimated that playing through a 40,000-game collection would take seven full years, nonstop. At a more reasonable 8-hours-per-day workload, make that 21 years. Moreover, if it takes just a single minute to purchase a game, and ‘working’ 8-hour days again, one would need three months to build such a library.

Buying games twice because they are a bargain

Many gamers will admit they have hundreds or thousands of games in their libraries and probably can’t remember most of them. I have 140 games, Steam informs me, but I know I have bought the same game twice occasionally, after seeing an irresistible sale somewhere and purchasing it before realizing. Remember, PC gaming bargains can be had directly and via bundles, third-party sales and offers, and more. Using a third-party key store means you aren't saved from purchasing duplicates by the Steam checkout system.

It’s been a banner year for Capcom fans. On the heels of Resident Evil Requiem, we now get Pragmata, a totally new sci-fi shooter that offers not only an intriguing premise but also a boatload of the latest technical features to tantalize PC gamers. We've tested Pragmata across 18 GPUs over the past few days to find the best ways to play.

Pragmata tells the story of Hugh, the only surviving member of an ill-fated lunar rescue team, and Diana, an adorable android with handy hacking skills, as they work together to navigate a giant 3D-printed lunar facility called the Cradle. They face off against an AI overseer and a menagerie of additively manufactured robots that are all working to stop their attempts to escape.

This title’s core combat blends strategic gunplay (courtesy of Hugh) and puzzle solving under pressure (courtesy of Diana) to blast bots back into the Lunafilament from which they’re made. That blend of mechanics immediately feels fresh and rewarding, and in tandem with its intriguing lunar setting, it’s one of the few games of late that’s really grabbed me and made me want to play through to the end.

Beyond its catchy premise, Pragmata is a technical tour de force, and that’s been my focus as I’ve tested over a dozen graphics cards with it over the past few days. Like Resident Evil Requiem, it uses the latest RE Engine to deliver path tracing for realistic lighting effects on cutting-edge hardware.

Pragmata is being heavily promoted by Nvidia, so it’s no surprise that it offers almost every cutting-edge DLSS feature. DLSS upscaling, Ray Reconstruction, and Frame Generation are all present as you would expect. Possibly due to that heavy promotional tie-in, this game’s much-touted path tracing mode is exclusive to GeForce cards. That feature exclusivity isn’t anything new for Capcom in 2026, as Resident Evil Requiem also locked its path-tracing to GeForces.

In any case, that Radeon lockout is disappointing, and it seems motivated more by business reasons than by any technical limitation. As you’ll see, Radeon RX 9000-series cards perform exceptionally well in this title, and AMD has a similar (if not 100% comparable) suite of FSR tech to compete with Nvidia’s software stack that Capcom could have drawn on if it wanted to here. But in a world where Nvidia holds the vast majority of the gaming GPU market on top of its oceans of AI cash flow, money talks, we suppose.

On AMD, you get FSR 3 upscaling as a baseline and FSR 4 support with Radeon RX 9000-series cards, as well as welcome support for FSR ML Frame Generation. Older RX 7000- and RX 6000-series cards only get FSR 3 upscaling and framegen, and we can confirm that FSR 4 is a noticeable step up, especially for framegen. Intel Arc gamers don’t get any XeSS features, so they’ll have to rely on FSR 3 for a performance boost, as well.

Image quality comparisons and notes

Before engaging in performance testing, we played through a few hours of Pragmata and made some notes regarding the benefits and shortcomings of each available rendering mode: pure rasterization, RT, and path tracing. We present these first so that you can understand what you're getting in exchange for your GPU cycles with each major rendering mode. Many of the issues and differences we call out are most noticeable in motion, but we’ve done our best to convey them via text and still images.

The above gallery shows raster image quality with maximum settings at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K, alternating between TAA and DLAA. (Use the button in the lower right to expand them to full screen, then click "View Original" in the lower right to pixel-peep with maximum fidelity.)

The base raster image of Pragmata with the RE Engine’s TAA is visibly and distractingly noisy or fuzzy across large parts of the scene at 1080p. Those issues are most prominent in reflections, and given how shiny everything is in the Cradle, you'll see them a lot. At best, that fuzziness is distracting; at worst, it greatly degrades image quality. Raising the resolution to 1440p or 4K helps, but not entirely. DLSS and FSR also help to clean up some of this noise, but not all of it.

Without RT or PT, you can often see prominent screen-space rendering errors in reflections and at the edges of the viewport. For example, walking over a reflection of a video screen on the floor of the Shelter hub area will “erase” large areas of it as you move, and you can see reflections disappear at the edges of the screen.

Hugh’s self-reflection will appear on some surfaces in the Cradle with rasterization, but you might see only part of his suit in that surface. These errors aren’t ruinous, but they do break your sense of immersion and remind you that you’re looking at a game, not real life. You can see how this scenario "should" look with the PT comparison image above.

Pragmata also has some other small rendering issues on all 8GB cards across vendors that feel like they made it past QA. You might notice corrupted geometry on some models with those cards that isn’t part of the game’s overall art direction. Hopefully, those minor issues get ironed out in future patches.

Ray-traced image quality

Enabling ray tracing improves the quality of reflections on some surfaces and cleans up much of the fuzziness we saw in the base raster image for all GPU vendors. As you’ll see in our performance results, it’s a fairly lightweight implementation, so it's widely usable if you want to give it a shot. The issue is that RT causes new image quality problems. It eliminates the screen-space rendering errors noted above, but the new reflections it introduces are rather faint and blobby.

Worse, enabling RT sometimes removes large areas of convincing screen-space reflections, leading to a presentation that’s actually duller than with RT off. See the screenshots of the view of the Earth from the Cradle above, where the progression is through raster, RT, and then path tracing.

Assuming this isn’t just a bug, such massive changes in the basic appearance of the game make us want to avoid Pragmata’s basic RT implementation entirely. (Even path tracing loses the framing of the geodesic dome here, to be fair, but the difference isn't as drastic.) It's one thing if RT makes a good thing better, but it's another entirely if it makes things worse.

RT can also cause large, blotchy areas of noise in ray-traced reflections and on some surfaces. These artifacts most distractingly appear after rapid disocclusion (a near object moving in front of a more distant reflection, for example), but they can also just be present on static surfaces at random.

All that suggests the RE Engine’s in-house denoiser isn’t doing a great job, and because DLSS Ray Reconstruction is locked behind path tracing and AMD’s FSR Ray Regeneration isn’t present at all, you just have to suck it up. In general, we’d probably not enable plain old RT in this title, given the issues we saw.

Path-traced image quality

Path tracing is a major step up in image quality and stability for Pragmata, at least if you have a GeForce card. Thanks to the combination of DLSS upscaling and DLSS Ray Reconstruction, virtually all noisy or “fizzy” elements of the moving RT image are corrected, and the intrusive screen-space rendering errors we noted earlier are absent.

Nvidia notes that path tracing allows for better shadows, reflections, ambient occlusion, and dynamic diffuse global illumination. In practice, those effects make the Cradle feel more real and immersive. Different materials clearly reflect light in lifelike ways. Glass is much more reflective, and you’ll see vivid differences between rougher and smoother metal surfaces.

Crisp, high-resolution reflections appear on some surfaces like car windows and puddles that only get blurrier, lower-fidelity versions with RT, as you can see in the gallery above.

The best moments with path tracing come as little surprises that make you stop and retrace your steps to confirm what you just saw. For just one example, the hair stood up on the back of my neck when I saw Hugh and Diana’s eerie reflection, lit only by a nearby control panel, in a glass window in a darkened hallway. Those reflections are completely absent without RT, only weak with RT, and crystal clear with path tracing.

In the elevator sequence above, you can see how the first path-traced image allows the ring of red lights on the shaft walls to create deep, diffuse reflections across the entire platform surface. Those reflections are missing entirely with rasterization and RT, and the RT image is made worse by giant smears of noise that appear alongside the moving platform. It looks pretty rough in the still image here, but it's eyebrow-raising in motion.

As you’ll see in our performance results, path tracing is hugely computationally expensive, but the combination of DLSS 4.5 upscaling and frame generation makes it a surprisingly accessible experience when those features are all used in concert.

The combination of Ray Reconstruction and path tracing isn’t entirely free of issues, though. Some translucent elements of in-game computer displays or UIs that are sharp under raster or RT rendering get smeary for no apparent reason with path tracing enabled, and textures on some reflective surfaces get lost entirely in favor of perfect mirror smoothness. Since Ray Reconstruction can only be toggled on with PT, it’s impossible to isolate this issue to one setting or the other.

Path tracing also seems inconsistently applied in Pragmata. In the street scene we explored, the windows on some vehicles get the lifelike reflections you'd expect; others, just a few feet over, are stuck with the duller, blobbier reflections that seem typical of standard RT. Whether this is an oversight or an optimization decision, we're not sure, but it goes to show that technical features and art direction have to go hand-in-hand for maximum effect.

Now that we've run through Pragmata's image quality, let's see what kind of rendering horsepower it takes to deliver these results.

Our testing methods

As always, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. We took careful note of any outliers or unexpected results and re-ran tests as necessary to iron out any wrinkles in our data.

Our 2026 GPU test system uses the following components:

We tested using the following graphics driver versions from each vendor:

• Nvidia Game Ready Driver 595.97 WHQL
• AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 26.3.1 WHQL
• Intel Game On Driver version 32.0.101.8629 WHQL

We gathered our Pragmata performance data in the Interconnecting Passage area of the Mass Production Array level, which resembles Times Square and is full of cars, buses, and puddles that all catch reflections from the giant screens and signs that ring the area. It’s much more demanding than the confined interior corridors of the Cradle.

Graphics cards that can manage stable performance in the Shelter hub area or similar confined spaces can fall flat once you reach the more expansive “outdoor” areas like the one we tested, so we favored this more demanding scenario to highlight any potential performance cliffs.

Raster gaming performance

Starting at 1080p max settings, it’s obvious that Pragmata runs great on Radeons, allowing the RX 9070 and 9070 XT unusual victories over the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080. But you don’t need an expensive card for a good time here. Even the RTX 5050 hands in a 60 FPS average.

The minimum-spec RTX 3060 12GB falls shy of that mark, though, and the RE Engine isn’t kind to the Arc B580, either. Both of those cards might benefit from lower settings or upscaling, or both, here.

At 1440p, 60 FPS can be had from the RTX 5060 Ti on up, and higher-refresh-rate power is easily accessible through the still relatively affordable RTX 5070 and RX 9070. At 4K, though, you’ll really want an RX 9070 or RTX 5070 Ti or better for a 60 FPS experience.

We didn’t have time to test a wide range of older cards in this title, but we were able to work in a couple for your reference. The midrange RTX 4070 and RX 7800 XT hang out near the middle of our charts across the board, while the older RTX 3070 and RX 6700 XT go neck and neck toward the back of the pack. Check out the GPU benchmark hierarchy if you need to know how your own graphics card compares to these reference points.

Despite its extra VRAM versus the 3070, the RX 6700 XT doesn’t distance itself from that card until we hit 4K, emphasizing the fact that maxing out Pragmata’s raster eye candy doesn’t ask for a lot of VRAM in return. That same trend applies to the RTX 3060 and its 12GB of VRAM. You’ll run out of horsepower well before that card’s extra memory makes a difference versus the 8GB RTX 3070.

Ray-traced gaming performance

Pragmata’s basic RT implementation is relatively easy on hardware compared to many we’ve seen, and every card but the RTX 5050 can still put up a 60 FPS average at 1080p. At 1440p, however, 12GB and 16GB cards start to separate themselves from their 8GB stablemates, as the RX 9060 XT 16GB and RTX 5060 Ti 16GB show. And at 4K, only the most powerful cards can turn in a 60-FPS-ish baseline without upscaling.

Path tracing performance with upscaling and frame generation

Our performance analysis of path tracing in Pragmata has several layers we need to build up for a full picture, so get comfortable. We'll start with native PT performance across all the Nvidia cards that support it.

Native path tracing is a whole different beast than ray tracing in Pragmata. Only the RTX 5090 can clear 60 FPS at 1080p, and performance rapidly falls off from there. Our 4K results are purely academic for even the RTX 5090.

Nvidia and Capcom clearly expect you to use upscaling and some degree of framegen to achieve a playable experience with path tracing enabled, and unless you’re on an older card that simply doesn’t support DLSS Frame Generation or Multi Frame Generation, that’s a totally reasonable bargain at this stage.

As we’ve explored in past coverage, as long as your input latency remains within reasonable bounds, the image quality of DLSS Frame Generation and Multi Frame Generation has improved to the point where any artifacts they might introduce are minor, and the arrival of the DLSS 4.5 upscaling models allows owners of RTX 40-series and 50-series cards to get away with lower input resolutions than they might have needed in the past for the same high output image quality. That all means higher performance as a framegen baseline and less reason for concern about latency as a limiting factor.

If you have a capable enough RTX 40-series or 50-series card and a high-refresh-rate monitor to match, and you haven't tried DLSS Frame Generation or MFG at this point, I don't know how else to say it: you're missing out. And Pragmata is just the latest example of a game where the path-traced visuals are well worth using those tools to their fullest.

The many combinations of DLSS quality presets and frame generation multipliers are far too numerous to comprehensively cover across every graphics card in our arsenal, so I’ve chosen what I feel are reasonable starting points for each output resolution and noted them on each chart below.

Since the RTX 3070 doesn’t support DLSS framegen, I enabled FSR 3 FG for this testing for fairness. Be aware, however, that FSR 3 FG’s image quality is far worse than the latest DLSS framegen model in this title. It’ll allow you to get a taste of path tracing, but it introduces plenty of artifacts (especially on particle effects and translucent UI elements) that you will instantly notice.

And we had to exclude the RTX 3060 12GB from this testing entirely, as no amount of DLSS upscaling or FSR framegen juice allowed it to get to a playable, low-latency experience without totally sacrificing image quality.

On to the results. We’ve charted both performance and average PC latency (as measured/estimated by Nvidia FrameView) above for each resolution so you can judge for yourself whether the resulting framegen performance is truly playable. Our past testing on the TH GPU rig has suggested that 60 ms or so of input latency is about the most we want for a playable experience with the average AAA game. 70 ms is high but tolerable, and anything higher than that is too much.

Here’s a shocker: even with path tracing enabled, Pragmata is easy enough on VRAM at 1080p that you can get framegen working with DLSS Quality, even on 8GB cards. The experience is not playable on the RTX 5050 and RTX 5060 due to high input latency, but it works as a party trick. The RTX 5060 Ti 8GB actually manages to be playable under these settings, but you’re one misplaced megabyte away from a performance cliff. Proceed at your own risk.

From the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB on up, any of these cards deliver a fine path-traced experience at a 1080p output res using the settings I picked, and thanks to Pragmata's well-managed input latency, even juicing a 40-FPS-ish baseline with framegen feels totally fine.

At 1440p, the RTX 4070 and RTX 5060 Ti 16GB are past the 60 ms mark, where one might want to drop down to DLSS Performance for a snappier experience, but even so, input latency is tolerable. All of the Blackwell cards are well within the playability ballpark. Our 8GB cards are all suffering, though, and none of them deliver a playable experience despite delivering seemingly OK frame rates on the top line.

At 4K with DLSS Performance, the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and the RTX 4070 are well past their limits, and the RTX 5070’s 1% low frame rates aren’t fantastic. The RTX 5070 is still delivering playable input latency, but it’s on the high side. Only the RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090 are solidly playable this way. But if you wanted to explore DLSS Ultra Performance and DLSS 4.5 Preset L on the RTX 4070 and RTX 5070 to lower latency and chase higher frame rates, you certainly could.

Again, all these results go to show that we are firmly in an era where DLSS Frame Generation is perfectly usable. As long as you’re monitoring input latency and managing your settings ambitions accordingly, there is no real reason to avoid it other than a lack of hardware support on your GPU or stubborn contrarianism.

Bottom line

Pragmata may have an impressive list of technical features for pixel-peepers like yours truly to dig into, but I’m happy to report that it’s an enjoyable game first and foremost. Its lunar setting comes full of 3D-printed mechs to blast apart through strategic gunplay and split-second puzzle solving, and that combo really grabbed me.

From a technical standpoint, Pragmata offers one of the most vendor-dependent experiences that I can remember. The game’s headlining path tracing mode is only available to GeForce cards, and it’s not as freely adjustable as I’d like for the best experience.

If you’re a GeForce gamer, you get access to all of Nvidia’s latest and greatest software features, and those all add up to make a big difference to image quality. DLSS—whether used as DLAA or for upscaling—is a great improvement over the RE Engine’s rough TAA implementation with RT off.

But enabling Pragmata’s basic ray tracing mode introduces prominent noisy artifacts and can even remove desirable reflections in some parts of the image at times. You have to decide whether those issues are more troublesome than the average screen-space error to your eye if you’re not going all the way with path tracing.

And you should absolutely give path tracing a shot if your graphics card can handle it. As we’ve come to expect, native PT is so demanding that DLSS upscaling and frame generation are mandatory for a smooth experience. But that’s a total non-issue on RTX 40-series and 50-series cards nowadays (at least for those with 12GB of VRAM or more), as the image quality of DLSS upscaling and frame generation has advanced to the point where you can enable both features alongside path tracing and just enjoy the game.

Path tracing offers the richest and most stable image quality of all the options on offer, and it pays off with plenty of little moments that make Pragmata’s setting feel startlingly realistic. It’s far and away the best way to play.

RTX 30-series cards without DLSS Frame Generation support will technically run path tracing, but you’ll need higher-end models with as much VRAM as possible to enjoy it. And you’re stuck with FSR 3 framegen if you need it, which can improve smoothness but introduces image quality issues of its own.

Radeon gamers can enjoy strong raster and RT performance in this title as a baseline, but Capcom’s implementation of FSR tech in this title could be better. Pragmata supports FSR 4 on compatible cards, but no FSR native AA option to match Nvidia’s DLAA on any Radeon. That feels like an easy fix in a future patch, though. Happily, RDNA 4 owners also get access to the latest ML Frame Generation model, which is a major upgrade over FSR 3 framegen, so smooth performance is well within reach at practically any setting.

But getting entirely locked out of path tracing—especially when the latest RDNA 4 hardware can clearly handle it—may be an unforgivable snub for some Radeon gamers, and I wouldn’t blame them for giving this game a pass for that reason alone.

Meanwhile, none of Intel’s XeSS features are present in Pragmata at all, and baseline performance is low even on the Arc B580, so Arc gamers will have to lean on FSR 3 upscaling and perhaps frame generation to get a more playable experience.

All told, Pragmata is both engaging to play and full of eye candy, and especially if you’re a GeForce RTX 40- or RTX 50-series owner looking for a showcase for everything your card can do, it’s a satisfying pick-up. I’m eager to get back to it as soon as I can so that I can learn how Hugh and Diana’s story plays out.

Steam is the most popular marketplace for games on PC, and Valve keeps adding new features to make it even better. One of the reasons behind Steam's prevalence is its pricing — how some games cost less in certain regions, and how often they're discounted in sales. Now, it seems like Valve is adding a 30-day price history right inside the store to let you track any recent changes and get the best deal possible.

Backend changes show multiple new strings in Steam's codebase that refer to price tracking, in particular, if a game is the cheapest it has been in the past 30 days. This data should show up in the buy box, next to the price and 'Add to Cart' options. There can be up to three different columns showing the typical price, the 30-day low, and the current price, based on which you can decide whether it's the right time to buy it.

We can infer all of this because this feature is technically not new; it's been available in the EU since 2023, but not every country in the region. By law, the EU Omnibus Directive mandates that all storefronts show the recent price of a product to safeguard consumers from fake discounts. For instance, a developer could raise the price from $20 to $60 for one day, then immediately "drop" it to $30 and claim it was 50% off.

Comment from r/Steam

Showing the price history for the previous month ensures stuff like this doesn't happen or, at least, the buyer is aware of it. That being said, even outside of the EU, Steam users have been able to track prices through third-party tools like SteamDB that offer a much more comprehensive outlook. You can check the all-time price history on SteamDB, along with regional prices (averaged against USD) for any game.

Since Valve is now considering adding support for price history in Steam natively, it will only help make more informed purchasing decisions, even if SteamDB offers better tracking otherwise. In other news, Valve is also reportedly developing "SteamGPT," its very own AI bot for customer support that might even be able to interface with CS2's anti-cheat. Clearly, it takes a lot for Steam to remain at the top, even if rival marketplaces are trying to become more competitive.

If you've been following the story of Denuvo's recent struggle against the weaponization of savants in the piracy scene, there's a juicy double-whammy of news on that front. Grab your popcorn or fire extinguisher, depending on which side you're on. First, voices38, who's been steadily cracking Denuvo-protected games for a while now, released a full crack for Resident Evil: Requiem, a title that's just over 40 days old, with the DRM fully disabled. It also runs much better than the bypassed version.

As if that weren't enough bad news for Denuvo's parent company, Irdeto, the existing hypervisor-based bypass (HV) that currently requires disabling most of Windows' security layers is seemingly getting a serious upgrade. According to MKDev member KiriGiri, the bypass should soon become plug-and-play, as "[they] found a way to make HV crack to be used without disabling any windows security or other things" (sic).

If you're not up to speed on all this, the summary is that Denuvo has been successfully bypassed across many new games, resulting in zero-day repacks out on popular sites like FitGirl's. However, said bypass is cumbersome and risky; its characteristics are bound to change as soon as it receives the purported upgrade. Moreover, it keeps Denuvo's code in the game, leading to the usual performance penalties famously associated with the DRM.

A traditional crack, meanwhile, strips away or neutralizes all Denuvo code in a game. Doing that takes a particular set of skills, and the cracker (or group) voices38 has been the one spearheading efforts, slowly but surely cracking 2024 and 2025 releases.

The release of a crack for Resident Evil: Requiem, a title that's only 40 days old, implies with high likelihood that Denuvo will get completely stripped out of recent games soon enough. Voices38 has reportedly been working on toolkits for contemporary Denuvo for a long while now, and it apparently took them only two weeks to pull off this latest feat after all the virtual ducks were in a row.

The cracked Requiem predictably runs faster, smoother, and uses far fewer resources than the HV version, and presumably by extension, than the full paid-for release. One point does not a dataset make, but ChillyWillMD ran a quick comparison between the two versions, and the cracked one delivers roughly 5% better FPS, a shocking 1.5 to 2 GB drop in VRAM, and sometimes close to 1 GB drop in system memory usage.

Our trusty eyeballs also say that the CPU spike and frametime graph is slightly improved on the cracked version, with fewer CPU usage spikes and sometimes lower frametimes — both exceedingly important for a feeling of gameplay smoothness. The tested system has an Intel Core i9-13900K CPU and an RTX 3090 graphics card. We hypothesize that machines with weaker processors will see even greater benefits from removing Denuvo.

This spells serious trouble in all-caps for Irdeto, as now there's a two-prong attack against Denuvo. The company predictably already promised upgrades to its software, all while running the game at the standard user-space operating system layer. The DRM developers have to get really creative now, and as the saying goes, may the odds ever be in their favor.

There are plenty of folks who insist that you don’t need 60+ FPS to enjoy PC gaming, particularly open-world adventure epics like Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2. For such cinematic masterpieces, perhaps 30 FPS lows are tolerable? Well, prolific Danish YouTuber Mongo TV recently went viral, with his video series showing him ‘enjoying’ RDR2 at a glacial 4 FPS. In the source video, Mongo TV appears to blame the game’s poor performance on his aged laptop, which packs an Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4GB.

Another key statement about the gameplay experience from Mongo TV is that it has taken “over 12 hours” to complete “all the many intro missions, up in the mountains in winter.” (machine translation from Danish). We assume that Mongo TV is referring to completing Chapter One: Colter. Based on various popular playthrough videos of this section of the game on YouTube, it looks like Colter typically takes between 1hr 45mins and 3hrs.

To put Mongo TV’s adventuring at 4 FPS into perspective, he took 12 hours progressing through chapter one instead of ~2 hours. So he’s playing 6x slower than average. Of course, the game is still running in ‘normal’ time, but gameplay progress at 4 FPS must be hindered by the incredibly unresponsive world view of your character.
According to some gaming stats sites, a typical RDR2 playthrough should take 78.5 hours. If we use the Mongo TV multiplier, our hero might instead be playing this for 471 hours to get to the finish line.

Please optimize settings

Before Mongo TV continues in his RDR2 journey, we’d love him to pause and do a little bit of game settings tuning. It should make the rest of the game far more pleasurable. Mongo TV’s gaming laptop features an "i5-8300H and a 1050ti with
4GB," according to various sources (the GPU is mentioned in the above embedded video description).

The YouTuber closes his video description by asking, “Should I give up on these great games for now, and then wait until I eventually get a faster gamer PC, with a better graphics card, than my very old GeForce TI 1050 4GB?” Well, we think he could do a lot better without splashing the cash on a new laptop. If we check the game’s minimum and recommended specifications, Mongo TV is using a device that is far better than the minimum specs.

Rockstar officially asks users to come packing an Intel Core i5-2500K / AMD FX 6300, 8GB of RAM, and GeForce GTX 770 2GB / Radeon R9 280 3GB at a minimum. On the CPU side, Mongo TV’s Intel CPU should be a big uplift vs those minimum baselines, as it boasts 4C/8T and a boost clock up to 4GHz.
Hopefully, Mongo TV also matches or beats the 8GB RAM minimum, too, or else that’s probably an easy upgrade (RAM stick addition/swap) to help this older laptop become a bit smoother in gaming.

The laptop GPU is also newer / better than those GeForce and Radeon baselines. The terrible frame rate could also be from the game running on the puny UHD Graphics 630 built into the Intel Core i5-8300H instead of switching to the GTX 1050 Ti. A quick settings check/tweak should see what’s really happening.

As we can be pretty certain the hardware is probably fine for RDR2 gaming at much more fluid frame rates, Mongo TV should also probably look at some optimization guides for this title on PC. A good start could be to make sure the GeForce driver is up to date. Then a quick poke at the Nvidia App will reveal the game library installed on the PC, with a one-button optimize setting. That’s surely a better start than whatever settings are currently being used to produce 4 FPS. Mongo TV, hosted by John, has published over 62,000 videos in the last 11 years

Last week, Denuvo made headlines, but for all of the wrong reasons. A freshly minted hypervisor bypass renders Denuvo's famous anti-tamper protection virtually useless to those willing to go to the lengths that the crack requires. For those not in the know, Denuvo is an anti-tamper and DRM software developed by Irdeto, which has been deployed across a huge number of PC gaming titles, sometimes with controversial results. Previously, it was considered difficult, or near impossible, to crack the DRM. Now, it's been blown wide open, due to the freshly minted Denuvo hypervisor-based bypass.

This method has allowed game cracking and distributing pirates (collectively known as "the scene") to once again release DRM-free versions of popular AAA titles on release day, known as zero-day releases. Naturally, this doesn't bode well for Denuvo and its parent company, Irdeto, for whom the DRM is a major earner.

We should note that the language in "hypervisor-based bypass" is specific, as actual cracks of recent Denuvo versions have yet to be published. A 'proper' crack would alter the game's executable code to remove or disable its DRM, while a bypass keeps the game mostly intact but adds an external avoidance mechanism.

This distinction is key with the hypervisor bypass (HVBP), as it requires drastic measures from gamers downloading pirated releases. One needs to disable almost every Windows low-level security feature — an exceedingly poor idea on its own — as well as install a scene-made hypervisor (HV), which Windows itself then sits on, to intercept Denuvo's checks. Gamers can easily enable these features after playing, but chances are, few will bother.

Any HV, whether it's VMWare ESXi, Hyper-V, Xen, or this Denuvo bypass, has access to the system at the metal level, with complete reign over the computer and all its data and hardware. Even trusting the scene's programming acumen, if the releases using HVBP prove popular, we're talking at least hundreds of thousands of systems with all defenses down and a nearly hardware-level threat vector. An unintentional bug in the HV can be exploited by malicious actors in an essentially untraceable manner.

Denuvo's reputation amongst enthusiasts

Ever since its inception circa 2014, Denuvo Anti-Tamper (not to be confused with Denuvo Anti-Cheat) has been under fire from gamers for its heavy-handed approach. The software is notorious for punishing legitimate customers, thanks to measures including hardware fingerprinting with limited activations, requirements to periodically reach out to Denuvo's servers, and finicky online validation that may brick many single-player titles if the activation servers ever disappear.

Every single one of those measures has caused perennial headaches for gamers, necessitating YouTube tutorials and other community help to let someone just enjoy a game they already paid for. But perhaps the most contentious of all is the performance hit thanks to the constant hardware verification, adding stuttering and lowering FPS, sometimes to the point of making some games unenjoyable in weaker machines. Denuvo has voraciously defended these reports, claiming that the DRM does not impact performance.

Regardless of optics, Denuvo has been able to stay one step ahead of crackers more often than not during the past decade. Whereas simple CD-checks of yore could be bypassed in an afternoon by someone with middling skills, combating Denuvo's thousand-layer approach requires a particular combination of technical acumen, patience/stubbornness, and free time — not an easy combination to come by, at least for free.

The cat-and mouse race against piracy

After its 2014 launch, it took crackers about a month to snap Denuvo, a timeframe almost unheard of for the scene. After a quick upgrade, Denuvo 2016 (the version naming is ours and not official) earned itself about a year and a half of immunity, with the main crackers almost giving up, until a rally in 2017 made zero-day releases the norm again. Around 2018, Denuvo applied its VMProtect obfuscation layer, making crackers once again work for weeks or even months to clean one title, though the scene's efforts accelerated to a full crack in 2019, resetting the scales once again.

After more Denuvo updates, the period between 2020 and 2025 was perhaps the driest for the piracy scene, given that apparently only two crackers (Empress, then voices38) were actively working on Denuvo, at a steady but undoubtedly slow pace. The vast majority of games remained uncracked, and those that fell to the attacks did so well after their original release dates. It was not until late 2025 that a new challenger appeared, in the form of the MKDev collective.

In December 2025, MKDev released a proof-of-concept of an HV bypass for Persona 5 Royal, with accompanying documentation describing how it all worked, using publicly available documentation and open-source hardware. This led to multiple community efforts applying that research, with the first notable release being Borderlands 4. More recently, Resident Evil: Requiem was a zero-day crack (one hour to be precise), and Crimson Desert was circulating in piracy circles the same day it launched.

Even the HVBP itself evolved somewhat, as the first version even required users to disable Secure Boot entirely and use EfiGuard to tweak the boot process, in addition to the aforementioned steps. Due to the concerning nature of the requirements surrounding the HVBPs, even its own makers alert users to the necessity of using the provided scripts to re-enable all the security features once they're done playing.

Popular repackers within the scene initially refused to carry HVBP releases, eventually changing their tune after the requirement to disable Secure Boot and use EfiGuard was removed. Even still, the HVBP games are clearly marked as such by both release groups and repackers. Meanwhile, voices38, the only known cracker working on contemporary Denuvo, already has 2025's Doom: The Dark Ages under their belt.

For its part, Denuvo has promised that it's increasing the product's security, and notably that it'll do so without further encroaching on gamers' systems. Despite its intensity, unlike some other copy protection methods of yore, Denuvo currently doesn't install any drivers and runs like any other application in ring 3 of the operating system, a fact that led HVBP releaser Kirigiri to posit that Denuvo will never be able to properly detect the HVBP, since that runs below Windows itself.

Denuvo ultimately helps PC game sales

The argument can also be made that, all things considered, until now, Denuvo has historically succeeded in its intended purpose. The mission of PC DRM has long been stated as protecting a game's initial sales weeks, particularly for highly marketed AAA releases that make the vast majority of their money around release date. As historical records show, Denuvo has been successful more often than not.

Normally, tangible and coherent information on the financial effectiveness of Denuvo is quite hard to come by. In 2024, the University of North Carolina released a study comparing sales-over-time of games protected with Denuvo versus those that got cracked.

The picture the data painted was pretty clear: a cracked game nets about 20% less total revenue in the first 12 weeks (three months) after release, with a strong correlation between the crack release date and the start of comparative revenue loss.

However, the study's author also notes that once those three months go by, it's borderline irrelevant for revenue whether a game is cracked or never had any DRM to begin with. Given Denuvo's well-known tendencies to cause performance and technical issues, some publishers have started removing it from their games right on or around the release day (Doom Eternal, Two Point Hospital, Devil May Cry 5) or some time after (Monster Hunter World, Resident Evil Village, NieR: Automata)

Most removals can be justified by the availability of cracked or DRM-free versions of the game, or due to community outcry, but it also likely benefits the publisher. Some reports claim that Denuvo's contracts include monthly and/or per-activation charges, which go away once the software is stripped.

Furthermore, any titles that never had Denuvo removed, including the HVBP releases, will be hard to archive, as at some point in time, the activation servers will vanish, and the games will otherwise become bricked.

Additionally, integrating Denuvo is both difficult and full of performance traps. Not only is Denuvo heavy to begin with, but it also takes effort from developers in crunch time to implement it effectively. Even then, the software's VM-obfuscation approach can undo weeks if not months of careful optimizations.

It also gets kind of ridiculous if you think about it: under normal conditions, a PC runs a Hyper-V, which runs Windows 11, that runs the game executable, that runs a Denuvo virtual machine, that then finally runs the game code (or parts of it). The analogy of software to onions has never rung truer.

Even still, with AAA game releases that amount to hundreds of millions, if not billions of revenue, that 20% slice is very hard to ignore — and so the cat-and-mouse game continues.

Steam will start gathering FPS data based on your hardware, allowing the company to potentially build a baseline and estimate game framerates based on your PC’s specifications. The company said in its last client update that the feature is currently in Beta, and that it will “focus on devices running SteamOS.” We’re unsure yet when this will drop for the general public and when we’ll see the results on the Store pages of various titles on the platform. However, this is an interesting data point, especially if it’s accurate, as it can give users a worthwhile estimate of how smoothly a game would run, especially on devices with borderline hardware, like a console or gaming laptop.

Xbox already has a feature that tells you whether a game should play well on your device, but it’s not super accurate. For example, it says that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III “Should perform great on your device,” on a gaming laptop running an Intel Core i7-10870H paired with an RTX 3060 and 32GB of RAM. While this technically falls under the recommended specifications for the game, in my personal use it runs at a rather cinematic framerate and load times are atrocious, leading to a rather disappointing experience. But if Steam can show an accurate FPS estimate on game titles, this would let gamers know what to expect and even help with making purchase decisions.

While this is a particularly useful option for PC gamers, Steam says that it will focus on SteamOS devices for Beta testing. This is likely because there’s a smaller number of configurations for the operating system, which is primarily used by handhelds like the Steam Deck and the Lenovo Legion Go S, versus desktop and laptop PCs, which practically have an infinite number of specifications. This might also be useful for gamers who intend to purchase a Steam Machine — although Steam’s console PC has been delayed several times, many still hope that it will launch later this year.

Of course, the feature is still in the Beta testing stage, so we are yet to see if this will get a general roll out and display estimated FPS numbers based on your hardware. More importantly, Steam must prove that its numbers will be accurate. After all, it would be disappointing if you bought a title because the Steam launcher suggested that it would have a playable FPS only to show an unstable and low framerate when you’re already playing the game.

PC emulation on Android has come a long way from the days of its inception. Today, we have hardware that can natively run a lot of games through translation layers, all while delivering reasonable frame rates. And there is no better device to show this progress than the Redmagic 11 Pro Golden Saga Edition — the most powerful Android phone in the world, and it can play AAA PC games better than a Steam Deck.

The video above from ETA Prime showcases a bunch of games running inside GameHub, a Windows emulator that translates x86 code into Arm. GameHub actually started as just mapping software for GameSir's controllers, but has since transformed into a full-blown emulator that comes baked into Redmagic devices. It has native integration with Steam, so all your save files are synced on mobile, just like on a PC.

The phone in question is a special edition of the Redmagic 11 Pro that features 24 GB of RAM and upgraded internals for slightly better cooling. The rest of the specs are identical between the regular model and this Golden Saga Edition, such as the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, the 6.9-inch OLED display, and the 7,500 mAh battery. There's 1 TB of storage onboard, and the phone features liquid cooling, along with a fan.

Coming back to the actual performance, ETA Prime ran Red Dead Redemption 2 at 720p with low settings and no upscaling. The game ran at above 50 FPS even in outdoor areas, and it was locked at 60 indoors, but drops down to the 40s at higher render distances in the open world. This was in the "Rise" performance mode, which is one tier below the maxed-out "Diablo" mode, and the phone was docked while playing.

Enabling the Diablo profile, the frame rate jumped from the low 40s to the low 50s, but the power draw also went up to 40W. We even saw an insane peak of 45W; that's laptop territory, and the YouTuber reiterated it's not thermally sustainable, even with a cooler on the back. Throughout the test, RDR2 consumed around 20 GB of RAM, so the extra memory pool is certainly worth it if you want to run AAA games.

ETA Prime also tested GTA V, and it ran at above 70 FPS, while reaching 100 FPS in indoor scenes. It's crazy to think that just a few years ago, something like this would still be a fake YouTube video, but it's real now. Ghost of Tsushima was also playable at above 40 FPS, while Resident Evil: Requiem actually ran at over 60 FPS, but it was unfortunately marred with glitches like missing walls in sections of the game.

Lastly, Cyberpunk 2077, arguably the benchmark for emulation and porting at this point, was able to deliver a consistent 60+ FPS with frame generation. Without it, the game can run at a locked 30 FPS, which would be a similar experience to the Steam Deck. ETA Prime has also tested Cyberpunk on the regular Redmagic 11 Pro, where it ran at around 50 FPS with frame gen, so the extra RAM here is certainly helping.

So, how much does this magical device that can open the doors to a world of PC games in your hands cost? It's listed for around $1,700, while not even being available to purchase in the States, so you'll have to import it. Before the RAMpocalypse, one could get a Strix Halo handheld for that kind of money, which would be a significantly better, albeit less novel, gaming experience.

Of course, a phone can't be compared to a dedicated gaming device. Redmagic specifically makes these for enthusiasts who don't consider money an object, so there's no value argument here. Besides, it's simply impressive to see something that can also make calls and take photos, play games at such a high fidelity. What's even more exciting is that the PC emulation scene on Android only goes up from here.

Gamers are running into AFK issues when they need to take a meal break in the middle of their matches, resulting in them getting kicked for being inactive. Because of this, McDonald’s Türkiye decided to release a solution — the “Archie” widget. According to the press release, this M-shaped contraption will hook onto the joysticks of your controller, allowing you to move your character with just one finger as you eat your burger. It’s only available with the fast-food restaurant’s Pro Gamer Menu, which includes a Big Mac, medium fries, medium Coke, and 8-piece onion rings — for delivery.

“Being away from the screen during online gameplay—especially in high-intensity moments—can directly disrupt the flow of the game. That is why many players turn to different workarounds,” McDonald’s Türkiye CMO Özdeş Dönen Artak said. “We transformed this behavior into a gamer insight and made Archie part of the McDonald's experience by offering it as a gift to customers who order the Pro Gamer Menu.”

We’re unsure how effective this gadget will be at preserving your character in the middle of a heated match, especially since the only thing it can do is make it easier to put random inputs on your controller without transferring the grease from your fingers. And unless you find a good hiding spot, your character will likely be dead anyway by the time you finish eating your Big Mac. You’ll also likely annoy your teammates for a few minutes, as you take your sweet time finishing those fries and onion rings.

This isn’t the first time that a fast-food chain has leaned on the gamer demographic for marketing. As far back as 2020, we’ve seen Microsoft give away a full-sized Xbox Series X fridge and KFC launch the KFConsole — an Intel NUC mini PC with a built-in fried chicken chamber. McDonald’s UK also launched a McCrispy gaming chair with a built-in fry holder and sandwich warmer in 2022, while Asus partnered with KFC China to give away limited-edition Fortress of Faith keycaps paired with a burger that sports the ROG logo burnt on the bun.

A good portion of the gaming- and piracy-adjacent internet has been on fire for the past few weeks, as a bypass for the (in)famous Denuvo copy-protection method has become popular. Not only did the new method enable the release of existing titles, but zero-day repacks are now the norm.

Contemporary versions of Denuvo and its multilayered DRM approaches have stood the test of time well and were widely regarded as the benchmark in the PC game DRM space. Naturally, this spells trouble for Denuvo and its parent company, Irdeto, as its primary source of revenue is now arguably useless.

Irdeto sent a statement to popular DRM and copyright news site TorrentFreak, wherein it claims that it is already working on countermeasures, promising that "performance will not be compromised" by said improvements and that they will not go deeper into the operating system.

The performance remark refers to a past controversy in which Denuvo's checks caused CPU spikes that added strong stuttering and FPS drops in many titles and configurations. This fact was vehemently denied by Denuvo and subsequently mocked online, as cracked versions ran far better.

As usual for any DRM company or publisher, Irdeto also claimed that downloading games with the bypass is a security concern, but this time around, the company has a valid point. Using the hypervisor bypass, even in its latest incarnation, requires users to disable:

1. Virtualization-Based Security (VBS): a layer that separates the Windows operating system from the its security enforcement features that run at a higher privilege level.
2. Credential Guard: a sub-feature of VBS that keeps login credentials in an container isolated from the rest of the operating system.
3. Driver Signature Enforcement: verification that any drivers installed in the system must have a digital signature issued by Microsoft to an identifiable company or developer, in order to prevent installing random drivers at the system level.
4. Core Isolation / Memory Integrity (HVCI): similar to the above, but prevents any kernel-level unsigned code entirely, as well as modifications to existing signed code so programs can't attempt to mess with existing drivers.
5. Installing a community-made hypervisor (HV) with Windows running on top of it. This HV fakes responses to the checks that Denuvo makes, and runs with higher permissions (ring level -1) than the operating system itself and has full, nearly untraceable access to hardware and software.

As you can imagine, disabling any one of those security features is not advisable, much less deactivating all of them at once. Once all those digital checkpoints are down, anything you run on your system has free rein to take it over completely, in ways that will be difficult to notice or fix, and will naturally evade detection by nearly any antivirus package.

Adding further concern, there's no telling that even without any malicious intent, the new HV won't have a security flaw of its own that, once exploited, runs at an access level beyond even that of the operating system itself.

To its credit, the community foresaw all of these issues, and game repacks include an easy-to-use script to disable and re-enable the security measures. The recommended procedure is to disable them, reboot, and play the game. Once your gameplay session is over, you would enable them again and restart. However, that's a chore for anyone, and one might guess your average user won't think twice about bothering with such trifles as "security."

Even within the piracy community, the team that designed the HV bypass and popular repackers like FitGirl have warned about the security implications of these releases, as trusted as they might be. Prospective gamers who are leery of bringing down their PCs' defenses will have to wait for an actual crack to come around.

There’s at least one trucker in the U.S. who looks forward to getting stuck in traffic. ZanaZamora shared a video on Reddit where they made the best use of what would usually be a frustrating time. After an accident closed the route they were on, they eagerly slid over to the passenger seat and played on a powerful $6,000 gaming PC. Disappointingly, it isn’t a truck simulator that we see Zamora indulge in during this jam. Instead, this closet racecar driver enjoys a bit of Assetto Corsa Competizione (ACC) action.

Stand still traffic? Time to switch to the other seat~ from r/simracing

“Been waiting to get stuck in traffic ever since installing this rig just to make this video lol,” wrote Zamora on Reddit, earlier this month. “Road was shut down due to an accident, said we could u turn across the median, I said one minute I need to do something REAL QUICK.”

The trucker has what looks like an awesome sim rig, with the immersive widescreen, driving yoke, various input pads, and dials. In a separate post, where Zamora also reveals their motorbiking hobby, we learn more about what the setup consists of. Components confirmed include “pedals are by SIMMSON, wheelbase is Simagic Alpha Evo Pro, wheel is Conspit GT300. Flight stick is Moza AB9/MH16, and throttle is Winwing Orion 2. The button box is by PXN, and the pad is an off brand stream deck.” Also, the monitor is on an adjustable arm, and there are “bass shakers” in the seat. Nice.

As for the PC driving the sim side of Zamora’s on-road life, another reply from the trucker reveals that the CPU in the PC is an Intel Core i9-14900 of some sort. This is paired with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 GPU.

Zamora’s dedication to high-end PC sim gaming is something to behold. If I get stuck in traffic, I might put the radio on, play some MP3s I put on the car’s SD card about five years ago, or watch YouTube on the phone. I’ll also note that you'd need a very bright screen to enjoy any complicated gaming environment in a vehicle. Neither of my laptop screens is very readable when even the slightest amount of sunshine pops from between the clouds in England.

The UK’s Imagination Technologies (IMG) is teasing its roadmap to “bring high‑performance, scalable, PowerVR graphics to desktop, workstation, and cloud environments.” We’ve seen and heard of a few false starts from IMG since the start of the 2020s, but this is the firm’s clearest messaging yet, with videos showcasing its work with Microsoft's DirectX, and stating that this work is “essential for mainstream PC gaming.”

IMG will be best known in PC circles, among folk of a certain vintage, for its pioneering PowerVR 3D graphics cards over three decades ago. It was also the graphical force behind the Sega Dreamcast (which launched in 1999). Since then IMG has spent focused on the mobile market, being a key Apple partner between 2007 and 2017.

In 2020 we noted IMG launching its B-Series GPU IP. That was a significant change of tack, after the disastrous mobile upset suddenly delivered by Apple. This IP would become the foundation for Chinese desktop GPU makers like Moore Threads and Innosilicon, despite their boasts of ‘domestic’ graphics tech.

In 2022, as it celebrated its 30^th anniversary, IMG would confirm that its tech was behind the aforementioned Chinese desktop cards. By this time there had been new generations from the Far East, with models like the 'double power' Fantasy 1 Type B card launching.

A year later Imagination’s IMG DXD, a DirectX‑capable GPU IP line explicitly aimed at desktop, laptop, and cloud gaming markets, were announced. Analysts at JPR thought that this marked IMG’s full hearted re-entry into the high-end PC market. DXD was its first real PC-ready architecture effort since Kryo in 2002.

Handling DirectX workloads with confidence

Today, IMG wanted to let graphics enthusiasts know it has reached a milestone in modern PC graphics support. From the few reviews and hands-on tests we’ve seen of Chinese PowerVR architecture cards, they have often been pretty poor at supporting PC gaming titles, especially newer games.

“We started adding hardware‑based support for DirectX to our GPUs with our last generation, D-Series,” IMG reminds viewers. “Below you can see it in action, in real silicon, handling complex DirectX 11 workloads with confidence.”

This is the same video referenced in the embedded LinkedIn post.

IMG indicates this demo evidences the beginning of its commitment to its long‑term roadmap embracing higher power devices like PCs. It asks that we stay tuned. Of course we will. But even if the demos get better and better, moving up through DX12, and adding other modern frills – it will probably be dismissed by the Crimson Desert devs…

Social media accounts officially representing Crimson Desert have apologized for prior dismissive language regarding Intel GPUs. “We apologize for any confusion our FAQ wording from several hours ago regarding playability on Intel Arc GPUs may have caused,” said a statement on X. Furthermore, it is made clear that work is now taking place to implement compatibility and optimize for Intel Arc graphics processors.

Circling back to just before the weekend, the PC gaming community seemed stunned by a blunt statement found in the Crimson Desert FAQ that suggested Intel Arc users simply find something else to play. In brief, that FAQ stated there was no support for Intel Arc GPUs, and if you’d bought the game to play on one of the Blue Team’s graphics cards or iGPUs, you should seek a refund from where you'd bought the game.

Many folks found this official statement troubling. Firstly, this is one of the hottest gaming titles around right now. Secondly, we didn’t have any hint of the reasoning behind such a sweeping decision. One must remember that while Intel is a relatively small player in discrete graphics cards, it is the leader in iGPUs. Moreover, its newer generation iGPUs are increasingly impressive. For example, the low-wattage Core Ultra 300H series mobile processors packing Arc B390 graphics can match the classic Nvidia GTX 1060 in modern titles. There’s a decade between their launch dates, but the 1060 is notable for making the grade in the official Crimson Desert minimum specs.

It is great to see the Crimson Desert devs change tack on Intel graphics. We reported a short time after the ‘no Arc gamers’ FAQ find, that Intel had reached out to developer Pearl Abyss “many times” concerning collaborative efforts. Intel stated in an email to Tom’s Hardware that it was “hugely disappointed that players using Intel graphics hardware can’t jump into the world of Pywel at launch.” Intel wrapped up its message by saying it was ready to assist the game devs however it could.

Perhaps, this chipmaking heavyweight’s clear disappointment and offers of help oiled the wheels deep at Pearl Abyss. “We are currently working on compatibility and optimization support so that Crimson Desert can also be enjoyed on Intel Arc GPU systems,” said the official social media account for the game today. “We are preparing to provide a smooth and stable gameplay experience, and we ask for your patience until the support update becomes available.”

For those interested in more Crimson Desert news and features, we recently shared our CPU scaling test results.

If you haven't been paying attention to gaming news, folks have been hyping new single-player action RPG Crimson Desert pretty hard lately. To be fair, it's a great game, with deep action combat, a sprawling open world to explore, and killer current-generation graphics. If you're keen to play the game but you have an Intel Arc GPU, however, bad news—you're out of luck.

Turns out, users with Intel graphics simply can't play Crimson Desert at all. It's not a situation where the performance is bad, or there are major bugs, or anything like that. The game simply won't even start, throwing up an error saying that "The graphics device is currently not supported."

It's not completely clear if this is an error message arising from a technical problem or if it's a hard-coded check and lockout. We wouldn't normally even consider the latter circumstance, but it's a possibility in this case, as Pearl Abyss has an entry in its FAQ for the game that explicitly says the title doesn't currently support Intel Arc graphics products.

Recommending that users return the game if they have specific hardware is surprising, especially considering that Intel actually ships the largest number of graphics processors for PCs. While it's true that Intel Arc discrete cards barely manage a percentage point of market share, there are a whole lot of systems out there with Intel CPUs and no discrete GPUs. All Intel CPUs from Meteor Lake onwards use some variation of an Arc graphics architecture, and Intel actually has the fastest integrated GPU right now with its Core Ultra 300H series processors, but users hoping to play Crimson Desert on integrated Intel graphics are also left out in the cold.

So what to do? Well, since it's pretty unlikely you have an Arc GPU, you're probably in the clear. I say "probably" because some users with high-end GeForce RTX cards have actually been getting the same error pop-up, as shown in the example below:

Some folks have theorized that the issue may be a lack of DirectX 12 Work Graphs support on Intel Arc GPUs. However, AMD doesn't support Work Graphs on its RDNA 2-based graphics hardware (Radeon RX 6000 series), and yet those cards can run the game just fine, so it's clearly not that.

Comment from r/pcmasterrace

Whatever the issue is, we suspect Intel can resolve it in a driver update. Intel has previously updated its Arc drivers to fix poor performance and graphical errors in Pearl Abyss' earlier game, Black Desert Online, which was based on an older version of the BlackSpace engine that underpins Crimson Desert. PA's admission the game doesn't support Arc GPUs "currently" implies it may do so in the future. However, the fact that it is encouraging users to seek refunds suggests that it may take some time to add support, if it arrives at all.

A developer has completely rebuilt the classic Gradius arcade game, first introduced in 1985, using ASCII. The newly launched Steam PC game page boasts that Battle for Asciion “is not just styled like text — it is text.” Nevertheless, the recorded on-screen action shows this 'bullets flying horizontal' scrolling shoot ‘em up shares many of the lures of the old-school pixel-based original. As a 2026 bonus, the reimagined ASCII Gradius remake is very RAMpocalypse-friendly, with its recommended specs of a mere dual-core 2.0 GHz CPU and 4GB of RAM.

“There are no sprites, no textures, no PNGs hidden behind the scenes,” the Battle for Asciion devs assure gamers. “What you see on screen is literal text.” This doesn’t mean the pace of the action is restrained in any way, though. Videos show the game running fast and fluid, and in some ways, it's surprisingly detailed.

As shoot ‘em up aficionados might expect, your ASCII ship in the game can be upgraded through stages to wield spectacular firepower. Moreover, there are five long stages, with giant end-of-level bosses to contend with, to beat the Battle for Ascension.

Some alternative history retro-style touches have been added to the configuration options for Battle for Asciion. The devs have implemented several display modes inspired by old monitors, including scanlines and simulated green, amber, or white phosphor dots. The game could be adapted to run on ancient MSX or PCW machines connected to real CRTs, hinted the dev on social media.

It is recommended to play Battle for Asciion PC/Steam using a keyboard “for precision and that ‘terminal shooter’ feel.” That’s entirely optional, though, as this 2026 release features full controller support via Steam Input and is listed as Steam Deck compatible.

The game’s 'Textshot' feature is fittingly unique. Instead of saving screenshots as images, this feature saves the current gameplay screen as a plain .TXT file, which can be edited, shared, or printed just like any ASCII file.

If you think the Battle for Asciion looks kinda familiar, and not just because of its Gradius-a-like gameplay, you may have played an earlier version of the game on the web in 2012. That was back when Adobe Flash was still a dominant interactive player supported by web browsers, and portals like Newgrounds and Miniclip still thrived.

Developer Relevo goes back even further than that in retro gaming terms, even though it was only set up in 2009. It has released games, not just for PC and web, but for classic retro hardware like the MSX, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC.

Microsoft used its DirectX "State of the Union" session at GDC 2026 to introduce DirectStorage 1.4, the latest update to its storage API designed to accelerate game asset streaming on Windows PCs. The headline feature is support for Zstandard (Zstd) compression, alongside a new toolset called the Game Asset Conditioning Library, or GACL.

If you've never heard of Zstd before, don't feel bad; most haven't. Developed at Facebook (now Meta), Zstd is a modern compression algorithm designed to strike a balance between compression ratio and decompression speed. It's already widely used in places like Linux distributions and cloud infrastructure because it compresses data well but also decompresses extremely quickly, which is a very important trait when you're trying to stream gigabytes of textures and geometry off an SSD while a game is running.

So, DirectStorage 1.4 adds native support for Zstd-compressed assets on both CPU and GPU paths, allowing developers to decompress data either on the CPU or through GPU compute shaders. The update does not replace or deprecate Microsoft's earlier GDeflate compression format, which debuted alongside GPU decompression in DirectStorage 1.1. Instead, Zstd simply becomes another supported option for developers building DirectStorage pipelines.

DirectStorage itself has had a somewhat underwhelming run so far. Despite early demos promising dramatic improvements to loading and asset streaming, only a handful of PC games have meaningfully adopted the technology, and in practice, DirectStorage sometimes improves load times, but it can actually cost a bit of frame rate. The reason is simple: GPU decompression isn't free. When the GPU is spending time unpacking texture data, that's compute time and power budget it can't spend on rendering frames. Since GPU time is usually the most precious resource in a modern game, the benefits of DirectStorage depend heavily on how much spare GPU compute capacity a system has.

Another technical change in the update may help with that. DirectStorage 1.4 adds global D3D12 CreatorID support to the EnqueueRequests function. CreatorIDs allow different GPU workloads to identify themselves to the driver, enabling smarter scheduling decisions when multiple queues are competing for GPU resources. In practical terms, this could help drivers better coordinate DirectStorage decompression work with traditional rendering and compute tasks, reducing the risk that asset streaming workloads interfere with frame rendering.

Arguably, the more interesting addition, though, is GACL, the Game Asset Conditioning Library. GACL is an attempt to standardize the asset pipeline around DirectStorage so developers can ship more compact game data that still streams quickly. Specifically, it's a build-time tool that preprocesses game assets before they're compressed.

By reorganizing and transforming asset data using techniques like data shuffling and entropy reduction, it can significantly improve how well the data compresses with Zstd. Microsoft says the conditioning step can dramatically improve compression efficiency for certain asset types while keeping decompression costs low. DirectStorage then reverses those transformations automatically when the data is loaded.

While DirectStorage hasn't yet transformed PC gaming the way Microsoft once suggested it might, the technology still has potential, particularly for future titles designed around its streaming model from the start. Updates like DirectStorage 1.4, with improved compression support and a more sophisticated asset pipeline, suggest Microsoft is still laying the groundwork for that possibility. We're not holding our breath, but we're not counting the technology out just yet, either.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has seemingly launched, or at least made public, a new investigation into malware-ridden fake games on Steam. Anyone who installed and played one of these games between 2024 and 2026 was likely affected, and the FBI is urging them to come forward. Victims of these malware-embedded titles will help with the investigation and be kept completely confidential.

There are several games part of this list, including Chemia, Dashverse / DashFPS, Lampy, Lunara, PirateFi, Tokenova, and BlockBasters. Most of these have their own dedicated stories from the time they were released, and stole victim info and compromised their accounts. BlockBasters is the most high-profile mention here as the game exfiltrated $32,000 worth of cancer donations from a streamer last year.

Moreover, pretty much all of these games — and likely more that the FBI didn't explicitly name — are crypto scams that drain your wallets once launched. Most people are logged into every website on their browser, which only makes the perpetrator's job easier as the automated attack ransacks everything. Even your Steam account will be hijacked, and you might lose access to your library.

The frequency of these thieving games has only gone up in the past few years despite Valve's efforts to regularly combat them. It's likely that the influx of new releases overpowers the vetting system, letting a few bad apples through. In some cases, subsequent updates or patches introduce the malware, letting the base game pass Steam's checks. That's why it's important to provide any relevant info that can help the authorities catch and/or prosecute these criminals under federal law.

You can fill out the "Seeking Victim Information" form on the FBI's website if you've been affected. If you know someone else who was targeted by these fake, malicious Steam games, then send an email to Steam_Malware@fbi.gov. In any case, the process is entirely voluntary, but if you choose to step up, you might be followed up with later based on your responses.

Earlier this year, Valve said the requirements for a game to be "Steam Machine Verified" would be much less stringent than for the Steam Deck, mostly because of the power envelope the former is working with. Today, the company has confirmed those initial comments with official slides presented at GDC 2026 for both Steam Machine and Steam Frame Verified programs.

We already knew that Deck Verified games would automatically be Machine Verified, too — games in this category are required to run at a stable 30 FPS at 1080p resolution. The Steam Machine is almost as powerful as a PS5 with 28 RDNA 3 CUs. Hence, "Deck Playable" games that didn't perform well on the handheld would also be Machine Verified because they'd be expected to run better.

However, any Deck Playable games that didn't run properly because of controls or any other reason would be thrown into "Machine Playable." Finally, "Deck Unsupported" games would be reassessed for the Steam Machine and designated "Machine Test" if they couldn't run on the Steam Deck due to power constraints. If SteamOS was the barrier, then these Deck Unsupported games would fall into "Machine Unsupported."

It's a pretty straightforward process that eliminates the need to put new verified badges on titles; the Steam Machine library should be huge from day one due to the work done for Steam Deck. By contrast, there is no Verified program for streaming games to the Steam Frame, with Valve saying that if a game runs well on your host PC, it will run well on Steam Frame. For standalone VR titles, there is no "Frame Verified" tier at all. There are only two tiers: Frame Test and Frame Unsupported, and both are self-explanatory.

Any game that was previously Deck Verified, Deck Playable, or Deck Unsupported because of VR would be assigned the Frame Test badge. These titles would be reevaluated to work on the headset. Games that were Deck Unsupported because of performance and SteamOS are automatically disqualified and will become Frame Unsupported as well. So, what actually are the requirements for the Steam Frame?

Valve says the games need to fully support the Frame controllers, and both VR and non-VR games are open to testing. Standalone VR titles need to achieve 90 FPS with no resolution mandated, but "2D" games need to run at 720p at a stable 30 FPS. Lastly, these programs should have a VR-friendly UI that's easily legible in the headset. In contrast, the Steam Machine has no UI legibility requirements.

That wraps up the rather efficient and straightforward verified program for Valve's upcoming hardware. Now, we just need to know when these things are dropping. The global component crisis has had many companies delaying their products, and Valve seems to be no different. The firm's decision not to subsidize the Steam Machine like consoles further complicates the release strategy. Whenever it does launch, buyers can rest assured that a large number of verified games will be waiting for them.

This year's Future Games Show Spring Showcase will take place during GDC, during which 40 games will be featured. The wide-ranging event is set to be broadcast across multiple platforms on March 12, starting at 4 pm ET (1 pm PT), and will run just over 90 minutes.

AAA and indie studios will be represented, with some highly anticipated games on the docket, including Project Shadowglass (Starhelm Studios), Directive 8020 (Supermassive Games), and SAMSON: A Tyndalston Story (Liquid Swords). The Spring Showcase will be hosted by actors Devora Wilde and Shai Matheson. Wilde performed the motion-capture and voice acting for Lae'zel in Baldur's Gate 3. Matheson will voice Batman in LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, which is due for release in May 2026.

Following the Spring Showcase, be sure to stick around for "FGS Live From GDC Festival of Gaming." This separate, multi-format showcase will be hosted by FGS channel presenters and filled with additional exclusive game trailers and on-the-ground coverage from the GDC show floor in San Francisco.

The Future Games Show Spring Showcase and FGS Live From GDC Festival of Gaming will stream live across a broad range of platforms, including TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, X, Steam, bilibili, and GamesRadar.com. Both the Spring Showcase and the Festival of Gaming are run by Tom's Hardware's parent company: Future PLC.

Update - Tuesday 10 March: In an update to this story, a Discord Spokesperson provided the following comment: "We recently became aware of an issue impacting some Arc Raiders players involving debugging features intended for developers building and testing Social SDK game integrations. This resulted in some players’ Discord information from the game being stored locally on their device, and viewing it would require access to the device or the files themselves. Embark has released a hotfix for the issue and we are providing guidance to developers and updating the Discord Social SDK with additional protections.”

A computer engineer has discovered a serious vulnerability within Discord's SDK that allows games to store Discord DMs between players in game logs without any security measures. System engineer Timothy Meadows published a blog post, revealing an incident where Arc Raiders was storing DMs between two gamers in plaintext to a local log file. Thankfully, at the time of writing, the problem has since been hotfixed by Embark Studios.

Timothy discovered that Arc Raiders' Discord SDK was using a completely unencrypted bearer token and logs "all events" including any private conversations to the user's local drive without any encryption. A bearer token stores the user's Discord credentials, and anyone who gets this token has full access to the Discord user's account, including private DMs, friends list, and account settings.

This is made worse by the fact that if Arc Raiders crashes and the user sends log files to Embark Studios (the game's development team), the company's employees will have that user's full account credentials and any DMs that were sent to the log files.

Arc Raider uses the Discord SDK to show your Discord friends list in-game and invite Discord friends to the game. For this limited functionality, Timothy states the game only requires a "limited OAuth scope for game activity display." This would solve the issue and stop Arc Raiders from recording DMs to log files and storing a user's full account credentials to the game's log files as well. Some engineers who've inspected Discord's API say the issue lies solely with Discord, however.

I dug into the ARC Raiders Discord token leak issue; this might not be ARC Raiders or Embark's fault. Discord's new Social SDK has a logging hook you can override, and as far as I can tell Discord is failing to scrub log events of sensitive information.API: discord.com/developers/d...

— @eidolon.photon.institute (@eidolon.photon.institute.bsky.social) 2026-03-10T11:17:16.528Z

Thankfully, Embark Studios has since patched the issue with a hotfix. The game company assured users that no private or personal data was sent outside of gamers' PCs, and the company itself has not reviewed or kept any personal information that might have been sent to them. Embark Studios has completely disabled Discord's SDK and is conducting an audit to ensure that there are no other problems with the SDK.

This isn't the first time Discord has to deal with security issues. The social app was hacked by a ransomware group late last year, demanding $3.5 million from Discord's developers, and allegedly stole 70,000 government ID photos.