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.

EA released its 'Javelin' anti-cheat last year to power the multiplayer gameplay in Battlefield 6. Like every other anti-cheat software out there, it runs at the kernel level to spoof out any bad actors or code, and EA has said it's been very successful thus far. So much so that the company is now seemingly looking to port it over to Arm and eventually Linux, according to a new job listing.

Titled "Senior Anti-Cheat Engineer, ARM64," the listing is pretty self-explanatory. The main responsibility endowed upon this engineer would be to "develop a native ARM driver" for the Javelin anti-cheat. Save an official announcement, this confirms that EA wants games like Battlefield to run Arm-based devices soon. Apple Silicon is not EA's interest, and Qualcomm's X-series hasn't been enough of a hit to justify this either.

That leaves us with Nvidia's upcoming N1/N1X chips that are highly rumored to launch this year. The timing for this role aligns with the chips' reported debut. The N1 silicon is said to finally bring Windows-on-Arm to the mainstream, with a focus on gaming that Arm has generally never been known for. After all, there's a 20-core Arm CPU and an RTX 5070-level GPU in there, according to the rumor mill, so it's plenty powerful.

The job description specifically mentions, "development of [our] Windows on ARM support," so there's no ambiguity over what platform we're talking about. Previously, Epic added support for Easy Anti-Cheat on Arm and Linux devices, but its flagship title, Fortnite, still doesn't run on those machines. Microsoft also released the Xbox app on Arm-based Windows 11 devices just a month ago.

Most anti-cheat software is only designed to run on x86-based Windows machines — part of Valve's push for Linux gaming has been held back by this. Similarly, Arm-based devices can't run anti-cheat either, which shuts out a large chunk of the most popular games from the platform. Therefore, getting a native Arm version of Javelin to work on N1-powered machines would be a huge step forward for non-x86 PC gaming.

In fact, the job listing also includes a point that reads: "Chart a path for EA Javelin Anticheat to support additional OS and hardware in the future, such as Linux and Proton." Namedropping Proton is a big deal; it shows clear intent to eventually have support for Javelin on things like the Steam Deck and Steam Machine — another audience EA doesn't want to miss out on, which can influence others like Riot and Epic to follow suit.

The Trump administration is actively debating whether to allow Chinese tech giant Tencent to keep its ownership stakes in several major gaming companies, including Fortnite creator Epic Games, League of Legends developer Riot Games, and Finnish mobile studio Supercell, the Financial Times reported today.

Senior White House officials are said to have held meetings to assess whether the investments pose a national security risk ahead of President Trump's planned April trip to China to meet President Xi Jinping. A cabinet-level discussion scheduled for Tuesday was postponed due to scheduling conflicts, the report said.

Tencent holds a 28% stake in Epic Games, fully owns Riot Games, and has a controlling stake in Supercell, the studio behind Clash of Clans. Together, those three companies reach more than a billion players worldwide. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a Treasury-led panel that reviews inbound investments for security risks, has been examining Tencent's gaming holdings since Trump's first term, making it one of the panel's longest-running cases.

It’ll come as no surprise that the Committee’s main concern is user data. Gaming platforms collect financial information, personal details, and chat logs from hundreds of millions of players, but there’s the added kicker that Epic's Unreal Engine is widely used in Western military simulation and training by defense contractors and armed forces. The U.S. Army has worked directly with Epic for years on early versions of the engine, so Tencent's ownership stake in the company that builds that technology has added to the scrutiny.

Attempts were made to resolve the case by the Biden administration, but disagreements between agencies meant that it never happened. Then-Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco pushed for CFIUS to force Tencent to divest its gaming companies, while the Treasury Department preferred allowing the investments to remain under data-protection mitigation measures, the FT reports, citing former officials. "These platforms could serve as a significant intelligence collection source," Chris McGuire, a former Biden administration official now at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Financial Times.

The Pentagon added Tencent to its list of alleged Chinese military companies in January 2025, a designation Tencent called a mistake and denied. More recently, in mid-February, the Pentagon briefly published an updated list adding Alibaba and BYD before pulling it within an hour, a move that sparked speculation the administration was trying to reduce friction ahead of Trump's China visit.

Sources familiar with the matter cautioned that it remained unclear whether the administration would push for forced divestitures or allow Tencent to keep its investments with conditions. Tom’s Hardware has contacted Epic Games for comment.

Steam's monthly hardware surveys are a great way to gauge the current state of the PC gaming landscape, as they provide real-world insight into the prevalence of certain components. Just a few weeks ago, we covered the data from January, which showed an impressive climb in GPUs with 16 GB of VRAM, while cards with 12 GB and 8 GB memory sizes had grown considerably less common. Today, Valve has come forward to somewhat refute those numbers.

In the release notes for its latest Steam Client Beta update, Valve says it "fixed an issue where VRAM on some graphics cards was not reported correctly," admitting that recent data might've been misconstrued. Now, it didn't provide any details as to which stats were incorrect in particular, or what the updated numbers are — likely because it can't go back and retake the survey.

In January, 16 GB GPUs were reported to be up 5.85% while 12 GB cards were down 4.01% and 8 GB cards became 3.11% less prevalent (despite holding 29.57% adoption overall). The takeaway was simple: gamers are moving toward 16 GB cards, recognizing the fallacies of less VRAM for today's titles. Games starved of video memory become a stutter-y mess, exacerbated by the optimization issues plaguing modern releases.

Even with various SKUs available in cheaper 8 GB configs, many buyers prefer to pay more upfront to get a 16 GB model because the difference can be substantial. Unfortunately, with the ongoing memory crisis, these GPUs are hit the hardest. We even had rumors of Nvidia ceasing to supply VRAM to board partners, leaving them to source their own memory due to the shortage.

As the industry navigates these turbulent times, graphics cards in general have gotten more expensive. Budget-conscious gamers feel left out as an already mid- to high-end focused market has begun moving even further up. Regardless, we should get a more accurate representation of VRAM capacities in Steam users' systems next month; with February's survey, that's only about a week out.

Moreover, Valve also said that in systems with "multiple display adapters," the one with the highest amount of memory will be reported. That means if you have, say, an 8 GB GPU and a 12 GB GPU together for some reason, it's the latter that Steam will pick up as part of its hardware survey. That should streamline the VRAM calculation process and provide us with a more realistic snapshot for most rigs out there. It will also prevent Steam from picking up integrated Radeon and Intel units with very small default allocations of VRAM in the BIOS.

PC emulation is gathering steam within the Android ecosystem and has finally reached mainstream viability for many Android gamers. We recently covered a PC emulation piece in which a YouTuber ran a full-blown PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 on a flagship Android smartphone. ETA Prime has since published another video showing off several Android devices running several PC games, besides Cyberpunk 2077, using emulation. The video shows that PC emulation on Android is now viable for a wide variety of PC games, including some AAA titles (if your Android device has the performance chops to tackle it).

The YouTuber tested several PC games on various Android devices, including GTA V, Left 4 Dead 2, The Witcher 3, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Marvel Cosmic Invasion, and Cyberpunk 2077 (again). For PC emulation, ETA Prime used GameHub and Game Native. The former can be found on the Google Play Store, but Game Native is an open-source app only available from the Game Native website or GitHub page.

On an AYN Odin 3, featuring a Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC and 16GB of RAM, the YouTuber tested Left 4 Dead 2 and Marvel Cosmic Invasion. Both games ran smoothly at 60 FPS with no noticeable dips. On a Lenovo Y700 Gen 4 Android tablet with the same SoC and 12GB of RAM, the YouTuber tested GTA V at 720p normal settings, and the game ran at just above 40 FPS.

Last but not least, the YouTuber tested three more games on the liquid-cooled Red Magic 11 Pro, which sports Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SoC and 16GB of RAM. In Spider-Man: Miles Morales, the Android phone achieved a near-steady 30 FPS with a frame rate lock at 720p on low settings, and FSR 3 upscaling set to Balanced. The DX9 version of Witcher 3 ran at 60 FPS with a frame rate cap at 720p low settings.

Finally, the YouTuber tested Cyberpunk 2077 again on the same phone, this time with better-tuned graphics settings. This time, the phone achieved over 60 FPS with frame generation enabled in the game. Previously, the phone could barely achieve 45-50 FPS with frame generation.

PC emulation on Android is nowhere near perfect, but it is now viable at least on high-end Android devices thanks to advancements in translation tech such as Valve's Proton compatibility layer. GameHub, for instance, uses a combination of Proton and FEX to translate x86 and Windows code into code that Android phones with ARM SoCs can execute.

Getting PC games to work on Android has also never been easier, as apps such as GameHub are available directly from the Google Play Store. GameHub requires no serious tinkering behind the scenes and comes with all the emulators needed to run PC games on Android. GameHub also has built-in Steam integration, making installing Steam games on Android devices a near-frictionless experience.

The idea of running Cyberpunk 2077 on a smartphone would have been ludicrous when the game first came out in 2020. Fast forward six years, and now that idea has become a reality. Handheld and SFF specialist ETA Prime on YouTube has made it happen with gaming phone running the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 at 30 to 40 FPS in emulation.

ETA Prime chose the Red Magic 11 Pro, one of the most powerful Android smartphones on the market, in combination with GameSir's GameHub platform to emulate the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 on Android. The Red Magic 11 Pro is unique in that it comes with an internal liquid cooler and active cooling fan to keep its Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset at high clock speeds under prolonged use.

At low settings using 720P resolution with FSR 2.1 set to Balanced mode, ETA Prime found that the Red Magic 11 Pro was able to pump out an impressive 30 FPS in most scenarios. In worst-case scenarios, the phone dipped into the high 20s, but never dipped into the teens. The YouTuber also reported that performance was smooth across the board, or at least as smooth as those frame rates can be.

To help kick up the frame rate, ETA Prime also ran the same settings with FSR frame generation enabled, boosting Cyberpunk 2077's frame rate significantly, with highs of up to 50 FPS and dips into the low 40s. tried the Steam Deck preset, which brings some settings up to high, and surprisingly, the Android phone was able to keep up. With frame generation disabled the phone was able to achieve around 27 FPS, but with frame generation on the phone was able to hit 40-50 FPS.

According to an internal OSD, the phone had displayed CPU usage in the 60-80% range while GPU usage hovered in the 50-60% range. Despite the Red Magic 11 Pro's integrated liquid cooler, temps were sky high, reaching up to 100 °C (heat problems are something that Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 phones are notorious for). RAM usage was also high, hovering around the high 80% range. The phone comes with 16GB of LPDDR5T RAM.

ETA Prime's demonstration of Cyberpunk 2077 running on Android shows how impressive PC emulation has become in the smartphone world. If you were to try running Cyberpunk 2077 through emulation in the same way a few years ago, it would likely be impossible or at best unplayable. Undoubtedly, Valve's contributions to PC emulation in the Android space have helped make PC emulation for AAA games viable, as the company has done in the Linux space. Valve actively sponsors some PC emulators for Android, and GameHub uses Valve's Proton compatibility layer as part of its PC emulation.

Smartphone chips continue to get faster and faster as well, which has helped accelerate AAA PC gaming through emulation, beyond just code optimization. If this progression keeps up, we could very well see smartphones just a few years down the road play Cyberpunk 2077 closer to 60 FPS comfortably—at least if the AI demand for silicon ever lets up.

Steam just released its Client Beta patch notes, and it’s adding a major new feature designed to make game reviews better. According to the company announcement, users will now have the ability to include their system specifications in any new or updated review they write. This would make it easier for potential game buyers looking at reviews to see how the reviewer’s hardware might have influenced their feedback.

At the moment, the only way you can see the specs of a reviewer’s system is if they intentionally add it into the review or into their profile. However, only a few people do that, so if a reviewer criticizes or praises a game, especially based on its performance, you’re unsure if you’ll get the same experience. But if you can see the specs of the reviewer’s system, you can then gauge if the issue they encountered is truly a problem with the game or if it’s only caused by a mismatch with their system and the minimum specifications listed on Steam.

Alternatively, a person saying that the game runs smoothly and without any problems might be running an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which offers devastating gaming performance, that’s paired with a powerful (and definitely expensive) MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z. This is especially true in some modern AAA titles like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which demands a ray-tracing GPU and an Intel Core i7-10700K for its minimum requirements. So, if you’re only driving a modest AMD Ryzen 5 5500 and an old GTX graphics card, then your experience will be completely different from what you read.

It’s unclear if Steam will automatically get your specifications, like how it extracts data for the Steam Hardware Survey, or if gamers will need to manually input their components into their profile. The former would make it far easier to implement this feature, although this would definitely raise some privacy concerns regarding the client. On the other hand, the latter could be problematic, as users could lie and skew the data. But whichever route Valve takes, this is an optional feature, and you can keep it turned off if you don’t want the world to know that you’re keeping a monster PC stowed in your basement.

You might have heard some rumors going around recently, claiming Epic would bring the stringent security requirements of other online games to Fortnite. That may yet happen, but it hasn't yet. However, if you're in the extremely tiny elite group of Fortnite players who do join in the official tournaments, you'd better make sure your PC is up to spec with its security hardening, as Epic has just made those measures a requirement to participate.

This isn't actually completely novel; Epic announced almost exactly a year ago that those wanting to join in the FNCS events requiring an account level of 350 or higher would need to have TPM and Secure Boot enabled on their PCs. These features are officially required to run Windows 11, although those requirements are trivial to bypass. However, the news here is that Epic is now requiring these security measures, as well as virtualization-based security, for all Fortnite tournaments.

To spell it out for the kids, that's "all tournaments," not "all players." If you're a casual Fortnite player who doesn't engage with the eSports side of the game personally, you don't need to worry about any of this—yet. Other big games, like Valorant and Battlefield 6, actually require these features to be enabled to play at all. Of course, none of those titles have the player base that Fortnite does, and Epic is likely keenly aware of the PR risks of suddenly cutting off a portion of players over already-controversial security measures.

The goal of the requirements is to lock out players who use cheat programs that evade typical anti-cheat by running in "ring 0", or even "ring -1". In other words, cheat programs that embed themselves in the system kernel, or worse, run as a hypervisor so that anti-cheat software can't detect them. The idea is that installing these tools often requires the user to disable features like virtualization-based security; Epic's thinking is that users with these features disabled are untrustworthy. It's not so far as to accuse insecure users of wrongdoing, but rather a concern that their system environment can't be verified.

If those cheats sound like science fiction to you, they aren't. The battle between game cheaters and game service operators continues apace, with cheaters (or more accurately, cheat providers) coming up with ever more advanced methods to inject cheat functions into games. It's not an exaggeration to say that game cheating and the fight against it is one of the very most forefront battlegrounds in the world of cybersecurity.

But, back to Fortnite; Epic is very serious about keeping its biggest money-maker fair, and it expresses that commitment both in its technical development (as we just discussed) as well as with its legal team. The publisher's blog post lists a short summary of legal actions it took against Fortnite cheaters in 2025, including multiple lawsuits it filed and settlements it reached with cheaters who were selling cheats and even stolen Epic accounts.

The ultimate takeaway is this: if you want to play in Fortnite tournaments, you'd better make sure your system fully meets the requirements for Windows 11. That's possible even if you're running an "unofficial" copy of the operating system, and if you have hardware that is capable of playing Fortnite, it's almost a given that your machine can meet the security requirements. Simply enter your system's UEFI setup and enable "Trusted Computing", "IOMMU" ("VT-d" on Intel systems), and Secure Boot. Unless you've done something really wacky with your configuration, that should get you golden to play in pro Fortnite events. Aside from your skills, anyway, you'll have to bring those yourself.

I’ve spent a good 25 of my 30 years welded to a game controller of some sort — be it the Dualshocks of my friends growing up, the Xbox 360 controller of my very first console, or one of the myriad gamepads I’ve had the privilege of testing over the years. But for the last four years, I’ve rocked exclusively one line of controllers full-time: the Razer Wolverine. In fact, I’ve bought not one, not two, but three Razer Wolverine controllers since December 2022: a wired V2 for myself, the same again as a thoughtful gift for a friend, and then finally an upgrade to V3 Tournament Edition, a gift to myself this New Year.

So what has my Razer experience taught me about buying the best gaming controllers for the PC? Like many of the best PC peripherals, there are almost too many options to choose from, making it quite daunting to know where to start. What are some considerations to keep in mind when choosing a PC gaming controller? Is my weapon of choice worth your time? Here’s what my experience has taught me, and some of the most important things to consider when making your own game controller decision.

1. Wired vs Wireless

Arguably, the most important choice you’ll make when buying a gaming controller for PC is the ever-present wired vs wireless debate. Like many people, I’d been a wireless proponent for as long as I can remember. The convenience and freedom of not having a cable was always my preferred mode, and I used to sigh with great remorse whenever I’d forget to charge the batteries in my Xbox controller and have to dig out the dreaded cable to get some juice.

In my old age, I’ve shifted back to wired, spurred by my Wolverine V2 purchase a few years ago. Of course, there are many great controller vendors out there, but across all of them, you’ll likely find that the wireless option is much more expensive than the wired version. When I went wired, it was mostly a cost decision. A Wolverine V2 will set you back around $60 today; I paid about $50. A similar wireless model will cost at least double that.

It was only once I’d decided to pick the cheaper wired model that I discovered the other benefits. Tethered to my PC or Xbox by cable, I never lose a wired controller, which definitely can’t be said of the wireless options in my house. Battery charging is never an issue either. There are no pesky dongles to lose, and I’ve saved a ton of money not buying either disposable batteries or more premium wireless charging solutions to keep my controller going.

Input lag is another possible consideration here. Generally, wired controllers should be faster than wireless controllers when it comes to the time it takes for your input commands to reach your PC. However, wireless controllers are pretty good these days, with most bog-standard offerings giving out near-imperceptible input lag. There are also some very potent 8000Hz wireless controllers out there if input lag is really a concern. However, unless you’re planning to join the pro Call of Duty circuit anytime soon, the difference between wired and wireless isn’t that big of a deal, at least in my experience.

Wireless controllers are a bit more convenient in-hand, what with no cable to worry about, but I’ve found the promise of knowing my controller will always be charged and ready to go to be invaluable, and I’ll probably never switch back to wireless for my daily driver.

So if you’re picking a controller, think about what you want and need in terms of convenience, how much more a wireless controller is going to set you back, and how you’re going to keep it charged for those mammoth gaming sessions. Otherwise, leave all of that behind and save yourself a few bucks by going wired.

A big upgrade I’ve found in the Razer Wolverine V3 is the detachable USB-C cable, which gives me more options if the cable were to give out. The older V2 has a proprietary cable with a USB-A adapter, and can’t be detached from the controller, so if it breaks, your options are decidedly more limited. Pay attention to the cable you get with any wired option.

2. Ergonomics

If you game as much as I do, you’ve likely encountered some RSI over the years. Gaming for too long, or with the wrong kit, can be really tough on your hands. So it’s important to pick a controller that is comfortable to hold. I love the Wolverine V2’s non-slip rubber grips and its contours. It is definitely nicer in the hand than the V3, but there are some drawbacks. Non-slip rubber is much less durable than plastic, I’ve found, so my V2 has bits that are starting to come away from the shell. If you take care of it, you’ll get decent life out of it, but it’s a trade-off over plastic worth taking into account. The V3 uses a less-soft, ridged plastic. It’s still grippier than a vanilla Xbox or PlayStation controller, but not as plush as the old one. However, I can already sense another benefit of this design that I’m yet to realise. The V2’s rubber seems infinitely more sticky than the V3’s plastic, and over time, my old controller has inevitably picked up dirt, grime, and no doubt some chocolate that I’d really wish wasn’t there. Standard plastic is much easier to keep in good condition.

Ergonomics also includes size. Xbox reduced the size of its controllers a few years back, and I was blown away by how drastic the difference in comfort was, despite the change not really being that visible. If you’re shopping for a new controller, take some time to check the size and also the weight, as a heavy controller will generally be less comfortable to hold for longer sessions.

3. Features, buttons, and modes

Gaming controllers, by default, will come with a basic set of buttons and features. At a minimum, to enjoy most titles, you’ll want a decent set of sticks, triggers, and buttons for input, as well as a D-pad. Beyond that, the possibilities are endless. I was drawn to the Wolverine series because I play a lot of first-person shooters. The V2 and V3 have an extra shoulder button on each side, and the new V3 comes with four paddles under the controller.

In theory, the latter ensures I never have to take my thumbs off the sticks during a gunfight. But even in less intense games, extra buttons, especially remappable ones, are handy. I love the Fallout franchise, for instance, and the A button on the right-hand side shoulder makes picking up items and interactions in titles like this much smoother.

My V2 and V3 also come with hair triggers, switches that reduce the travel time of the triggers to make shooting easier. Of course, if you’re looking for a nice colorful controller to play Stardew Valley, that probably isn’t of much interest. But the point is that you should definitely be looking for a controller with at least a few extras to spice up your gaming. Does it have any modular parts that can be swapped or customized? Does it have RGB lighting? The Turtle Beach Victrix Pro is a great example of a modular controller where nearly every physical aspect is customizable. You can change the design and feel of the sticks, or even swap out the buttons to your liking.

A final word should go to the hallowed Hall Effect or TMR thumbstick technology. If you want a decent amount of durability and to avoid dreaded stick drift, it is worth investing a bit more in a controller with upgraded stick tech beyond bog-standard potentiometers. I won’t go into detail on the pros and cons of Hall Effect vs TMR, but know that both use magnets, instead of the resistive film found on most common gaming controllers, which will inevitably wear out over time. Hall Effect sticks are an upgrade to the Wolverine V3 that I’m really pleased with, and it might mean I never have to buy another controller again.

So there you have it. PC gaming controllers are a vast and complicated environment, but that also means there’s a lot to offer for everyone. With a vast array of options, you also don’t need to break the bank for a good controller, with many good third-party options costing less than $50.

Still, remember you can always buy a standard-issue Xbox or PS5 controller to get you started. After all, there’s a reason those designs haven’t changed substantially in years, and a reason why so many third-party alternatives follow their designs.

It's been more than 7 years since the Epic Games Store debuted alongside its launcher as a unified platform. For many, it's still a glorified Fortnite client: one that's opened to claim free games from time to time, but only out of necessity. The launcher has never posed a real threat to Steam for many reasons, and Epic is finally admitting to those shortcomings, with a promise to build a new version that's much better.

"We’re in the process of rebuilding the underlying architecture of the Epic Games Store Launcher and plan to ship improvements this summer. These changes will make the storefront on the launcher responsive and feel good to use, with fast load times and greater stability."

The news stems from the yearly platform review Epic released yesterday, citing a 4% increase in third party (non-Epic games) players on EGS. Amidst all that data, the company included a little section on what's next for 2026, where it formally announced a revamped Epic Games Store that will feature a "better social experience for players" with new additions like avatars, player profiles and private messaging.

"These social capabilities will be extended to Epic Online Services, opening up text chat for other developers to include in their games later this year. In Q2, we will add voice chat and game-independent parties to our social framework." Afterward, Steve Allison — GM for Epic Games Store — sat down with various outlets to provide insight on the journey the platform's taken and where it's going now.

Becoming competitive with Steam is the number one priority that drives most of these changes. But change starts with first acknowledging what's wrong, and Allison had heaps of self-awareness. "... The launcher sucks. Let's call it what it is. It's really slow," remarked Allison while speaking to Eurogamer. He went on to break down why that is:

"It makes calls to our back-end services to refresh every time you click around, and depending on your connection, you'll have to wait a couple seconds. And that just doesn't feel good, especially when people are comparing and contrasting and dual using one that doesn't do that." Allison is, of course, referring to Steam at the end there, which has always been very responsive — even if it's not the prettiest.

He then explained the branching issues that make Epic's launcher less desirable than even proprietary solutions on console. "We have no social framework in the store, like other stores — even console platforms — which have the ability to communicate with your friends, and we just kind of stripped that out during COVID and never brought it back."

Beyond fanboyism, Epic's storefront is very barebones in terms of actual functionality that players appreciate or have grown accustomed to. Forums are a standout omission here which enable a greater sense of community. The company has focused on developer-facing concerns and bringing EGS to mobile for the past few years, so it's finally time to adjust tracks back to the gamer.

Work on the upgraded Epic Games Store and launcher started back in November 2025, and the company plans to release it this summer. Epic wants to increase its market share in the PC gaming segment to 30-40% in the next five years and topple Steam's monopoly. Valve currently enjoys 90% of the pie, despite Epic offering a more lucrative 88-12 percent revenue distribution offer compared to Steam's 70-30.

Allison was confident in saying the "battle has not been lost at all", mirroring the famous words of Logan Roy on Succession: "This is not the end. I'm going to build something better — something faster, lighter, meaner, wilder." Now, whether Epic's renovation project imitates the titular character's fate on the show or subverts it, well that remains to be seen.

There's also the Tim Sweeney of it all: Epic's rather vocal CEO has presented some very polarizing opinions, especially pertaining to AI, in recent times. These simply serve as ammo to a market that already rejects the EGS as a viable alternative, and there's no saying when the executive will upset the community once again. (If you think what Sweeney says doesn't matter, just take a look at how revered Gabe Newell is amongst gamers.)

Valve's dominance in the PC gaming market has put it squarely in the sights of a UK activist who thinks Valve is charging Steam gamers and developers too much money for games distributed on the platform. BBC reports that Valve is being hit with a £656 million ($903 million) lawsuit for "abusing its market dominance" by digital rights campaigner Vicki Shotbolt. If she wins, all 14 million UK Steam gamers could be compensated, and similar lawsuits could likely hit Valve in other countries.

The lawsuit instigated by Shotbolt claims that Valve is prohibiting games sold on its Steam platform from being sold through other distribution platforms that might charge less for the same games. Valve is also being charged for allegedly imposing anti-steering provisions based on its in-game purchasing model, where PC game add-ons or DLC only work through Steam if the base game was purchased through Steam. Finally, Valve is being charged for charging consumers too much based on "excessive commission charges".

So far, Valve has argued against the legitimacy of this lawsuit, claiming that Shotbolt has not provided adequate methodology for determining Valve's effective commission charge.

This is not the first time Valve has been accused of taking too much income away from gamers and developers. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has been one of the biggest advocates against Steam's high commission rates and has blamed Valve for being the "Game Developer IRS". In fact, Sweeney took Google and Apple to court over the same issue, and the issue was the main reason why Epic Games removed Fortnite from both companies' stores.

Valve is one of the highest-demanding gaming platforms on the market, with an average 30% comission rate for games sold on the Steam store. Valve takes home 30% of a game's income below $9.9 million in sales. Above $10 million in sales, Valve drops its commission to 25%, and for over $50 million in sales, Valve takes home 20%.

That said, Valve is not the only company that takes home 30% comission. 30% is an industry-wide rate that most game companies have adopted. Nintendo, Xbox, PlayStation, and even Good Old Games charge 30% comission under most circumstances. Epic Games Store is one of the few gaming platforms that charges well under 30% — adopting a 12% comission rate.

Regardless, Steam continues to grow, and its parent company, Valve, is ranked one of the most efficient companies in the world, generating a whopping $50 million per employee.

A video posted on social media shows a gamer playing a first-person shooter game on a hardcore gaming rig that makes an extra step, or two, for realism. X user @interesting_aIl shared the clip showing the engineer playing an fps title with firework mounts arranged around their monitor. Whenever an opponent took a shot at them, a pyrotechnic is launched at the player, who wore a full-face helmet and a jacket (hopefully, fire retardant) for protection.

The next part of the clip shows an additional a gun contraption that probably delivers recoil with every shot and also revealed the firework launcher’s capability to launch multiple pyrotechnics in succession to simulate machine gun fire.

Another scene showed the player underneath an in-game rainstorm, with the clip then transitioning to the player blasting away while being pummeled by wind and water in real life. It is also in this part of the video that we see the player’s smoke or wind machine fall apart during operation.

The last few seconds show the player wearing some sort of electrical contraption zapping them every time they get shot in game. This does not just give them a whole-body shock — instead, it only electrifies the specific limb that received damage, like an arm or a leg. But when they were cornered and mowed down by their opponent, you can see them getting knocked off their chair with the electrocution they received from their arms and legs up to their torso.

This gaming feedback rig isn’t practical at all, especially as you will have to reload the fireworks after every encounter — so you either have to pause your game after every fire fight, or you need to pay someone to do it for you. More than that, the electrical zap effect is visibly painful and dangerous, which kind of defeats the purpose of playing fps games. Still, the post gained a lot of admiration from the gaming community, with even tech mogul Elon Musk commenting, “Hardcore,” followed by a laughing emoji.

This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen gamers take gaming to the literal next level. A Bilibili user called blyat, possibly the person in this Tweeted video, built a three-crew tank rig to play World of Tanks in, while another one built a jet fighter sim rig, complete with a full motion gaming chair, a recoiling machine gun, rocket launchers that shoot fireworks, countermeasure dispensers behind the cockpit, and afterburners that spurt out literal flames.