Valve is adding framerate telemetry data to games so you can see what your hardware will manage in a given game before you buy it. The new initiative will start with the Steam Deck, but Valve has promised to bring the feature to more hardware in the future, presumably not only its Steam Machine but desktop gaming PCs more generally. The new feature shows players' average FPS on Steam Deck while playing the title, so customers can decide whether to invest without risking a purchase.

Valve already added the option to insert your hardware specifications when you write a review for a game, but an extremely small fraction of players actually write reviews, and from looking at reviews on recent Steam games, it seems like an even smaller fraction actually select to include their hardware specifications, for whatever reason.

So this is a pretty interesting idea, not least because Valve is debuting it for the Steam Deck first. Notably, the framerate data Valve is using is sourced from users who opted into sharing this data, so there's no privacy concern here. It appears to be as simple as it sounds: Valve will capture your performance while playing a game on the Steam Deck, and then show that performance to other users—anonymously, of course.

The clever among you may have realized "but wait, PC games have settings you can adjust, so even the same hardware might deliver really different performance levels." Correct! And it's also exactly why Valve is doing this. Its Steam Deck Verified program requires a certain level of performance, and games can get marked as "Unsupported" if they don't reach that level, but some people may find them playable regardless. In other words, there's no one perfect standard for "playable performance," and thus Valve wants to let users decide for themselves.

Valve says that, at least for this early trial with Steam Deck data, that data is being filtered to only show data from Decks that are set to the default frame limit. The firm doesn't make any attempt to account for custom in-game settings, yet it says that "despite this, [Valve has] found that the framerate data consolidates around relatively narrow ranges," after accounting for the unusual effects of vertical sync.

So what if you don't have a Steam Deck? Well, Valve says it sees this update (adding the Steam Deck framerate data) as "a stepping stone toward providing framerate data for more devices than just Steam Deck." Obviously, that includes Valve's own Steam Machine mini-desktop and Steam Frame VR headset, but presumably it will extend to folks on standard gaming PCs (whether desktop or laptop)

It's not clear whether desktop performance data will be matched by graphics card, some combination of GPU and CPU, or multiple factors, but either way, there's no question that this is yet another feature that sets Steam as a storefront above its competitors. If you'd like to opt in, you'll have to join the Steam Client Beta for now; Valve says the feature is coming to all users "in the future," though.

Blizzard pulled out all the stops to ensure World of Warcraft: Forever survived a chaotic launch night. What was the company's secret weapon? Splurging an absurd amount of money on infrastructure made up of 3,924 virtual machines with 70,480 CPU cores and a whopping 251,136 GB, or 251 TB, of memory.

Praised by media and players as one of the smoothest launches in Blizzard's history, World of Warcraft: Forever requires significant computing firepower. 3,924 virtual machines work out to 18 cores and 64GB of memory per instance. Or, the company could be using a mixture of 16-core and 32-core nodes with slightly less memory.

To put the infrastructure's scale in consumer terms, we are looking at about 8,810 mainstream processors, or 7,848 high-end gaming systems with 32GB of memory each. In any event, the hardware is greatly improved compared to what World of Warcraft used to run on back in 2009.

In 2009, Blizzard said it used 10 data centers worldwide to host World of Warcraft. At the time, the infrastructure included 13,250 server blades, totaling 75,000 CPU cores and 112.5 TB of memory. By comparison, World of Warcraft: Forever leverages 6% fewer CPU cores but rocks 2.2X more memory. Modern processors are leagues faster than chips from 17 years ago. By today's standards, the bottleneck is memory capacity and bandwidth, which is why the infrastructure can run on fewer cores but has more than double the memory to compensate.

Blizzard does not specify the exact hardware that World of Warcraft: Forever runs on. However, if we were to translate the core specifications to, for example, AMD's EPYC 128-core Bergamo or 96-core Genoa chips, it could be anywhere between 275 and 365 2U server nodes, depending on which processor it uses. Therefore, World of Warcraft: Forever could be running on just eight to ten 42U server racks, a noteworthy improvement over 17 years ago.

Blizzard should have no trouble building the infrastructure for World of Warcraft: Forever. A ballpark estimate for about ten 42U server racks with EPYC chips is at least $15 million, even with today's memory pricing. But then again, since Microsoft owns Blizzard now, the company could just be tapping its parent's existing Azure platform. Technically, it is not free compute, but Blizzard would benefit from cost pricing and priority allocation of Azure's capacity.

World of Warcraft: Forever shows that a high-profile launch does not have to be a nightmare when companies are willing to invest in computing infrastructure. In this case, many would agree Blizzard is putting those 251TB to good use, although Sam Altman may say otherwise.

The explosion of cloning and reverse-engineering games with AI has forced Anthropic to completely block its AI tools from executing these tasks. However, this has also negatively impacted game developers, who have started complaining that they can no longer use the tool for their own legitimate purposes. The Anthropic team has updated the rule so that Claude will now offer to build an original game in the same genre when asked to copy an existing one, according to an X post by technical staff member Addy Osmani.

"Last week some of you ran into Claude Code pushing back on game projects it should have just built. We'd added a short rule to the Opus 5.5 prompt to steer Claude away from recreating specific existing games, but it was also kicking in when you referenced one just to describe the mechanics you wanted," Osmani wrote. "We've updated that rule in 2.1.317. You can name a game to describe what you want, and Claude should now build an original game in that genre. If you ask for a copy of the original, it'll offer to build something similar instead."

Game decompiling used to be difficult task — often taking teams of dedicated and skilled volunteers months, if not years, to complete. The availability of AI tools has made this process so much faster and easier, although that doesn’t automatically mean that the decompiled version comes out clean. But what’s worse is that some bad actors have been using the technology to reverse engineer game demos from small and indie developers and blackmailing them by threatening to release an AI-completed version of their game — holding the developers’ games hostage and asking for ransom so that their work is not spoiled or destroyed.

Anthropic engineers are now trying to find a balance between preventing its tools from being used to copy games and earning the ire of software giants, publishers, and game developers while also ensuring that its paying customers can continue to use Claude for their own games.

Osmani also said on his post, "We want Claude to be as helpful as possible when you're building something original, but also to protect your work if someone else tries to copy it."

Frontier AI is becoming increasingly powerful, allowing programmers and developers to get things done more quickly and efficiently. But its unprecedented capability is also leading to unintended consequences, such as the ability to create rough clones of expensive software, such as Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office.

Gamers can now experiment with playing their favorite Steam titles on a jailbroken PlayStation 5. The game launcher is actually based on the Playden launcher designed for macOS and adapted for the PlayStation, allowing you to sign in with your Steam account and install games from your library directly to the console. Playden for PS5 is a GitHub project that lets you run Steam games on the console, notes VideoCardz. When you launch a game on Playden for PS5, it sets a private Windows environment and is run through prospero-win, which is a PS5 port of Wine.

Note that the launcher itself does not run the game — instead it builds a separate PS5 app created for the game that you installed, allowing the Steam title to appear as a separate tile on the console’s home screen. Aside from that, its files, settings, and crashes are isolated from the launcher and other games. There’s also a separate runtime kit that handles Wine for PS5, the required graphics drivers, the Windows environment, and a template app shell for your games.

While Playden for PS5 successfully launches Steam games, it does not necessarily mean a smooth start-to-end experience for every title. The creator notes that it’s still in the Alpha stage of development, with X user v7dt1 saying that even though they were able to launch a game, it eventually crashed. On the other hand, u/Cevap shared on the r/PS5_Jailbreak subreddit that they were able to play Portal through the launcher with no issues, except for the lack of a mouse cursor and the inability to hit ESC to open the options menu. Still, the developer of the launcher lists several compatible games, including American Truck Simulator, Cyberpunk 2077, Doom Eternal, GTA: Vice City, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, and more.

Of course, users need a jailbroken PlayStation 5 if they want to use this launcher. But aside from that, the creator said that using it poses several risks, including the fact that it’s an unofficial Steam client. While there haven’t been any problems with third-party Steam clients, the app notes that Valve does not officially support it and any risk that comes with the use of the launcher “is yours to accept.”

Sony announced that it will cease physical game disc production by January 2028, which did not sit well among many fans. In fact, a petition against the move has nearly hit 200,000 signatures just a week after the announcement. Alongside that announcement, we started seeing a number of jailbreaks and emulators for the PS5, allowing users to take back control of their hardware, likely to the chagrin of Sony executives.

Nvidia's RTX Spark platform puts local AI inference and content creation first, but Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra really wants to game, too. The vented keyboard keeps the critical WASD keys cool under load by design, the smooth 120Hz screen can get as bright as 2000 nits with HDR games, and the built-in speakers may be the best I've ever heard on a laptop, period.

There's just one problem: that 3270x2180 screen asks a lot of DLSS upscaling. The computation that DLSS performs doesn't come for free, and the load increases with higher output resolutions. This is especially relevant with the Surface Laptop Ultra's high-density panel, which has just 14% fewer pixels than a 16:9 4K display.

The Surface's unusual 3:2 aspect ratio (at least compared to the average gaming laptop) also means that scaling content up to fill the screen isn't straightforward in many games. 16:9 and 16:10 content gets stretched vertically, causing obvious distortion of character models and objects like tires. And if you use windowed mode instead, playing in a 16:9 or 16:10 window on a relatively small screen like this quickly tires the eyes.

The thing is, all this is easy to solve—easy enough, in fact, that I'm surprised I had to do it myself at all.

Microsoft seems aware that lower 3:2 resolutions are useful for this system, as it put a 1600x1024 custom resolution in the list of display modes that's slightly less than half of native on both axes. But at roughly 1.6 megapixels in total, that image offers less resolution than even a 1920x1080 display does. Scaling up from such a low-res baseline on the Surface screen results in a noticeably soft image even before we dial in DLSS.

What we really want, for reasons of both performance and adequate sharpness, is a 3:2 resolution that comes close to the 2.07 megapixels that 1920x1080 yields. Some quick math and rounding to whole numbers gives us 1764x1176 as an optimal target.

With those ideal dimensions in hand, the next step was to create a custom resolution to match. The Nvidia Control Panel doesn't work on Windows on Arm, but we can still use the Nvidia App to set custom resolutions.

After diving into the System tab and expanding the Display Properties pane, I found the "Customize Resolution" button to open an editor to that end and added 1764x1176 at 120Hz. I then tested it and confirmed that it worked as a supported display mode. (If you want to match the 3.7 MP of 2560x1440, set up a 2352x1568 resolution while you’re at it.)

If for some reason you don't want non-3:2 content to fit the entire Surface Laptop Ultra screen, there is a Scaling pane in the Nvidia App that lets you control that behavior. The "Aspect Ratio" scaling mode will letterbox 16:9 and 16:10 material if you set the display resolution accordingly. But if you're paying $5899 for this system, I presume you want to use every one of its pricey pixels rather than leaving some of them dark.

So what does that bit of tweaking buy us compared to our initial gaming results with Control Resonant?

As someone who primarily games on our Ryzen 7 9800X3D GPU testing system and not a laptop, I wanted to make sure I wasn't setting unreasonable expectations for the Surface Laptop for input latency or CPU performance. So I hauled out an older 17" gaming laptop with a Core i9-11980HK and an RTX 3080 Mobile 16GB inside to get some perspective.

To level the playing field with the Surface Laptop Ultra and its native support for frame generation, I modded Optiscaler into Control Resonant on that system to enable Intel's Xe Frame Generation and Xe Low Latency features.

I conducted my testing with Control Resonant's High raster preset and medium RT preset, which gets you a noticeable boost in image quality thanks in part to DLSS Ray Reconstruction.

You can see that with these settings, trying to upscale Control Resonant to the Surface Laptop Ultra's native resolution is too much to ask for a smooth or responsive gaming experience. Even with DLSS Ultra Performance (an input resolution of 1090x727) and 2X frame generation, we only just break 60 FPS, and latency is at an unacceptable 87 ms average. There's no latency budget left to turn up MFG without turning down other image quality settings.

With our 1764x1176 custom resolution, however, we're off to a great start with DLSS Quality upscaling (an input resolution of 1176x874). The resulting 83.4 FPS average, 42.9 1% low FPS, and an average input latency of 67.8 ms is a fine experience. We still have room to dial in MFG 3X, leading to a 123 FPS average and 55 FPS 1% lows while keeping latency a reasonable 71 ms.

The RTX 3080 Mobile system with XeFG and XeLL, meanwhile, turns in an 87.1 FPS average, 53 FPS 1% lows, and a 69 ms average input latency at 1920x1080 with the same image quality settings. Its key advantage is in 1% lows, but that win comes with significant trade-offs.

Plugged into our Watts Up meter, the RTX 3080 system draws 250 W from the wall to deliver the experience it does, but according to a USB-C power meter, the Surface Laptop Ultra pulls between 110 W and 120 W under load. Silicon has come a long way since Tiger Lake and Ampere.

The RTX 3080 system and its enormous power adapter together also weigh over nine pounds (4.1 kg). It's technically portable but practically a pain to haul around. The Surface Laptop Ultra and its 140W adapter weigh just 5.3 lb (2.39 kg), which isn't featherweight but won't break your back.

And the Surface will actually fit on a tray table or your lap, with enough battery life that you can use it through a transcontinental U.S. flight, say, and still have plenty of juice left for either side of the trip.

So at least in Control Resonant, the Surface Laptop Ultra is delivering largely the same gaming experience as that high-end RTX 3080 Mobile system, but in a much smaller and lighter total package that draws less than half the wall power. And if you want to stretch frame rates further with MFG 3X, the Surface has MFG support that the older system doesn't. Just add in the 1764x1176 intermediate resolution that Microsoft forgot, and you’ll be well on your way to a better gaming experience.

Electronic Arts (EA) is closing BioWare and its Edmonton studio, according to a recent letter to employees, which confirms that early development on the next Mass Effect game has also been canceled. The studio was behind Mass Effect and other popular franchises such as Dragon Age, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, and Baldur’s Gate during its 31-year history. EA is focusing on Battlefield, Iron Man, and a Fight Night revival instead.

BioWare, a “legendary studio,” in EA’s words, had a small team working on early development of the next Mass Effect game, but the company “made the decision not to move forward with this development.” BioWare was acquired by EA in 2008, and EA itself went private in August. The next game in the series was first announced in November 2020 and teased that December with an official trailer on EA’s Mass Effect YouTube channel. In 2021, the Mass Effect Legendary Edition remaster of the original trilogy was released. Since then, the studio has been relatively quiet except for Dragon Age: The Veilguard in 2024.

EA spared only a few lines for BioWare, instead focusing on three priorities: Deepen Our Core, Expand Our Reach, and Transform Our Business. Battlefield 6 is touted as “a great success” as the company is focusing on Apex Legends modes, Marvel’s Iron Man, and the next Star Wars Jedi game. “Project Gridiron” falls under the EA Sports heading as a social-first, open-world experience from EA’s American football team, with a Fight Night revival currently in pre-production. The company hasn’t forgotten about The Sims, either, and intends to “prioritize [its] efforts on ‘Project Evergreen.’”

Those impacted will be supported “in exploring other opportunities within EA.” EA did not give a job count, and neither the Mass Effect nor the Dragon Age series was declared dead. BioWare’s released games were also not mentioned.

Veilguard, as EA described it early last year, engaged only about “1.5 million players during the quarter,” which was “down nearly 50% from the company’s expectations.” That reception may have played a partial role in the decision, though EA did not say so. Around the same time, BioWare general manager Gary McKay said that only “a core team” was working on the next Mass Effect game and didn’t “require support from the full studio,” as colleagues were matched “with other teams at EA.”

The move is not entirely unexpected, with job cuts being common in the industry, for example, with Microsoft announcing 3,200 Xbox job cuts in July, citing low margins.

EA did not reveal any dates for major titles, but it plans to discuss its direction and the work ahead with staff at its Global Town Hall in November. For now, it looks like EA is doubling down on its core franchises and dropping the studio to refocus on what’s been working.

The revelation that there was a ton of performance lying on the table in the remastered The Elder Scrolls Part IV: Oblivion won't be a surprise to people who have played the game, which is notorious for its hitching and stuttering. The reason primarily lies in its poor utilization of hardware, and that's a big part of what LTSharpe and Claude have addressed in the new Oblivion Remastered Performance Fix that changes nothing about the game's visuals yet increases performance by as much as 68% in the worst case. (h/t to ComputerBase)

Yes, this mod is just about 100% vibe-coded, and yet, rather than hacking Minecraft into GTA V on iPhone, or hacking CoD Black Ops 2 maps into Minecraft, this mod is a binary code modification for Oblivion Remastered that seeks to improve performance and stability considerably, and according to numerous jubilant and thankful posts on NexusMods, it seems to do exactly that, with one user proclaiming that the performance increase was "dramatic" and that the overworld stuttering that plagues the game is "completely gone."

The story goes like this: gamer and mod creator LTSharpe has a slightly older system with a Ryzen 7 5800X CPU. Not the newest chip on the block to be sure, but Zen 3 isn't so old that it should be crumpling under the weight of games just yet. Frustrated with the verifiably awful performance of the remaster of The Elder Scrolls Part IV: Oblivion, he paid for a subscription to Anthropic's Claude AI agent and started working with the assistant to diagnose and fix the performance problems.

"Diagnose" is a critical keyword here, because it isn't like Claude was hallucinating an engine.ini tweak somebody else published for the original game 20 years ago. The partners, with Claude doing the hard work and LTSharpe directing, reverse-engineered the game to the point that they were able to build a repeatable benchmarking framework. That allowed them to systematically diagnose the causes of the performance problems and then test fixes against the real behavior of the game with modified machine code.

That's the thing; this was done without source code. Neither TES4 Oblivion nor the remaster's Unreal Engine is open-source software. The sheer magnitude of the task would be incredibly daunting to a team of human engineers, much less a single person. According to LTSharpe, over the course of two weeks Claude successfully diagnosed and fixed bugs in not only the Remaster's Unreal Engine code, but also in the underlying Gamebryo original engine, in AMD's frame generation code, and even in the Unreal Engine itself, improving performance and avoiding crashes.

The developer—or perhaps we should say, coordinator?—is careful to acknowledge that the performance tweaks were created with his system specifically in mind and that they may not work well for others. Indeed, he has a Radeon graphics card, which puts him within a surprisingly small minority of PC gamers, and some portion of his fixes were aimed at making sure AMD's FSR upscaling and frame generation remain in effect despite a long-standing game bug that disables them when you task-switch (Alt+Tab) out of the game. The good lieutenant invites other gamers to try out the fix and report back, and he's even helping out with support requests on NexusMods, too. Head over there if you're keen to grab the fix and try it for yourself.

Leading French eSports club Team Vitality has confirmed that its Paris HQ has been smashed up, with trophies, computer equipment, and more looted over the weekend. Thankfully, no team members or staff have been hurt. The team’s V.Hive premises were attacked by criminal opportunistic looters under cover of the widespread protests in France over issues related to school funding, living costs, and government spending cuts. Other shops, public buildings, and property have been smashed, looted, and sometimes burned.

Above, you can see the confirmation of the serious, unfortunate events seen over the weekend. “Our display windows were destroyed, and our trophies and computer equipment were stolen,” lamented the post [machine translation], while being thankful that no members, staff, or fans of Team Vitality were hurt. The bulletin ends with the news that the V.Hive will remain closed for now, until after damage has been assessed. More information is promised in due course.

There are a multitude of social media posts sharing images, videos, and pointing fingers at what they see as the cause of the protests, riots, and looting. Of course, fingers point in all directions, and unfortunately there are also reports of AI-generated rage-farming media, so keep a critical eye open should you dare to doom scroll.

Of course we’ve focused on the damage and looting of Team Vitality’s HQ due to the tech angle. The compendium of video clips shared by the news organization NEXTA provides evidence of the extent of the V.Hive attack. This 30-second clip appears to show rioters hammering at and kicking in the eSports HQ’s windows, taking items from the premises, and throwing gaming chairs onto bonfires in the street.

We also see accounts like ElBuni share clips of looters brandishing what appear to be eSports trophies from Team Vitality’s HQ (embedded above). The second clip shows looters with their hands inside gaming PCs opened up on the sidewalk. It looks like the hooded and gloved looter in the video is removing RAM sticks, an easily pocketable yet highly valuable PC component, as you will all know.

This morning, the French Prime Minister has called for local and partial curfews to contain the post-demonstration rioting. Meanwhile, there are concerns that there could be copycat behavior across Europe.

A new 3D web game where you live "A Day in the Life of a Semiconductor Wafer Factory Worker" has gone viral in Taiwan, where it was developed. Available in Chinese, English, and Japanese, Fab24hr is a work simulator where you play one of several semiconductor engineer roles in a blocky isometric 3D factory. Though the graphics might look basic, Taiwan’s TVBS news says that the game is so realistic that it resonates with fab workers but not always in a good way – some have likened it to "a horror game" or "prison" [machine translation].

If you head over to the Fab24hr site, the game UI loads pretty quickly and you are asked to input a character name and ‘Clock in.’ Then two game modes are presented. You can play the main story, dubbed ‘The life of a chip’ where you character works through 12 chapters shepherding a hearing-aid chip from the R&D line into the hands of an end user. In this mode your blocky fab worker character will simulate dealing with equipment failures, process anomalies, and production progress emergencies. You might also have to file reports about operational errors. Apparently there are three endings to this 12-chapter game, depending on your progress and decisions.

Another game mode is called ‘A day in the fab.’ Here you pick a factory location and role. For example, you can choose to be a Process Engineer. Your day started with the ETCH-03 semiconductor tool breaking, and “everyone is waiting for you to say what time it will be fixed.” Though this might sound like you’ve been thrown in at the deep end, if you pay attention to the handover from the previous shift, there should be clues to get you by. Technical terms are explained in the game so even those with no semiconductor industry experience should be able to ‘enjoy’ this escapade.

I briefly tested the game in my browser, where it ran without issues. It didn’t take long to understand why some Taiwanese fab veterans felt this simulator was kind of stressful, or even “super scary.” It isn’t the kind of free-time escapism I’m looking for.

Epic Games says that it’s working on an update for its anti-cheat solution for Linux that would close the gap in capabilities with the Windows version of Easy Anti-Cheat. The company said that EAC Linux V2 will use existing Linux features to make it easier for distribution maintainers to meet these requirements by default, which should allow more Linux gamers to play competitive titles without needing to make changes to their current setup, but with the trade-off of forced adherence to certain security measures that the Linux community often avoids.

EAC Linux V2 currently has the following requirements: Signed Kernel and Kernel Modules, TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, Measured Boot, Input-Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU), Kernel Lockdown Integrity Mode, Kexec Disabled, and Linux Security Module BPF. The company says that it expects to iterate on these requirements over time, and that it’s looking to work with developers and distribution maintainers to refine these requirements. Using these features means that EAC Linux V2 will not need a kernel driver like the Windows implementation of anti-cheat, although it may require some distro maintainers to effect a configuration change to work with EAC Linux V2.

As for Linux players using an EAC-Linux-V2-compatible game and distro, they need to install an anti-cheat systemd service that only runs alongside a protected game. Once they quit the protected title, the anti-cheat service would also end its process. Some of the distros the EAC Linux V2 recognizes signing keys from include Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, Bazzite, and Debian, among others, meaning gamers already using these would be able to play protected games provided that their machine also meets all other requirements.

Even though Epic is trying to reach as many Linux gamers as possible, these features will likely not be well received by the community. Some Linux users don’t trust big tech, and it is often one of the reasons why they switched over to the open-source platform in the first place. Enforcing these requirements just to play a single game would go against the ethos of having full control of one’s hardware and software, which is one challenge the anti-cheat systems working on Linux must deal with. Epic does offer some compromises, like allowing multiple boot options so that Linux gamers can still maintain their preferred configuration when they do not intend to play a protected title. But the fact that something with this many stringent requirements is installed on their system may not sit well with many users.

Epic Games has a new launcher available to download now, which was redesigned with AI. The company says it "vibe coded" the new launcher, and claims it's "way faster" than the current version, as well as 46% faster to start up compared to Steam. Epic Games has set up a landing page where you can download the new launcher, as well as browse its new enhancements.

"Programming is hard. So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher that’s way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look," wrote Epic Games in a blog post discussing the new launcher. The launcher is currently in "preview" phase, which is somewhat of an open beta. Epic is gathering feedback, and anyone is free to download the launcher. In the future, it plans a stable release after it gathers and addresses feedback.

Although the headline startup figure is what Epic focused on its blog post, the updated launcher comes with several additional features, many of which are preset on Steam but weren't previously available with Epic. There are dedicated pages for games in your library now, for instance, as well as a unified downloads page. The app also includes collections, a big feature of Steam, allowing you to organize your library into different categories. On the landing page, Epic claims the new library is "30x faster," though doesn't provide any details beyond that point.

Although the launcher has new features, it's still rough around the edges. For instance, the new social menu now follows you around from the store to your library, with no option to close or resize. Epic also highlights that "certain social features and account management options" are missing from the new launcher. The company says it's working toward "feature parity."

Additionally, Epic Games suggests developers working on Unreal projects, as well as competitive players in Fortnite and Rocket League continue to use the old launcher. It's not clear why Epic is pointing these groups toward the older launcher, but it raises some red flags about what gaps might be present in the new, vibe coded launcher.

Epic says its new launcher is 46% faster than Steam from a cold start, as well as 14% faster when restoring from the system tray; though, the latter metric only accounts for a whopping 0.06 seconds. Epic commissioned the testing from Keywords Studios, somewhat of a matchmaker in the video games and entertainment industry for a variety of services (including benchmarking, apparently). Epic says its results were gathered from five tests across 13 Windows platforms.

Interestingly, Epic didn't provide any performance details about the new launcher compared to the old one, outside of saying the new launcher is "way faster and more responsive."

The Epic Games Launcher preview is available to download now, with native versions for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Windows 10 and 11 are supported, as is macOS 12 or newer. On Linux, you'll need at least Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Fedora 43, or Debian 12.

Epic has recently pivoted to an AI-first company, at least according to Epic boss Tim Sweeney. The company has reportedly delayed a Disney-based shooter, with another director telling staff that there should be "no more handwritten code" and that art will be "generated with full AI workflows."

A Ukrainian DLSS 5 experimenter is back at it again, this time testing the original Quake game. It’s running as a post-process, not natively integrated into the game engine, using 4x Multipass to enhance the effect, but it doesn’t look so good.

Valery Kryzhanovsky has posted multiple videos running DLSS 5 on games it was never meant to be used for, nor were the games built with AI upscaling and image enhancements in mind. We previously covered a few of Valery’s projects, running DLSS 5 on 2D games like Duke Nukem and Pac-Man, resulting in weird and cursed images.

However, this time Valery uploaded a video of it on the 1996 Quake, considered to be the very first true 3D FPS in history. Valery explains in the description that the game is not running the leaked DLSS 5 build natively, but as a post-process using ReShade through RenoDX to play with the parameters and settings and inject the effect on DOSBox’s rendered frame. So it’s an emulated version of Quake with basically an AI filter with the DLSS 5 algorithm over it four times, except it’s running in real time on a game. This is similar to how others have experimented with DLSS 5 on videos, applying the effect on top, like JackSpace’s video to “fix” bad CGI in old movies with DLSS 5.

Before DLSS’ popularity, Nvidia released an RTX demo running Quake II with ray tracing in the game engine to improve the lighting. That demo looked stunning, with realistic lighting and reflections, but DLSS is not ray tracing/RTX; it’s an upscaling technology that runs well on RTX cores. And on top of that, DLSS 5 is not even integrated into Quake’s engine, explaining the terrible results. However, this is a very early build of DLSS 5, and Valery says in his blog that the leaked build is undertrained. I honestly thought it would do better, considering there are more obvious 3D elements for the upscaler to work with compared to the 2D games Valery has experimented with. It seems that it darkens everything so much, possibly because of the sparse distribution of torches and highlights.

This might fare better if DLSS 5 were integrated into the engine, like how Sultim Tsyrendashiev modded ray tracing into Quake's engine, similar to Nvidia's Quake II demo.

Earlier this week, Nvidia announced that it had improved the performance of its DLSS 5 model by 2x, while shrinking its footprint by 24%. The result should be higher FPS while using less VRAM, drastically increasing performance.

Grand Theft Auto VI, or as its friends call it, GTA 6, will be a console-only game when it goes on sale on November 19. But while Rockstar Games has yet to confirm when PC gamers will be able to get in on the action, a new GamesBeat report claims that it will be within the first three months of 2027.

With GTA 6 launching on Xbox Series X|S and PS5 in around a month, PC gamers have been left wondering if they should consider picking up the console version — and even buying a whole new console to play it. But GamesBeat reports that might not be necessary, with a Q1 2027 release potentially sooner than a lot of gamers had worried may be the case.

Those gamers had plenty of reasons to be worried that a longer wait could be in the cards, too. GTA V was released on consoles around a year and a half before the PC version. Console gamers were able to put the game through its paces in September 2013, with PC owners waiting until April of 2015.

While far from official, the news comes from industry sources "familiar with the studio's plans," although they were given anonymity for obvious reasons.

It's perhaps no surprise that Rockstar Games is keen to open GTA 6 up to as many potential buyers as possible. It's thought to have cost upwards of $2 billion to create, and making that money back is a lot easier when you add PC gamers to your list of customers.

Rockstar Games will also likely want to get its money-making online version of GTA 6 into the hands of players as soon as possible, too. It won't be ready at launch, but is expected to debut in 2027.

While GTA games have historically been popular among console gamers, there are reasons to choose the PC version if it's available to you. The console version of GTA 6 is expected to run at just 30 FPS at launch, for example.

GTA 6's development hasn't been an easy one. The game itself is thought to be in the hands of "Cyberleek," someone who has already shared clips of the game and has threatened to leak the entire game if their demands are not met. Those demands include their memecoin reaching a $30 million valuation, perhaps hinting at their true motivation.

Epic Games has reportedly delayed a shooter based on Disney’s Marvel and Star Wars franchises, with its developers told to use more AI. According to Bloomberg, the yet-to-be-named game was supposed to be released in March of 2027, but its launch date has been pushed back to an unspecified date. Aside from that, the company also told the people working on the project to switch to an “AI first” production model. One of the game directors was quoted telling staff that there will be “no more handwritten code” and that the game’s art would now be “generated with full AI workflows.”

Around the same time this news came out, Epic boss Tim Sweeney posted an update on X that seemingly confirms the change. “We have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration,” the Epic founder said on the platform. “The aim isn’t to do the same stuff with fewer people, but to enable everyone here to build MORE and BETTER stuff, and to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal.” Sweeney has previously criticized Steam for putting AI tags on games, calling it “irresponsible of Valve.” He says that AI is just a tool and that it’s useful for handling boring, menial, and repetitive tasks like finding errors in code or rigging 3D models. “We’re embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do,” Epic Games communications director Jake Jones told the publication.

The announcement still reportedly left some of the developers working on the project in a state of astonishment. They were hoping that the directive wasn’t serious or that Epic Games would change its mind about the decision, while others jokingly asked if they should ask Claude to fix its own errors. The delayed title was supposed to be the first in a series of games involving Disney intellectual property, which had invested $1.5 billion in the game developer and publisher in 2024. However, Bloomberg reports that progress on the game has suffered because it lacked the number of people required to keep the schedule on track. It seems that the company is trying to make up for lost time by pushing its people to use AI in the hopes that they’ll be able to work much more quickly.

AI is indeed quite a useful tool, with some developers using it to build surprisingly complicated vibe-coded games, like this GTA clone set in Taipei or this decompiled version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. One group even used Gemini for their free game demo, leading to a cost of $1,000 a day in AI usage bills. Despite that, many creators and developers have been against the use of AI in the industry, with one major gaming convention in the UK outright banning games that were built mostly using AI.

Developer Maurice Heumann details in his blog how AI agents were able to decompile Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009), which the post calls only “a popular first-person shooter,” in an effort to rebuild its source code in C++, taking three months and over 500 billion tokens. The agents originally attempted to cheat a byte-for-byte check added after the first month of code ran, but it was “semantically wrong,” and now 99% of the game’s functions are present, with 83% matching the original.

Heumann’s goal since the beginning has been to produce an “accurate, stable and feature-complete recreation,” and he wrote on X less than two weeks ago that the game was fully playable. By his estimate, the project consumed 600–700 billion tokens. In another X post, he said he doesn’t pay for his own tokens but put the cost at about €1,200 with subscriptions or $200,000–$250,000 with API tokens.

The difficulty turned out to be not in producing the code but verifying it was correct, forcing the developer to create a check and to make sure the agents couldn’t game it. The other challenge, as he put it, was that “corporate America was here to ruin our fun.” Two earlier blog posts on the project have since been removed, and the video in his Sept. 30 X post was disabled after a report by the copyright owner. No comment from Activision is currently on record.

The method includes pointing a fleet of agents, using Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex, at the original 2009 PC game. Heumann started with a Claude Max (20x) plan, then added Codex Pro and used both simultaneously. These are flat-rate plans and do not use per-token API billing. “Most of the time,” the developer relied on Sonnet 5, although Opus 5.5 and OpenAI’s Luna, Sol, and Terra were “also used a lot.” For harnesses, he relied mostly on the Claude Code and Codex CLIs.

The agents read the code through IDA using Hex-Rays’ ida-mcp server. The work started with four agents, three workers and a reviewer; by Sept. 30, he wrote on X, it had “17 agents working in parallel.” Keeping all of this straight meant having one GitHub issue per translation unit, and having all agents and humans share a single Discord channel with GitHub webhook CI posts. The developer also tuned the auto-compaction threshold, from the default 90% of the context window maximum to 42% to help clear finished functions out of memory. Agents also had a tendency to drift, so an hourly cron job had them reread instructions.

The agents’ first month of code was extremely readable but “semantically wrong” for multiple reasons: wrong function signatures, types and struct layout issues, and logic that was invented or removed. The agents also made unneeded architectural changes, such as turning a config-variable lookup into one that was “orders of magnitude more expensive.”

The reviewer agent failed to stop this as there were no objective acceptance criteria, and the workers’ comments justifying their changes “effectively acted as unintentional prompt injection,” Heumann says. The team eventually stripped all comments from the source, which “helped a lot,” he wrote on X. An attempt to salvage the first four weeks of code took more time than starting from scratch would have.

The answer was an automated check, so the team switched to the same compiler used to build the original game. A script compares each rebuilt function against the game’s executable at the byte level. Calls and data references are at different addresses and are skipped, with target symbols and offsets checked instead, but data and types get the same check. Then it’s a simple matter of pass/fail for each function, and every match is recorded so CI can recheck it and alert on regressions. While this type of matching is slow and sometimes challenging, a match guarantees identical behavior down to reproducing original bugs.

Even with this positive change, the agents immediately tried to cheat by writing “inline assembly” and “repeatedly tried to modify this script to exclude their function from comparison,” Heumann wrote. Inline assembly and similar shortcuts were then banned in the agents’ instructions, and CI now hashes the verification script and checks it against a hash stored as a GitHub Actions secret. Agents cheating is an expected outcome at this point with many such reports, such as when OpenAI’s models went after ExploitGym answers instead of solving the capture-the-flag challenges directly. As Heumann discovered, having a reviewer agent alone may be insufficient.

Before the check was originally implemented, the cheaper, less capable Haiku and Luna models “produced extremely bad results,” the post says. With the check in place, there was sufficient feedback to make the models work, which cut costs and let the project scale up. After almost two more months, 99% of the functions were present, with 83% meeting the byte-exact requirements. Heumann believes the 16% lacking a byte match are still semantically correct, but diminishing returns were getting real. The blog claims the game “runs flawlessly” as it stands.

For “obvious reasons,” the project’s code is remaining private and will be used “for my own needs only,” Heumann says. As he put it on X, the “decompiled code is obviously also copyrighted.” However, the developer has started extending Sogen, his userspace emulator, into lightweight sandboxing for agents, a response to his project’s agents wiping VMs. It will not be production-ready for a while.

As for the decompilation project, Heumann says that it is a special case, as not every project can do a byte-for-byte reference, but thinks every project can get close “with enough creativity.” One takeaway lesson is that you should be willing to move past failures as “Generating code is cheap now. Throw it away if it’s bad” and focus on correctness over productivity.

When it comes to the gaming industry, the billions bandied about regarding AAA titles often lead many to think that if your game scores a hit, you're essentially set for life. Unfortunately, the sad reality is that indie developers often have to end up pinching pennies or outright in a deficit despite strong sales. Omer Develioğlu, the co-founder of Northend Games, offered a candid breakdown of how $560,000 in income over five years for sales of his games ended up as just $134,000 split two ways, with $73,000 in his and the co-founder's pockets. In the end, the co-creator got only $15,000 per year and continues to drive his 2012 Mazda, hardly the riches one would expect.

The $560,000 gross figure refers to sales for two titles: Northend Tower Defense and Deepstone Rift (Early Access), both sold on Steam, for a grand total of 135,000 units. In an accompanying video, Develioğlu mentions that an impressive 53.3% of sales come directly from China.

Unfortunately, he also says that the country's customers are very demanding, and that the refund rate there is disproportionately large. Thus, $134,000 goes right away towards said refunds, with a rate of 22%, "way above" the purported standard of 10-15%. For what it's worth, the Chinese refund rate is corroborated by both older and recent third-party figures. Current tally: $426,000.

Then there's Steam itself. The platform is widely beloved by gamers everywhere for its value-add features like the Workshop, but also for the basic notion of not making the other platforms' questionable business decisions. Having said that, Gabe Newell's enterprise has also been on the receiving end of criticism thanks to fees starting at 30%, which only go down for amounts over $10 million and beyond. As Develioğlu's games are nowhere near those figures, 30% it is: $127,000 for Steam, and $297,000 for the devs... or so you'd think.

Next up, there's the U.S. withholding taxes. The developer lived in Iraq and moved to Thailand, a country that has a tax agreement with the U.S. to prevent double taxation. Even still, Uncle Sam's slice is 5%, bringing the total down to $287,300.

Now, it's time for one of the more controversial aspects: the publisher's cut. According to Develioğlu, his Asian publisher took care of PR, distribution, and marketing in the China, Japan, and South Korea regions. The fact that the majority of the game's sales came from China could mean the publisher did a good job, but the cut was hefty: $115,000, seemingly in a sliding scale, leaving take-home at $172,000.... before local taxes.

Develioğlu doesn't clear up what the publisher's cut, perhaps due to an NDA. The most logical option is that the $115,000 fee refers to the sales in Asian countries. Given that 53.3% of sales are in China, and that the publisher also handled Japan and Korea, this would mean a percentage cut of around 35-40% of net income.

As an exercise, we ran the figures assuming no publisher, only 15% of sales in Asia, and a lower refund rate. Interestingly, the net amount was nearly the same.

Thailand's offices also want in on the action, and take 15% away from Northend Studios, a mercifully low rate as it's a digital product. Even still, it's $26,000 off the cash pile, now reduced to $146,000.

Finally, Develioğlu split this 50/50 with his co-founder at Northend Games, for a grand personal total of $73,000 for five years' work, or roughly $15,000 per year of work. As the developer notes, he lives in Thailand, and this comparatively small amount is still more than the country's average wage, letting him make games as a full-time occupation. (For reference, the average wage in Thailand is around $5,280 a year).

But as he says, despite making half a million dollars in sales, instead of buying a Lamborghini, he still drives a 2012 Mazda.

Easy Fox, the developers behind a free, AI-powered game demo on Steam, has been forced to take out a bank loan as more players tried out its title. The game, called Teach My Little Sister How To Drive, uses Google Gemini to listen to your voice commands and generate responses, with ChatGPT serving as a fallback system. In its latest update, Easy Fox said that the number of players trying out the game has grown over 20 times, which is more than what it expected. This led its costs to skyrocket to more than a thousand dollars daily, and cheaper fallback AI models have led to slop injected into gameplay, impacting the user experience.

SteamDB showed an average player count of under 10 people until late August, when it started gaining steam. By late September, this had ballooned to around 50 players, before finally hitting a peak of 431 on Oct. 1. “We are currently spending over $1,000 per day on AI services for the demo,” the team wrote on its Steam update. Easy Fox also added, “This isn’t because each player is particularly expensive to support. The total cost has increased because so many people are playing, and we have taken out a bank loan to help keep the demo running.”

Since the game’s sole control method is your voice, AI is a critical part of its programming to recognize your commands and translate them into instructions for the virtual little sister. Since the game is still a free demo, Easy Fox needs to pay for the ongoing usage costs of the game. However, the developers said that the cost of using AI will be included in the price of the game once it gets final release. “For the paid release, we plan to account for expected AI usage in the game’s price,” the team said in its update. “Players will not be charged separately for their individual AI token usage after purchasing the game.”

The developers also said that they plan on introducing local AI models for gamers with capable hardware, so they don’t have to rely on external services, which could run into limits. This is one of the issues that the game has been grappling with, especially as the increased number of users has caused it to hit usage limits on Google Gemini. This has forced the game to fall back on the less capable ChatGPT Realtime Mini 2.1 model, which has led to some player issues, like delayed responses and wrong inputs. It also said that it’s testing alternative AI models for smoother gameplay in Russia, which does not have easy access to Western models because of sanctions. They might find it hard to find suitable replacement AI models, though, because Ukraine has struck Russia’s largest data center.

Increasing AI costs is one of the reasons why some companies have abandoned tokenmaxxing. Even though the price of AI has been falling quite rapidly compared to other technologies, the fact that AI agents use so many more tokens than AI chatbots has made the use of the technology more expensive than anticipated, especially as AI subscriptions have hit a pricing wall.

Ukranian DLSS 5 experimenting YouTube channel Valery Kryzhanovsky showcases the MS-DOS version of Pac-Man with 4x Multipass in four different rendering modes. The video shows weird and glitchy effects, with some rendering modes completely removing green Inky’s eyes and the dots.

This cursed experiment is another attempt at putting DLSS 5 in games it wasn’t designed for, nor are the games designed to use such upscaling technology. While Nvidia’s leaked upscaler has been used for modern 3D games it’s designed for, it has become a meme to run it in games that aren’t even 3D at all, and some attempts aren’t even games at all.

Valery was able to do this by running Pac-Man through the MAME arcade emulator and using ReShade to inject DLSS 5 into the graphics pipeline, and RenoDX to allow the DLSS 5 parameters to be tweaked. Valery emphasizes that this is not native, and of course it isn’t; the game was never designed to accommodate anything like it — that’s why it needed to be injected externally.

Valery elaborates why 4x Multipass is needed in his blog post, saying that 1x basically does nothing for some older games. Multiple passes are needed in order for the changes to stack up, stating that this usually makes it look bad, but in some cases, photorealism could be achieved. However, for Pac-Man, there is basically no 3D information DLSS 5 could gather. The game is flat, and it has barely any human-like features for DLSS to enhance, except eyes, which is probably why it gave it sunken eye bags or cheekbones, as Valery described in the description of the video. Duke Nukem, however, fared a lot better with the metal environment and occlusion along the walls and ceiling.

In the video, Valery tries out 4 different rendering modes: Natural, Default, Cinematic, and Denoise. Valery describes each mode: “Natural keeps the maze readable. Default decides the ghosts need cheekbones. Cinematic puts Blinky in a film nobody greenlit. Denoise clears the board of everything, dots included. One yellow circle, four ghosts, and four different opinions about what any of them are supposed to look like.”

The video doesn’t state which modes are enabled, but one of the modes definitely removed the eyes from the green ghost, making it look genuinely terrifying, as if it were one of those cursed game Creepypastas. All it needs is some red dots in that hollow chasm, and you’d have a stereotypical 2013 scary meme.

Valery further explains in his blog post that DLSS 5 is still undertrained, lacking temporal context, and is similar to earlier DLSS models. The 150MB DLSS 5 build is only a small peek into what it could be come release date — which will come with a more mature model and likely a larger file size.

The publisher behind Arc Raiders is now training in-house AI models to detect cheating as the arms race escalates with persistent cheaters. Cheating on online games is a perennial problem, and it only gets worse the more a title becomes popular, which is why the Arc Raiders developer released an update on its anti-cheat measures. According to Arc Raiders executive producer Aleks, Embark Studios has been working on the issue, and it has deliberately been scant on details to make it harder for cheat engine makers to adapt. However, this stance has been frustrating some players, which is why the company finally gave some details of what it has been working on behind the scenes.

Embark Studios said that it’s already using kernel-level anti-cheat from Denuvo, and that it also detects cheaters using Anybrain’s AI service. But aside from those third-party providers, the company said that it’s also using artificial intelligence to build in-house models to help detect cheating. “In addition to kernel-level protection from Denuvo and detections from Anybrain, we’re using a growing set of in-house models built around machine-learning and other data,” Aleks wrote. “These systems work together to identify suspicious behavior and build confidence before action is taken, while allowing us to continue improving detection as new cheats emerge.”

Aside from building and using anti-cheat tools, the developer is also tightening its enforcement of anti-cheating rules. A permanent ban is now the standard sanction for anyone caught cheating, and it will not give any warnings or second chances to offenders. It has also started associating copies of the game to accounts accused of cheating, so cheaters can’t simply make a new account using the same game license to get back into the game. Other accounts linked to a banned copy of the game will receive the same permaban, as well.

Aleks also said that Embark Studios is working on a hardware ban to cut the number of repeat offenders, and that it hopes to implement this solution later this year. This may be the biggest move that Embark Studios will make, but it also risks other players who buy used hardware that’s been previously flagged and get their account banned, too. One unfortunate Valorant player experienced this recently, but since Riot’s bans are temporary, they could get back into the game after a few months. This might be a different case for Arc Raiders, though, since the game enforces permabans, so this is something that it must consider so it doesn’t prosecute innocent gamers.

All these changes might seem harsh, but it seems that the crackdown is driven by complaints from the game’s burgeoning community. Aleks even noted some players’ frustrations, especially when they see streamers boasting their cheats, but said that the company is careful so that it doesn’t incorrectly ban legitimate players.

Anti-cheat technology is a game of cat and mouse between developers and cheaters, and Aleks said, “it will never fully go away.” Embark Studios is trying to make it as difficult as possible, though, and has employed these strict measures as a deterrent to prevent players from even thinking about cheating. It’s also not the only developer trying to clamp down on cheating, with an individual researcher even building a technique to fingerprint players using their mouse and keyboard inputs and track cheaters across accounts and hardware.

A master’s student from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology developed a fingerprinting technique that identified gamers from their mouse and keyboard input patterns as part of their thesis. u/Magga_ shared the results of their study on the r/GlobalOffensive subreddit, where they tracked the mouse and keyboard signals from more than a thousand players and then correlated them to each other. Using this technique, they were able to fingerprint unique users and match them to specific accounts, even those that used multiple smurf accounts.

u/Magga_ said that his technique was able to determine unique players 100% of the time from the mouse dataset, while keyboard fingerprinting was able to pick the right player 98% of the time. Since both metrics measure entirely different movements, combining them makes for highly accurate detection. There are concerns that unrelated people could potentially have the same play style, especially as Counter-Strike 2 still has over 1.2 million players at peak, resulting in false positives. However, u/Magga_ said that even though complete strangers can have similar signals for either mouse or keyboard, there’s very low statistical probability that two people would have similar mouse and keyboard habits.

“Across pairs of strangers, the correlation between how alike their mouse habits are and how alike their keyboard habits are is just 0.11, where 0 means unrelated and 1 means they always go together,” the researcher wrote. Interestingly, they faced an obstacle during the testing of their method for a time after it kept on returning a number of “false positives.” But once they investigated deeper, u/Magga_ found out that these accounts were actually related to each other, revealing unknown account pairs and even connecting four different accounts to one person.

They even claimed that this method of fingerprinting accounts and matching them to specific players isn’t a proof of concept but a working system. It’s designed to take in demos and link accounts continuously, allowing it to build a reference system with every uploaded match. Despite the massive number of matches and players that it must handle, it’s designed to work on a single 20GB slide of an Nvidia A100 GPU. Still, the author said that the amount of data they tested on it is pretty thin, and they want to see it in action on the real population size of CS2 players. Another limitation they noted is that shared accounts would break the system.

While this system might be a good idea to help game developers find cheaters and prevent them from ruining the online gaming experience, it also raises issues regarding privacy and ethical use. Some players have been criticizing invasive anti-cheat measures, which led to Riot dropping its controversial always-on anti-cheat requirement. There were also complaints when Valorant soft-bricked $6,000 cheating hardware, with some saying that this was a step too far for the developer. The researcher understood the implications of their anti-cheat technology but said that it’s up to the game developer how it would implement this anti-cheat measure.

“Cheating once as a kid should not bar you from a game for life, so I think a ban passed on through a link should expire after a set period,” u/Magga_ said. “Where to draw that line is a real question, but it is a policy choice, not a limit of the method.”

An unofficial GTA V port on a web browser went live and was taken down within hours. Alex St. Louis, the founder of Wonder Interactive, shared a clip of the in-browser gameplay on X, which he said was ported to WebAssembly using AI. It’s unclear what made the website become inaccessible in such short notice — people who tried to access the page received Cloudflare Error 1014 for some time, before the PlayGTA5.com page was replaced by a food ad from the ‘70s — but Take-Two would likely have raised copyright concerns if it saw the project. The game can still be accessed via online archives.

While Take-Two does not have the same reputation as Nintendo when it comes to litigation, it’s still quite protective of its intellectual property. It has previously shut down a similar browser port of GTA: Vice City and has even sent the creator of the GTA V Homebrew port on the Nintendo Switch a cease-and-desist letter. While Rockstar allows anyone to create mods for its games, it has strict guidelines on what they could and couldn’t do with these mods, with the guiding principle of “Respect Our Games.” While these ports show how far modern browsers and computing hardware have come, IP like GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 generally can’t be used to showcase these capabilities, even if the creators of the port don’t charge users, add a caveat, or even require players to own a copy of the game.

What’s quite interesting, though, is how AI may have helped accelerate its development, with St. Louis suggesting that the developer/s used the technology to build the GTA V port. It took Rockstar about five years to make the original GTA V, with development beginning in 2008. And even after it launched in 2013, Rockstar still took over a year and a half to launch the title on PCs. Although it’s unclear who made this short-lived GTA V port or how many were involved in the project, it seems that it was backed by a significantly smaller team compared to other AAA game studios.

Some gamers also asked this question: what’s the difference between game streaming and porting a game to a browser, and why don’t game developers and publishers use the latter instead? Game streaming services like GeForce Now run games server-side and then stream the video and audio output to users, while browser ports download or load the game assets into your browser while processing almost everything on the host device. While this removes most of the drawbacks of streaming, like latency or input lag and video compression artifacts, it also introduces a new host of challenges like performance issues, memory limitations, and compatibility constraints. So, for major commercial releases with huge budgets, it makes more sense to run games natively instead of relying on browsers that could break the game with just one bad update.

Despite being in the midst of an unprecedented memory chip shortage, it seems that gamers are still willing to invest in their gaming PCs to extract the best performance out of their favorite titles. The September 2026 Steam Survey results show that 42.22% of the surveyed units now have 32GB of system RAM — a 4.77% increase compared to the previous month — while 16GB configurations have shrunk by 3.38%, falling to just 37.82%.

We’ve also seen increases in “weird” memory configurations — 24GB has grown to 2.56%, increasing by 0.34%, while 48GB inched up to 1.46% after a 0.26% increase.

This comes as a surprise, as some manufacturers have reintroduced laptops with 8GB of RAM even as Microsoft called 16GB the new “practical starting point,” and recommended 32GB as the future-proof “no worries” configuration for gaming. It should be noted, though, that the company quietly erased this suggestion after it released 8GB base models for its Surface laptops a few months later.

It’s quite possible that memory capacities were always destined to increase for gamers, especially as titles become more demanding. Minecraft, which hasn’t updated its system requirements for 17 years and is known for being potato-PC-friendly, even increased its recommended memory to 16GB earlier this year, forcing players on older systems to switch to the Java Edition or play retro games instead. Because of that, the memory shortage may have merely postponed the inevitable reign of 32GB RAM on gaming PCs.

Another metric we’ve been following in the survey results is AMD’s slow but relentless march toward taking away Steam Survey market share from Intel. Team Red’s 48.37% market share across all platforms is the highest we’ve seen so far this year, with Team Blue now at just 51.63%. The May 2026 Steam Survey showed AMD at a little under 45% — at this pace, it’s possible that it will overtake Intel in just a matter of months.

If we break it down by operating system, 52.59% of Windows users are on Intel, while 47.41% use AMD. Intel may have an advantage here compared to the overall result, but it’s just a tiny margin, and the trend shows that AMD is gaining ground month after month. The difference between Intel and AMD is more glaring when it comes to Linux users, with an overwhelming 66.18% preferring Team Red over Team Blue’s 33.71%.

The Steam Survey is far from scientific and may not even reflect the broader movement of the overall PC market. But with Steam reporting a peak of more than 38 million concurrent players at the time of writing, the survey still offers a useful snapshot of what’s happening in the gaming PC market.

Thanks to a Rhysida ransomware attack in December 2023 aimed at Sony and Insomniac, the 1.7 TB of data stolen contained an early version of Wolverine. The source code of the leaked PS5 exclusive paved the way for u/Clean-Market5761 to create their own PC port.

It is currently a buggy mess; textures are missing, and Wolverine’s whole head is missing from multiple screenshots. Ironically, there is another screenshot where only Wolverine’s head is present, with no body in sight. The developer claims that neither KytyPS5 nor AnyPS5 were used, like in a recent story of Wolverine on KytyPS5. The developer says that the 2023 leak was key to understanding how they could generate a PC executable program.

Skeptics are claiming the developer’s screenshots are fake and from the old 2023 build; one claims they were able to port Wolverine to PC before u/Clean-Market5761, but the developer argues the screenshots are from a Jailbroken PS5 in dev mode. The developer further defends himself by comparing screenshots of Wolverine’s appearance in the 2023 leak versus their assets.

The developer has admitted to using AI for assistance in creating scripts and automated asset conversion, but trial and error were done manually. u/Clean-Market5761 further elaborates that the playable character doesn’t have a head because they haven’t ported over the PS5 shader library to render the hair, and it freezes the game. They have disabled the whole head asset, focusing on getting the game to run and become “playable.”

As excited commenters are about the port and the work of the developer, they are not thrilled about Wolverine itself. One commenter applauds the dev, but says, “You can keep it, though.”

The PS5 exclusive has not been received well, being regarded as an “interactive movie.” A viral video shows a motorcycle chase scene completing itself without any player input, with Wolverine riding along walls, seemingly with no way to crash or fail the segment. Other instances show Quick-Time Events completing themselves if the player chooses not to press any buttons. Players feel the game is making it too easy and holding their hand too much.

Even if there were an official port of Wolverine, it seems likely that the game itself isn’t attractive to players.

It's the year of two thousand and twenty-six, and "Running Doom on X" is still probably the most popular software hacking hobby. From pregnancy tests to space satellites, the 1993 game has been ported to pretty much anything under the sun that has a CPU and some memory in it. Now it's time to run the game in a database, in this case CedarDB, courtesy of the SQLDoom project by Lukas Vogel, who previously authored DoomQL.

If you're wondering how the heck one runs a game in SQL, it's actually much easier than you imagine, so long as you think like a database architect. The actual frontend displaying the graphics, playing sound, and taking inputs is in Python, but that part acts only like a PC's peripherals — all the math is done inside the database.

The backend is written for the performance-focused, Postgres-compatible RDBMS CedarDB. Much like modern Doom ports, SQLDoom uses two paths: one running at the game's original 35 Hz for handling all the logic, and a separate thread for displaying graphics, interpolating camera position between game updates.

To start, Vogel had to convert the entities in Doom's WAD package file to databases. That was easier than expected, as the data therein "is highly relational already," with Vogel presenting the example of map levels ultimately being structured in parent-child relationships that are trivial to replicate in plain tables. 1000 lines of Python was all it took.

For the main gameplay loop, Vogel was once again pleasantly surprised that the game logic was easy to convert. The resulting code was 5,900 lines of SQL, compared to the original C source code's 9,000. A lot of the savings came from the fact that whereas one has to iterate over entities with "for" or "while" loops to update values, a simple "UPDATE... WHERE" is enough in SQL to do that in just one statement — and in parallel, no less. As an added bonus, the fact that everything is a row in a database table makes for some trivial instant modifications, like changing weapon characteristics or enemy behavior on-the-fly.

The graphical renderer is also small at 1,300 lines, but it's trickier as it's the one query spanning 89 tables. Vogel notes that the pipeline is ultimately very similar to that of Doom. Data for Carmack's then-revolutionary Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) traversal, an implementation of binary trees, can be easily represented as a table.

Each left/right value can be converted to a bit, and ultimately the vertex order value can be reduced to just the one number. Thus, a simple "SELECT... ORDER BY" automagically sorts the walls front-to-back for you. Amusingly, I used the very same database technique when I wrote the defunct Tech Report's threaded comments system. Despite his best efforts, Vogel says the floor and ceiling renderers didn't map very cleanly to SQL, as ultimately they're clever flood-fill algorithms.

When it came to multiplayer, that's when using a database was actually much better than the original game. The reason is simple: maintaining synced states across many tables with copious amounts of interdependencies is literally what databases are designed for, so snapshots, authentication, access control, are all effectively free and implemented for you. To run a game tick, all you need is "START TRANSACTION," run the logic, and "COMMIT," and everything magically synchronizes.

You can peruse or download SQLDoom from its GitHub repository, or read Vogel's entertaining blog post detailing the adventure.

Developers AICodeWith have published a browser-based game dubbed Taipei GTA. The game’s name could put the devs in hot water with Rockstar’s legal department, but at the time of writing, it's online, free, and very playable. While it remains online, Taipei, with the not-so-secret ingredient of crime, might be the diversion you’re looking for while you wait for GTA 6. You can try this game, which took $ 10,000 in tokens to create, at https://taipei-gta.vercel.app/, where you can toggle language options in the top right of the window.

The above Taiwan TV news report says that GTA Taipei has attracted 1.2 million concurrent users in just three days since its release (machine translation).

While we've only seen reports about Taipei GTA via media based in Taiwan and Hong Kong (in Chinese), thankfully there’s an English-language wiki about the game in the absence of any official announcement(s).

Taipei GTA was vibe-coded via the AICodeWith platform, which is described as a unified platform for developers. It provides access to DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, and 30+ models and relies on prepaid tokens. AICodeWith also seems to be the developer of this web-based game. It might therefore be safe to assume it is a kind of demo/showcase for the platform. Certainly, not many hobbyists would spend the purported USD$10,000 on coding tokens to make a game like Taipei GTA. This looks like pretty good publicity for the development platform, though.

If you follow the link to play this game, you will notice it is a web app on the Vercel cloud platform. Currently, it has zones based on several famous areas of Taipei such as Ximending, Taipei Main Station, and Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall. Moreover, many features of Taiwan’s capital city life are represented. My quick test run allowed me to experience the busy modern city streets filled with neon signage, motor scooters, convenience stores, cram school ads, night markets, plenty of cops, and more.

Like seminal GTA titles which inspire it, Taipei GTA is a free-roaming experience with the added spice of crime. Starting the game on foot with just the clothes on your back, your fists, and NTD$500 (about USD$16) in your pocket, you can basically do what you want in the city. For a more structured experience, there are currently 93 missions to work through in the game, once you get to grips with controlling your character and so on.

Taipei GTA is still under development/expansion. Media reports say that the devs are asking the community about any development direction they would like to see in updates.

In my brief runaround, performance in this browser game seemed pretty swift and responsive, even on a PC using integrated graphics. I gave the game a quick spin on my laptop without switching to the discrete GPU, but the action still ran at 100FPS+ on the Radeon 890M. This web app only uses low-poly models with simple lighting, but I felt it had some early-2000s style retrogaming charm. The nearest real GTA comparison might be San Andreas, but Taipei provides a starkly different environment.

A gamer from Germany bought a used AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D and got slapped with a Valorant ban. u/After-Cartoonist-196 shared the problem on the r/PCBauder subreddit [machine translated]; although the processor worked perfectly fine when they ran their computer, they were immediately kicked out after they fired up the game. When they reached out to Riot for support, they found out that the CPU they bought on Sep. 21, 2026, was blacklisted by Vanguard on Aug. 12, 2026, because its previous user apparently cheated on Valorant. However, while the CPU has a ban enforced, Riot Games says the ban duration is four months. In contrast, other anti-cheat engines enforce permanent bans using similar hardware ID systems.

Unfortunately, Riot customer service told them that they cannot reverse the ban, which stemmed from the CPU HWID and has seemingly affected the user’s Valorant account. u/After-Cartoonist-196 said this wasn’t really a big issue for them but also added that “everything else from my system is now also on the blacklist.”

This story has picked up steam on X, which led to Riot Games anti-cheat specialist Phillip Koskinas saying that hardware bans only last for a maximum of four months and that they’re game-specific. Customer support would also tell customers how much time they have left on their ban, and that the anti-cheat system only matches one component on the denylist, not all the parts of the offending player’s gaming PC.

Even though this story might seem unique, other titles and developers also use HWID bans, and incidents like these have reportedly affected other players, too. Ban conditions also vary by developer, too. Easy Anti-Cheat will ban cheaters and users with affected hardware across all the games that use it, while BattleEye enforces permanent global bans. While Vanguard requires Secure Boot and TPM 2.0, Ricochet, which Call of Duty uses, is even stricter as it contacts Microsoft’s servers to confirm that the system remains untampered.

Anti-cheat systems have become controversial recently, especially as some players complained that they’re too intrusive. Others also said that they were too resource-intensive, especially for some systems with an always-on requirement. One Valorant anti-cheat update even went so far as to soft-brick purpose-built cheating hardware, which alarmed a few who thought that the gaming company was killing hardware. However, gamers who are tired of cheaters, trolls, and griefers would agree that anti-cheat systems have become crucial to make online games playable.

Given Koskinas’s comments, u/After-Cartoonist-196 could eventually play Valorant again once the ban expires, or they could get a new CPU and create a new account to enter matches as soon as possible. While this might be a reasonable ending for the Redditor, it still doesn’t fix the risk that gamers face when they purchase used CPUs or GPUs. After all, even if the former owner denies cheating on games or getting banned for doing that, an unlucky buyer getting flagged hardware would have no way of checking this until they get kicked from their favorite title.

PC gaming continues to see an upward trend despite rising hardware costs, as Steam is estimated to have generated a record $1.7 billion in revenue for September 2026. According to Alinea Analytics, Steam had its best September ever with a 13% jump compared to the previous record set in September 2025. It also had its strongest third quarter on record, generating an estimated $5.5 billion in revenue, an increase of 12% from the same period last year. That brings Steam's estimated revenue for the first nine months of 2026 to $16.5 billion, compared to $14.5 billion during the same period in 2025.

Among the 500 top-grossing games on Steam last month, new IP releases in 2026 generated 20.5% of the revenue, while established IP accounted for 79.5%, including 3.8% from remakes and remasters. Several major releases helped drive revenue during the month, including Wardogs, generating an estimated $86.9 million since its early-access launch on September 10; Onimusha: Way of the Sword at $30.4 million; and The Blood of Dawnwalker bringing in $26.9 million.

Free-to-play games also remained an important part of Steam's business, with Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends, PUBG, and Dota 2 alone generating almost $168 million combined in September, which is nearly 10% of Steam's total estimated monthly revenue.

Steam is also closing in on a new annual record for the number of game releases. As of October 1, Steam has a total of 20,220 game releases in 2026. Another 1,156 titles are currently scheduled to launch in October itself, meaning that if those releases arrive as planned, it would put Steam ahead of the 21,268 games released in 2025.

The numbers suggest that while building a gaming PC might be expensive in 2026, it has yet to translate into a slowdown in PC game spending. With a packed release schedule for the coming months, Alinea estimates that Steam could potentially surpass $20 billion in annual revenue for the first time.

It is also worth mentioning that Steam extends beyond desktop and laptop gaming. Valve's Steam Deck gave the platform a dedicated handheld audience, allowing users to access most of their Steam game library on a portable device. The company has also expanded into living-room gaming with the newly launched Steam Machine. It is additionally working on extending support for Steam OS, its gaming-focused operating system, to more devices.

Insomniac Games' Marvel's Wolverine is the hot new PS5 game right now, but that's all it is — there's no PC version in the works, and given Sony's reported decision not to bring single-player games to PC, that seems unlikely to change anytime soon. However, that doesn't mean PC gamers are out in the cold after it was confirmed that an experimental PS5 emulator has been shown to be able to run the early portions Marvel's Wolverine, though only at single-digit frame rates.

While the KytyPS5 emulator was already able to start the game up, that was all it was able to do. That was great if you just wanted to be able to move around the game's menus, but it wasn't much use beyond a proof of concept. Now, things have progressed considerably, with VideoCardz pointing to an X social media post showing the emulator rendering the game's cinematics and gameplay.

The latest build of KytyPS5 can indeed play the game, but it does so at a single-digit frame rate. That's a long way short of making the action-packed title playable on anything other than a PS5 or PS5 Pro. But it's a start, and a much more promising one than was the case previously.

The frame rate situation probably says more about the emulator than the game itself. KytyPS5 is still very much in the early stages of its development, which means that issues are to be expected — especially for a title that has only been available for a few weeks. The emulator's developers are also focused on making it boot more games rather than making a handful work flawlessly, so it's unlikely it will be ready for prime time for a little while yet.

None of this is to detract from the work that has been done to get this point, though. The rapid progress that Marvel's Wolverine has seen is promising for the future of PS5 emulation on PC. KytyPS5 uses Vulkan 1.3 for its graphics output and uses an in-house system to decode the PS5's RDNA 2 GPU instructions. It's also available for both Windows and Linux right now, with an even more experimental version in the works for macOS.

This news also comes as another PS5 emulator has reached something of a milestone of its own. The developers behind SharpEmu, another experimental PS5 emulator, have been able to run a number of PS5 games at a playable 60 FPS. But even then, the success is modest —the developers only got six of 55 games to that point. A further six reached the point of gameplay, albeit at lower frame rates.

Game streaming over your local area network is cool, but game streaming as typically implemented is basically a hack. It borrows video streaming technology and applies it to interactive games, which isn't actually a great fit, like so many cases of using a tool for a task it wasn't really designed for. Legendary open-source dev Hans-Kristian "TheMaister" Arntzen (known for the libretro framework and Retroarch frontend), decided to tackle this problem by making a video codec called Pyrowave specifically designed for in-home game streaming, and now, that exact codec is implemented in the Steam beta client.

Your LAN has less than 10 milliseconds of latency; less than one millisecond if it's wired. However, in-home game streaming rarely achieves latency anywhere close to that because the process of rendering the game, encoding a video, sending it over the network, and then decoding it (before you can even see the new frame and react) usually takes upwards of tens of milliseconds, meaning that even on a LAN it's possible to have noticeable input lag when streaming.

There are also possible compromises on image quality for in-home streaming. Typical video codecs like AVC and AV1 rely on a lot of "tricks" to reduce how much real data they need to use to encode a video stream; one of the most common is chroma subsampling, where a video uses less data to represent the colors in a scene, because human vision is much less sensitive to brightness than color. This is fine for a lot of games, but it can cause problems on the desktop as well as in games with lots of text (or similar fine elements), because the text develops nasty fringing that makes it hard to read. You can solve this by using 4:4:4 video, but that's actually not very well supported by common video codec hardware.

Arntzen's Pyrowave solves both of these problems (latency and quality) by working in a fundamentally different way from other video codecs. Instead of using Discrete Cosine Transforms and inter-frame encoding, Pyrowave is similar to Motion JPEG2000 and uses Discrete Wavelet Transforms along with intra-frame encoding. There are a lot of downsides to this approach, but a lot of upsides, too. You get very consistent quality from frame to frame (making it perfect for constant bitrate applications) and you also get excellent error resilience. Because Pyrowave is very simple and computed on the GPU's shader array rather than the video engine, which doesn't understand it, you also get insanely low latency, and there are no concerns about the capabilities of fixed-function hardware.

The downside? Well, it's in the headline: bandwidth. In the Steam beta client patch notes where Valve announced the addition of this feature, Valve notes that the codec uses "5-10 times the amount of bandwidth of other streaming codecs." So how much bandwidth is that, really? In a brief test of Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis, streaming to a Lenovo Legion Go S from a desktop, we clocked Pyrowave on default settings at about 210 megabits per second. That's over 26 megabytes per second of video going down the line, which is an incredible amount of data to be sending over a network so you can play a video game in bed without sacrificing visual quality or frame rate.

But most notably, it was tangibly more responsive than the usual Remote Play experience, and best of all, the image quality was quite exceptional, especially once we ticked on the 4:4:4 mode. Unfortunately, we weren't able to see if the GPU overhead was overbearing with an RTX 5070 Ti and frame rates capped at 120 FPS for streaming.

Just for clarity's sake, while it's possible that Pyrowave streaming could cause service interruptions for other people on your LAN (and thus isn't suitable for high-traffic networks like at a company or large business), it is strictly intended to be used over your local network, not the Internet. As a result, your internet connection doesn't matter at all, so if you were worried about ripping through your data allotment on a metered connection, there's no need for alarm; all of the data sent is between devices on your network. Even the over-200 megabits-per-second of Pyrowave is peanuts compared to the tens of gigabytes per second your graphics card is sending to your display via DisplayPort or HDMI, after all.

If you'd like to test out the Pyrowave codec yourself with Steam Remote Play, you'll need to be on the Steam beta client first. After you swap to the beta client, go into the Remote Play settings and you should see the option for Pyrowave. It's currently only available for standard games (i.e. not VR) on macOS, Windows, and Linux, although Valve says it's coming soon to the Steam Link app for mobile devices as well. You'll need "at least Gigabit Ethernet", although user reports in the Steam discussions say that it works fine on a solid Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7 connection, too.

Irdeto, the company behind the much-maligned and performance-sapping DRM software Denuvo, has just scored itself an apparent win. According to reports circulating online, DenuvOwO, the group that came up with the hypervisor-based bypass (HV) of Denuvo, has disbanded. Although it wasn't spelled out, a piracy scene source close to the matter stated that the action was probably due to Irdeto's lawsuit against known cracker Voices38. The HV bypass itself, rather than the games, is a DRM-breaking tool, and one that disables system-level protections to run, to boot.

The well-known CS.Rin forum was oftentimes the first place where links to DenuvOwO HV-bypassed games first appeared, and it has removed all links to said titles and banned some of the group's members. Despite the fact that the site is hosted in Russia, the likely explanation is that since Irdeto is now reaching out to multiple third-party services searching for Voices38's identity, CS.Rin wishes to reduce its exposure to far-reaching laws like the DMCA.

Although the loss is causing some consternation and concern among the piracy scene, this latest development isn't expected to freeze Denuvo cracking entirely. DenuvOwO's work was based around the usage of common open-source computing tools, and it's expected it'll be relatively easy for others to replicate.

Meanwhile, Voices38 has previously said "all is fine [...] Everything will continue as normal" regarding the lawsuit and keeps releasing games. Most recently, long-running cracking group RUNE has taken to using Denuvo DRM as cannonball target practice, and a couple days ago released a proof-of-concept crack for Assassin's Creed: Mirage, fully removing Denuvo Anti-Tamper and VMProtect from the executable in one fell swoop.

Surprising nobody by now, the stripped version appears to run way better than the original, with a 15% boost to average FPS and a 76% uptick in minimum frame rates. This was measured on a beefy rig, too, with an Intel Core i7-13700K and an RTX 5080.

As an added bonus, the main executable size dropped from 496 MB to 102 MB. That's hardly surprising considering how much the binary resembled a barnacle-encrusted ship — the crack strips out 34 VMProtect-virtualized functions, 200 Denuvo VM cores, 261 function obfuscations, and 25,000 function relocations.

Developers of SharpEmu — an experimental, open-source PS5 emulator — have successfully run PS5 games at a playable 60 FPS on the emulator. According to an X post on September 25, the developers reached this milestone for six of 55 titles tested, with 12 — including the six playable — reaching gameplay. According to the developer, the six games are yet to be tested from start to finish; the “playable” designation means the games currently run without issues, although minor graphical or audio issues may persist in some.

The six 60 FPS titles are Dreaming Sarah, Void Terrarium, New Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja, Tetris Forever, Hoa, and Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered. The breakthrough was achieved with SharpEmu v0.0.4-release.2, the emulator’s latest public build released on September 25. According to developers, the build includes upgrades such as improved SPIR-V shader translation and updated Vulkan API support.

Developed in C#, the SharpEmu PS5 emulator supports Windows, Linux, and macOS and uses Vulkan and MoltenVK for graphics API calls. PlayStation 5 relies on an AMD Zen 2 x86-64 CPU architecture; therefore, SharpEmu can execute the console's CPU instructions natively on a standard PC rather than translating them from an unfamiliar instruction set. The emulator focuses on loading a game's eboot.bin executable and required system modules, partially handling kernel functions, and processing the game's shader, resource, and AGC graphics submissions.

For now, SharpEmu is still far from handling demanding 3D titles, with only 12 of 55 tested titles reaching a game ready state. Of those 12, only six performed cleanly enough to be designated as “playable” at a full 60 FPS. The developers stress that SharpEmu is still in its early stages, noting that “SharpEmu is an experimental emulator intended for research and educational purposes. This project does not contain any copyrighted system firmware, game data, or proprietary PlayStation assets.” Meanwhile, another emulator, KytyPS5, recently ran the PS5 version of GTA V at roughly 40 to 60 FPS on a high-end Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Radeon RX 7900 XT system, crashing after the game's opening mission.

While gamers wait for the release of Grand Theft Auto VI, whether on their consoles or gaming PCs with one of the best graphics cards, they can relive one of the franchise's most memorable titles. Modder gebdag has unveiled GTA2 RTX Remix, a mod that harnesses Nvidia’s RTX Remix technology to add full path tracing and dynamic time-of-day cycles to the 27-year-old classic, Grand Theft Auto 2.

Grand Theft Auto 2, released in 1999, used older graphics APIs such as DirectDraw and an earlier version of Direct3D. The problem is that these legacy APIs create a technical barrier to modern technologies like RTX Remix. Nvidia's platform lacks native support for DirectDraw and only plays well with Direct3D 9. It requires a wrapper to interface with previous versions of Direct3D, which is where the GTA2 RTX Remix comes in.

Modder gebdag ingeniously developed a custom Direct3D 9 renderer for Grand Theft Auto 2. It acts as a generational bridge between the original game and Nvidia’s RTX Remix. To do so, the mod relies on two DLLs (gta2dx9.dll and gta2dx9_vid.dll) that serve as translators, converting the game's legacy graphics pipeline into a modern Direct3D 9 renderer that RTX Remix can understand. As a result, RTX Remix can interpret Grand Theft Auto 2's visuals in real time and do its magic.

As you can see in the embedded video below, the mod preserves the core gameplay fans will appreciate while adding a dramatic graphic overhaul to the classic top-down action title. Anywhere City now looks like a living metropolis, with realistic lighting and shadow effects throughout. The dynamic day-night cycle is a great addition that lets you see the sun set and the moon rise. Things like explosions, vehicle fires, or neon signs now have their own light sources with glows and reflections. Press F4 to open the menu and tweak the lighting to your taste.

The graphics revamp is just one of the mod’s improvements. Beyond the eye-candy upgrade, it also adds other features to bring Grand Theft Auto 2 up to modern standards. While the original was limited to a 4:3 native aspect ratio, the mod supports widescreen 16:9 displays, giving gamers a more immersive view of Anywhere City. The mod also improves gameplay by adding support for frame rates up to 60 FPS through Frame Generation technology. It also fixes the nuisance of cars and pedestrians popping in at the screen edges.

GTA2 RTX Remix is an open-source project available on GitHub. To use the mod, you will need a copy of Grand Theft Auto 2. The modder tested it specifically with version 9.6, which Rockstar Games distributed for free in 2004. You will also need a 64-bit version of Windows 10 or Windows 11, along with the required RTX Remix runtime files.

RTX Remix has opened the floodgates to a plethora of mods from studios and the modding community that transform some of the most beloved games from our childhood. Now, Grand Theft Auto 2 has joined this notable list, which also includes Need For Speed Carbon, Tomb Raider, Max Payne, and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, to name just a few.

A newly published patent shows that Nvidia has been working on an AI chatbot that could make it quicker and easier for developers to optimize their PC games. The chatbot would be capable of receiving a plain English request for help before running diagnostics based on the specific issue at hand.

PC gamers are well aware of the impact of poor optimization on games. And while there are tools available to developers that help them identify issues and then address them, they require specialist knowledge to use. They also take time, something that developers rarely have — especially as they get closer to a release date.

The patent, first spotted by Patentlyze, could help. It depicts a chatbot-like interface in which developers would be able to outline the issue that they are seeing. They would be able to do so using normal language, allowing even relatively inexperienced developers to use the tool.

Example questions provided by the patent include "What is causing the micro-stutter during camera cuts?" and "Why is frame time spiking when ray-traced reflections enter the viewport?".

Once the question has been posed, the AI would then write a diagnostic specific to the issue before automatically running it on the GPU and then providing the results for interpretation. The developer would then be able to implement any fixes and re-run any testing that is still required.

The patent doesn't make it clear whether there will be any validation or testing of the diagnostic code this tool would create, something that may give some pause. Test results are only as strong as the test that was used to get them, and developers will need to trust that Nvidia's chatbot is up to the job before relying on it.

However, it's important to remember that companies like Nvidia apply for countless patents every year. Not all of those patents turn into shipping products or features, and there is no guarantee that this one will ever see the light of day. That being said, it does seem similar to G-Assist, a chatbot-like tool that allows gamers to get AI-powered assistance for their GeForce RTX PC. Nvidia has also sought to bring its AI chops to bear on other aspects of gaming, not least DLSS 5 and its multiple AI modes for different levels of detail — whether gamers want it or not.

For gamers, the hope will be that this patent will result in a tool that makes it easier for game developers to optimize their wares ahead of release.

2019’s Control followed Jesse Faden into the ever-shifting, paranormally corrupted brutalist innards of the Oldest House, the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control, where she became the new FBC director, fought the invading forces of the Hiss, and sought the truth about the fate of her kidnapped brother Dylan.

Control Resonant marks the next chapter in the siblings’ story, as Dylan reawakens to discover that Jesse has gone missing and that the Hiss threat has escaped the Oldest House and corrupted Manhattan. Using his own powers and guided by the mysterious Board, Dylan sets out to find Jesse, combat the Hiss incursion, and uncover the mysteries of a new paranormal entity at work in the twisted Manhattan cityscape.

We’ve had access to Control Resonant for the past few days, and we’ve been exploring its performance and image quality across a range of hardware and settings.

Control was one of the first games to show off the capabilities of GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards and their ray-tracing capabilities, and it was also one of the first titles to incorporate DLSS upscaling. It’s only fitting, then, that Resonant is a technical showcase of its own. It features path-traced lighting effects bolstered by Nvidia’s RTX Mega Geometry tech, as well as support for the full suite of DLSS 4.5 features: Super Resolution (aka upscaling), Ray Reconstruction, and Multi Frame Generation.

With that extensive spread of cutting-edge rendering tech at its disposal, I expected Resonant to look incredible, as both Control and Alan Wake II did before it.

Even without ray tracing or path tracing and DLSS Ray Reconstruction, Control Resonant already looks good, as we’ve come to expect from Remedy games. If performance is a priority, you certainly won’t make the game bad by leaving RT off.

But ray tracing or path tracing is certainly worth enabling if you can. Outdoors, RT primarily improves the rather blobby shadows and soft reflections that appear in the numerous puddles around Manhattan.

Sometimes this is subtle; other times it’s dramatic, as with the railing shadow above.

At its highest settings, path tracing turns shadows into the crisp, accurate renderings you would expect in direct sunlight and makes reflections much stronger and clearer not only in water but in glass like car and shop windows.

Inside, RT models the behavior of strong artificial light sources more accurately. Overhead lights properly shadow Dylan’s face from above and let his back fall into darkness if he’s occluding them. Metallic objects like trash cans look and shine like roughed-up metal as you move around them, not a flat and static game asset.

In the examples above, you can see how path tracing accurately represents the light from a fluorescent tube outside the storeroom, casting a hard shadow on the wall and a green glare on Dylan's uniform. WIth RT off, this effect is only represented on the floor.

Everything looks more alive and more real, in other words, and these subtleties need to be appreciated in motion, not just in stills. I enable path tracing for those moments where something unexpectedly realistic catches the corner of my eye and makes me double back to explore it.

Despite all the environmental magic that path tracing and DLSS Ray Reconstruction lend to Control Resonant’s setting, that level of polish isn’t evenly applied across all the game’s assets.

Control stood out to me not only for its lighting effects but also for its amazing facial modeling work. In Resonant, however, the character models of Dylan, Zoe, and supporting characters like Langston all look like a step back from the level of detail achieved in past Remedy games. Maybe I’ve been staring at too much DLSS 5 output, but the faces in Resonant don’t match up to the environmental quality, and that gap stands out.

Control Resonant raster gaming performance

Our gaming performance results start off with native res, raster-only settings.

At 1080p Ultra with RT off, Control Resonant is already placing heavy demands on our tested cards. You want an RTX 5060 Ti or better or Radeon RX 9060 XT or better for 60 FPS (ish) average among current-gen cards, or an RTX 4070, RTX 3080, or RX 7800 XT among earlier cards. The RTX 3060 can’t even break 30 FPS on average, and that’

Radeons also tend to turn in lower 1% lows than GeForces, although that didn’t translate to a bumpy experience with our high-refresh-rate, variable-refresh-rate monitor. If you’re only playing on a 60 Hz display, that difference may be more apparent.

Even though it still lands above a 60 FPS average at 1080p, the older Radeon RX 6800 XT is stuck with FSR 3.x upscaling, so its output image quality is noticeably worse than RX 9000- or RX 7000-series cards that get FSR 4.1.

Control Resonant is also the first game we’ve tested where the demands of running the DLSS 4.5 transformer upscaling model hits RTX 30-series products hard, so if you’re not trying to perform heroic feats of upscaling, you can probably get a few frames per second back by shifting to older DLSS models at the cost of some output image quality.

2560x1440 Ultra is similarly punishing. Here, the RX 9070 GRE and RTX 4070 Ti end up just below a 60 FPS average, while the RX 9070 and RTX 5070 Ti end up slightly above it. Any weaker card will likely need lower settings, a dose of upscaling, or both to deliver a smoother experience.

Finally, at 4K, only the RTX 5090 can deliver the coveted 60 FPS average. Some degree of upscaling, frame generation, or both will be needed on every other graphics card here for this resolution (and possibly on the RTX 5090, depending on your desired experience).

Control Resonant ray-traced performance

Given the already punishing raster baselines we just saw, we had little reason to believe that RT would be an attainable feat in Control Resonant at native resolutions, and it’s not.

Enabling even the medium RT preset at 1080p smacks down a wide swath of our tested cards. The RTX 4070 Ti, RX 7900 XTX, and RTX 5070 all land just below the 60 FPS mark, while the RX 9070 XT lands right on it. The RTX 5070 Ti offers a significantly more comfortable average frame rate and 1% lows for a smoother experience.

At 1440p, even the RTX 5080 isn’t quite enough to manage a 60 FPS average, and at 4K, not even the RTX 5090 can conquer Control Resonant with these settings. Oof.

These results mean that upscaling and frame generation will be mandatory if we’re going to chase RT glory in Control Resonant.

Control Resonant path-traced performance with upscaling and frame generation

There are two problems with trying to gauge competitive performance when we go ham on upscaling and frame generation, as we’re about to here.

For one, DLSS 4.5 produces a much more stable image than FSR 4, especially at extreme settings like 4K Ultra Performance. FSR 4 can look slightly sharper at rest, as reviewers usually are when creating side-by-side comparison images, but in motion, it can exhibit strong and distracting flickering artifacts, especially on fine structures with repeating elements like fire escapes and chain-link fences.

DLSS 4.5 isn’t entirely free of those artifacts, but they affect much smaller portions of the screen and to a much less intrusive degree.

The net result is that DLSS 4.5 frames are not the same as FSR 4.x frames, so that makes for two different experiential variables we have to account for in any comparison: raw performance and delivered image quality.

And the third variable is that FSR Frame Generation (whether in its ML-powered or traditional shader-based form) isn’t backed up with a robust latency reduction technology like Nvidia’s Reflex or Intel’s Xe Low Latency in Control Resonant.

Radeon Anti-Lag does reduce input latency, but even with the RX 9070 XT in full path-tracing trim, it is at best taking a high input latency and making it somewhat less high. Even with Anti-Lag enabled on the RX 9070 XT, the average latency before framegen is enabled is well above the roughly 60 ms threshold we try not to exceed.

What’s frustrating is that AMD has a more robust input latency handler for devs to use. Radeon Anti-Lag 2 exists and works well in Cyberpunk 2077. But like FSR 4 Ray Regeneration, it’s not implemented in Control Resonant.

Worse, FSR Frame Generation isn’t compatible with the performance counters that Nvidia FrameView monitors to estimate PC latency, so we’re left with only our eyes and our guts to decide whether the net result of FSR FG is a truly playable experience. Even Intel’s XeFG supports these performance counters properly, so it’s all the more annoying that AMD doesn’t, even two years after the arrival of FSR 3.1.

So before we get into these results, bear a couple asterisks in mind. Path tracing as Nvidia envisions it and as Control Resonant implements it—with upscaling, denoising, frame generation, and lag reduction all working together—is not possible to replicate 100% on AMD hardware.

We include AMD results (and RTX 30-series cards with FSR framegen) as a sort of best-effort reference point for maxed-out RT behavior with this game, but because these are doubled frame rates, any figure below 60 FPS on these charts for RTX 30-series and AMD cards should be understood as an unpleasant (or even unplayable) experience, whether due to input latency, significant artifacting, or both.

At 1080p with Ultra RT, DLSS Quality, 2X Frame Generation, and DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, only the RTX 5050 and RTX 4060 fail to deliver playable input latency. Even the RTX 5060 squeaks in under the 60 ms threshold we want for a responsive experience. That’s great news for the accessibility of path tracing on relatively affordable hardware, or at least what used to be relatively affordable hardware.

At 1440p with DLSS Performance, the RTX 5060 just barely fails to meet the 60ms mark for acceptable input latency. This is more the territory of the RTX 5060 Ti and up.

And at 4K with DLSS Ultra Performance, we’d strongly recommend an RTX 4070 Ti or better, although you can get away with an RTX 5060 Ti or RTX 4070 in a pinch.

The combination of DLSS 4.5 technologies and Reflex makes for a perfectly playable path tracing experience in Control Resonant across a wide range of hardware, and as we’ve already noted, it’s impossible for AMD gamers to enjoy the same experience.

Bottom line

Control Resonant marks a new chapter for one of my favorite gaming sagas, and I was thrilled to step back into the Oldest House. The Hiss-corrupted Manhattan setting looks fantastic, even if I’m still waiting for the story to fully grab me. I need to fully explore the full range of weapon forms, skill trees, and builds the game offers as our protagonist Dylan Faden fights through hordes of Hiss in close-quarters, split-second combat. Death is just one wrong move away in this game, and I've been frequently reminded of that fact.

For all its path-traced environmental splendor, there are some wrinkles on the tech side in Control Resonant that stand out. The character models, even main characters like Dylan and Zoe, look a bit basic for a 2026 game, especially with all the other graphical fireworks happening around them. Perhaps I’m ruined by DLSS 5 (and perhaps this game was meant to have it alongside more capable hardware), but I've come to expect more from Remedy given the artistic heights of Control and Alan Wake II.

Any graphical shortcomings like that stand out given how crushing Control Resonant is for many graphics cards. This is a game that really demands some degree of upscaling for good performance on less powerful hardware, and Ultra settings may not be possible on older, lower-end cards, period.

But at least for Nvidia RTX 50-series gamers, the aggregate improvements to the DLSS 4.5 software stack in 2026 make Control Resonant’s fanciest graphics settings incredibly accessible, and you really should take advantage of every DLSS feature at your disposal in this title.

Thanks to DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution’s remarkable capabilities, even the RTX 5060 can do path tracing at 1080p with DLSS Quality upscaling, DLSS Ray Reconstruction, and frame generation enabled, all with a reasonable input latency and solid output image quality. And if you’re willing to tolerate slightly higher input latency, you can get away with the same settings at 1440p using DLSS Performance.

The RTX 5070 provides a great experience at all resolutions with those same settings, and you really only need more powerful hardware like an RTX 5070 Ti if you’re chasing higher DLSS input resolutions. I would normally shout out the RTX 5060 Ti here, but that card’s 16GB version especially is so close in price to the RTX 5070 that you should just get the more powerful card if gaming is your goal.

The situation is less rosy on the AMD side, even for the latest RDNA 4 cards. FSR 4.x upscaling is available in this title for RX 9000- and RX 7000-series graphics cards, but it isn’t as strong at image reconstruction as DLSS 4.5, so lower RT settings and higher FSR input resolutions may be necessary on RX 9000-series cards than on comparable RTX 50-series hardware to achieve the right balance of performance and image quality.

And the lagginess of FSR Frame Generation means that you’ll have to carefully test that feature if you want to try to use it to boost smoothness, unlike the general no-brainer that is DLSS 4.5 (M)FG.

All told, the incomplete implementation of AMD’s gaming tech suite in Control Resonant, as well as the generally lower RT performance of RDNA 4 cards versus Blackwell, means that you can max out RT settings in this game, but you still won’t enjoy the same image quality as on GeForce cards, especially in the areas of the frame that DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction enhances.

Once again, this situation proves that having a software feature in your toolkit is meaningless if you can’t convince a developer to adopt it. Every new game that comes out with only a patchwork of AMD features like this is another paper cut for RX 9000-series GPU owners who are left with a distinctly lower-tier experience than RTX 50-series cards get. Fine wine, this is not.

But maybe you’re totally unmoved by RT and neural rendering techniques and just want strong raster performance with a touch of upscaling where it’s needed. RX 9000-series cards deliver that experience with strong performance per dollar in today’s ever-pricier gaming graphics card market.

Going off what I’ve played of Control Resonant so far, I’d suggest checking some full gameplay reviews to see if it’s for you and perhaps giving it a post-launch point release or two to iron out some minor technical issues we saw.

But one thing is for certain: the full array of Nvidia tech in this title, and its general accessibility across a wide range of hardware, means that a GeForce graphics card is the best way to play it.

An artificial intelligence and games development enthusiast has demonstrated the Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Hijacked map running natively in Minecraft. In a post on X/Twitter, Luckey Faraday explains that a browser-based port of Black Ops 2 they previously created was first inserted into Minecraft and ran “on a PC screen inside” the game. Then, GPT Astra was used to rebuild the project so that the Hijacked map ran “directly on Minecraft’s own OpenGL context.” Video footage shows the 2012 Call of Duty map running full-screen pretty fluidly at around 45 fps.

“The map, collision, bots, navmesh, weapons and rendering are all running inside Minecraft as a Fabric mod,” explains Faraday. Fabric is a lightweight, open-source mod loader and development API for Minecraft. Thus, the Black Ops 2 content and Hijacked map are injected directly into Minecraft through this modding framework.

Faraday runs an AI builders’ community where they invite fellow enthusiasts to collaboratively build demos and share logs and code. The way this port was made and rebuilt is a prime example of their process. Specifically, the dev began by making Hijacked playable in a browser. Subsequently, this effort was shoehorned into Minecraft but would exist only as a playable game on 'a PC' inside the sandbox. Then, Faraday decided to task GPT Astra with rebuilding the whole thing in Java. With this new code, they were able to run the iconic FPS directly in Minecraft’s OpenGL context.

Faraday says that there’s “still a lot left to do,” but this compact yacht-based map looks playable enough running in Minecraft, rather than just being displayed in the game. Next up, if the project continues, we might expect additional maps, more weapons, and multiplayer modes.

Many will know Minecraft as the best-selling video game in history. While it appeals to youngsters for its adventure gaming, creative building, and social aspects, the openness and extensibility of the sandbox mean it also attracts some highly technical minds. This is why it has been behind some spellbinding computer science feats. Examples that immediately spring to mind are the working 5 million parameter ChatGPT model, dubbed CraftGPT, wedged into the game.

IKEA has announced the Kallax Storageborn companion creation for players of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition on PC or Xbox. But who’d want a set of drab utilitarian Swedish shelves following them around during their adventures in this fantastical role-playing game? The answer is quite a lot of people, it would seem, from the social media feedback we’ve seen. IKEA’s free mod for this iconic RPG also appeals to gamers’ pragmatic instincts with its claims that “your inventory woes end here.”

The household furniture giant says it designed this Skyrim mod as it wanted to bring its real world smart storage solutions to the digital domain. Skyrim was chosen, in particular, because gamers in this classic title are “plagued by the evils of encumbrance and disorganization,” asserts IKEA.

Of course, the furniture maker will have invested time and money into the development of this fully voiced companion mod (voiced by comic actor Matt Berry) for the publicity, too. But there's little to complain about as it's free and entirely optional to your Skyrim experience.

If you are interested in adding the Kallax Storageborn companion creation to your Skyrim experience, you can get it directly from Bethesda here, for free. But before using these eminently practical flatpack DIY shelves in your game and “sending clutter back to the fires of oblivion,” you have to discover and assemble your Kallax through a questline. You’ll find it at the Dwemer furniture store, where you’ll also discover the secrets of Kallax’s origin and have to defeat the Clutter Golem.

Naturally, you summon this shelving unit in the game with a call of ‘Aya Key Yah.”

The mod doesn’t just introduce your trusty new Kallax Storageborn companion; you’ll also get access to the Allenblade weapon, some blue and yellow-themed armor, and a Meatball helmet.

It is always interesting to see non-tech brands cross over into our reporting realm. The first example that springs to mind is the KFC console, but IKEA has dipped its toe into tech more recently by expanding its computer furniture ranges to include products such as the Xbox Gaming Den furniture series showcased at Gamescom 2026, plus various smart home accessories.

Today is September 9, and the significance of the date for Australian consumers is that, by law, buying online apps and games now requires an over-18 age verification step. The local law isn't specific about the exact type of verification, only that it offers "appropriate age assurance measures." Valve is complying by asking for a bank card rather than government ID or a biometric check. The problem in the land down under is that while credit cards seemingly all work, debit card support is spotty and conditional.

This situation isn't unique, as it's basically a repeat of the same existing scenario in the United Kingdom. Valve's privacy-minded approach is laudable, as a bank card only links a payment method to a name and address. Meanwhile, a government ID is a more dangerous document if it gets leaked; face scans are quite fallible and revealing, and biometrics are intrinsic to the person and not replaceable if exposed — unlike bank cards, which can be canceled and swapped in minutes.

However, having a card check as the only verification option is causing problems, and many users are already asking for other means of verification, even if they're more invasive, citing Xbox and Sony's services as more accommodating.

Since credit cards in Australia (and the UK) can only be issued to adults, they work fine for Steam verification. Debit cards, on the other hand, can be carried by minors, and they're only valid for age checks under specific conditions. For now, that seems to be those (a) belonging to the Mastercard network, which introduced its own global automatic age verification check on June 2, 2026, and (b) for which the issuing bank flagged the card product as adults-only. The transaction firm only passes the answer to "is the buyer an adult?" back to the merchant (in this case, Steam), without exposing an actual date of birth.

A quick harnessing of user reports, mainly from Reddit posts, seems to indicate that debit Mastercards from Commonwealth, Westpac, and Macquarie appear to work, while those from Bendigo, St. George, Revolut, ANZ, and most Visa cards seem to fail the check. Note that this is an evolving situation, so the situation may have changed by the time you're reading this.

The demographics of credit card ownership definitely don't help matters. Unlike the U.S., where credit cards are the default method of purchase, only about 45% of Australian buyers and 65% of UK punters own one. Perhaps most importantly, within the 18-24 age demographic, only 25% to 30% own a credit card — precisely the people who buy the most games and are the most affected. For both user satisfaction and business reasons, it's seemingly desirable that Steam add verification alternatives.

If you play hard to get, you could get Xbox Game Pass for cheaper; at least that is what numerous users are reporting on a Reddit thread. One Xbox Game Pass subscriber shared a screenshot of Microsoft offering them the Ultimate plan for $16.09 for a month, 30% lower than the standard $22.99. Their secret? Cancel Xbox Game Pass almost every month.

Dynamic win-back discounts are perhaps the oldest trick in the book, but they remain widely used because of their effectiveness in re-engaging customers who have stopped buying a product or, in Microsoft's case, canceled their Xbox Game Pass subscription. These targeted offers, often disguised as "We Miss You" or "Welcome back" deals, aim to win back lost customers with exclusive or time-limited discounts.

According to the Redditor, they have used Xbox Game Pass on and off for about two years. However, instead of committing to an annual plan, the user frequently paused and resubscribed. In the Redditor's words, they were "not doing any sort of tricks lol...just got the offer randomly because I cancel gamepass almost every month, so maybe this was their way of keeping me."

This kind of customer behavior is not uncommon among subscription services, since buyers seek to maximize value and avoid unnecessary spending. Apparently, Microsoft seemingly noticed this user and proactively offered a 30% discount, dropping the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate price from $22.99 to $16.09 for a year. And it worked. The Redditor confirmed that they took the offer and locked in for the entire year.

At least one other Redditor confirmed they also received the same $16.09 offer. The thread quickly filled with additional posts as users shared their experiences with Xbox Game Pass discounts. For example, one Reddit user said that when they logged in with a secondary account on their Xbox console, they saw an $18 offer for 12 months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Their main account allegedly never receives offers like this. Meanwhile, other users chimed in to report receiving $ 20-per-month offers.

It is unclear what criteria Microsoft uses to distribute these win-back discounts. Many speculate that the company may be considering activity, subscription history, or even multiple accounts. The discounts do not seem limited to the U.S., where the Redditor lives. Users in the thread have reported similar discounts in regions like México.

Despite Microsoft slashing Xbox Game Pass pricing earlier this year, many gamers still resort to digital key marketplaces such as Eneba, G2A, or Loaded, where one month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate can cost as little as $9.28. By running targeted annual promotions, Microsoft can encourage subscribers to stick with Xbox Game Pass, secure long-term revenue, and avoid the risks of month-to-month cancellation.

However, these targeted discounts raise an important question: should Microsoft not reward loyal Xbox Game Pass subscribers with similar exclusive discounts? Win-back promotions are great for bringing back former subscribers, but long-time users will feel overlooked and see no reason to commit, since the generous deals go to those who cancel and return.

The PS5 emulation scene is growing at a rapid pace, perhaps the most rapidly we've ever seen, because the PS5 version of GTA V is now at least playable at up to 60 FPS on PC for a few minutes as modders work to fine-tune their approach. The last time we checked in over a month ago, GTA V was still stuck at the initial splash screen while 2D games were running smoothly, and other 3D games were just beginning to perform. Evidently, a lot of progress has been made since then — all in an effort to potentially get GTA VI playable on PC before an official port drops.

The video above shows GTA V's starting mission running at roughly 40 to 60 FPS, fluctuating based on how much action is going on. It's the starting mission of the game, so the true test of the open world is still a bit far out. The game is being emulated via KytyPS5, the most prominent PS5 emulator at the moment, alongside ShadEmu. The PC running it has a Ryzen 7 9950X3D CPU and an RX 7900 XT GPU, so admittedly very high-end specs.

Unfortunately, as soon as the player gets to the shutter that opens up to police waiting outside, the game crashes. It would've been almost euphoric to see actual gunplay between the character you're controlling and the NPCs shooting at you, but what we already witnessed was highly impressive, nonetheless. This is by far the biggest milestone in the PS5 emulation scene and the closest we've gotten to the actual goal of all this sudden development.

Case in point, a user was able to get past the starting mission and actually into the open world of GTA V. The game was running below 15 FPS, but as soon as Franklin and Lamar's cutscene occurred, the frame rate rose to the mid-40s. The game crashed as soon as the cutscene ended, but remember that GTA V cutscenes are not pre-rendered videos but are instead rendered in real time using the game engine, so this is a very impressive feat for the KytyPS5 emulator.

GTA V is not a difficult game to run; Android flagships from the past three years can emulate it at up to 60 FPS as well these days. But getting the PS5 version of the game to even be playable on PC in such a short amount of time is a testament to the community's dedication. It's easy to imagine that after seeing the GTA VI gameplay reveal, the urge to play it on PC right away instead of waiting for an official release has spiked to an all-time high.

GTA V actually first booted inside KytyPS5 a week ago before getting to this point, but it's not the only game running well right now. There are at least four other PS5 titles capable of being played at 60 FPS through emulation. The tweet above shows them all running on an RTX 5080 system with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D. We tried one game ourselves — PAC-MAN WORLD Re-PAC — and it ran shockingly well, locked at 60 FPS, even on an RX 6700 XT rig paired with a Ryzen 7 7700X processor.

On the other hand, SharpEmu is also making progress, but that team has a different approach to the same hurdle. They're busy tackling accuracy and infrastructure setup rather than game-specific compatibility, per its GitHub repo. In other words, it means fixing low-level issues that are preventing games like Astro Bot from currently reaching the gameplay state. Astro's Playroom has just barely reached the point where it boots.

SharpEmu is delivering a lot of achievements on the handheld side, though, with massive improvements made for the Steam Deck. The post below shows a similar level of performance for Astro’s Playroom compared to a much more powerful RX 7900 XT system with a Ryzen 9 7900X CPU. It's still barely 1 frame per second, and the game doesn't get past the boot screen, but the fact that it's even possible is enough cause for celebration. Remember, this is the worst that PS5 emulation will ever be.

A former Jagex employee who used to work on Old School RuneScape (OSRS) was sentenced to a three-year prison term and suspended for two years after he was found guilty of stealing over $400,000 worth of virtual gold and selling it on the black market. According to Dexerto, 32-year-old Andrew Lakeman, also known as Jed Sanderson, worked on the game starting in 2015 and is known to the community as “Mod Jed.” By 2018, Jagex noticed a pattern: accounts would get recovered under suspicious circumstances, and then valuable in-game items and gold would disappear from them.

OSRS’s in-game economy is similar to that of the real world, where players can trade items with each other or sell them directly on the Grand Exchange, which functions much like a stock exchange. While we don’t know if OSRS players have built collections worth $100,000 or more like in other titles such as Team Fortress 2, these missing virtual items still hold real monetary value and could have a direct financial impact on its players.

Jagex initially thought it was a glitch, but a deeper investigation led the company to suspect that it was an inside job. The event wasn’t that catastrophic for Jagex, unlike the Rainbow Six Siege X hack that shut down the game and forced Ubisoft to take all its servers offline. However, it’s still a major breach for the developer, especially given that the hack was done by its own employee. Failing to act on the issue would break player trust — a crucial metric for a game that averages more than 100,000 players at any given time.

So, it changed how account recoveries work and also modified its firewall without telling its people, allowing its IT team to track the illegal activity back to Mod Jed. Lakeman denied the accusations and claimed that somebody hacked his account to conduct the thefts, but Jagex fired him anyway and reported the incident to the police. Investigators later discovered that the virtual gold and other in-game items Lakeman stole were eventually sold on the black market for over $400,000. He even held $493,000 in cash in various bank accounts, allegedly as proceeds of cryptocurrency sales, although it’s unclear whether this amount came from his illicit sales.

He was finally arrested in July 2019 but was only given a three-year sentence, suspended for two years, on September 3. The Cambridge Crown Court also gave him a 150-hour unpaid work sentence, plus 25 days of rehabilitation. “Lakeman was well aware that what he was doing was wrong, and the hundreds of thousands of pounds he gained from selling the in-game items is no different from any other theft,” Detective Constable Andrew McKeane said in a statement by the Cambridgeshire Constabulary. “Just because it’s virtual, doesn’t mean he shouldn’t face the full force of the law.”

Nvidia's DLSS 5 has arrived in NBA 2K27, and we've been up since midnight testing it across every RTX 50-series graphics card to see what the first official implementation of this tech can do and how it compares to the community-implemented mods that have been circulating over the past couple weeks.

Before we discuss the performance cost of DLSS 5, many will ask whether this tech is even worth getting excited about, given the intense controversy that it's sparked ever since Nvidia revealed it earlier this year.

In short: yes, absolutely.

This first-party implementation of DLSS 5, tuned under the full control of 2K Games' art directors and artists, looks incredible, full stop. If you see it running, you will want to leave it on. It doesn't look like "slop" or a cheap filter. It just looks correct, or at least more correct.

For just a couple of examples, without DLSS 5, even at ultra settings and with RT, the game has a slightly "plastic" or "flat" look. Faces can have a waxy uniformity that immediately indicates that you're looking at a video game, not a live broadcast. Hair looks totally and unnaturally flat. The whites of eyes can be unnaturally bright, giving a sort of googly-eye or doll-like effect that immediately broke my sense of immersion. I didn't think any of this would be a big deal for a sports game, but it all stands out.

DLSS 5 breathes incredible life into NBA 2K27. Skin looks like real flesh and blood. Eyes are rendered with the proper tones, depth, and sparkle. Hair looks a billion times more realistic. Every human on screen just looks more alive. You won't entirely forget that you're looking at a game, but it becomes much easier to suspend disbelief and get lost in the action.

My experience slapping DLSS 5 mods into games has produced promising but sometimes mixed results. If the polished experience that NBA 2K25 delivers is any indication, I can't wait for more studios to get their hands on it and integrate it into their games under the care of the same artists that created them.

Our testing methods

We did our best to deliver clean test numbers in the short time we've had with NBA 2K27. Performance in this can be tricky to measure. Benchmarking in the hub worlds or cutscenes will deliver lower performance than on the court, and even then, in-game events like fouls and time-outs will also result in skewed numbers if you're not careful. We picked a repeatable match-up from the game's career mode and sampled 60 seconds of continuous gameplay with DLSS 5 on and off, making sure to restart if we ran into any of the scripted events above.

We used NBA 2K27's maximum graphics settings as our baseline, including RT. We tested at native resolutions without upscaling, and we didn't test with Multi Frame Generation enabled. We view MFG as a cherry on top of an already solid baseline experience, not a baseline in itself.

Our test system is built with the following components:

All of our performance results are captured using Nvidia's FrameView 2.0 utility. We measure graphics card power consumption directly with Nvidia's PCAT hardware power logging tool.

If you have any questions about our testing methods, let us know in the comments and we'll do our best to answer them. On to the numbers.

NBA 2K27 1080p performance

At 1080p, everything from the RTX 5070 on up is CPU-bound without DLSS 5 enabled, even with maxed-out settings and RT on. Turn on DLSS 5, though, and the differences in Tensor Core compute across the cards quickly becomes obvious. But even the RTX 5060 can manage nearly 60 FPS on average with DLSS 5 enabled at 1080p, so almost anybody with a Blackwell card can at least try out the feature.

Given these results, you might think to enable DLSS Super Resolution (aka upscaling). But because the amount of time needed to run the DLSS 5 model has a fixed cost per output frame that scales with your target resolution and largely dominates the total frame time, especially on lower-end hardware, you may find that enabling DLSS SR doesn't have as much of an effect on performance as we've come to expect. The game still has to wait for that final generative step to occur, even if DLSS SR cuts down some of the total frame time.

As noted, we didn't use MFG for these tests, simply because there's no need for us to make the numbers on these charts artifically large. If you do want to enable it, the multiplier you want will be determined by your monitor's refresh rate and your own personal tastes.

We did chart PC latency as estimated by FrameView, so you can get a sense of whether there's enough of a latency budget to enable MFG at all. At 1080p, every card is a solid candidate for enabling MFG without adding unreasonable amounts of input latency, although the RTX 5050 is in a borderline position. And all three of the 8GB cards might have trouble fitting the MFG model into their VRAM with these maxed-out settings and DLSS 5 enabled, so you might need to turn off RT at a minimum to use MFG on these lower-end GPUs.

As we already saw in early testing of the leaked DLSS 5 builds circulating in the community, enabling the model has a large impact on power consumption, likely due to the intense Tensor Core load required to run the DLSS 5 model.

NBA 2K27 1440p performance

Moving up to 1440p separates our cards some more. The RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 are still CPU-limited without DLSS 5. The RTX 5060 Ti 8GB, RTX 5060, and RTX 5050 all get a "Low VRAM" warning with these settings, so if you're trying to push this higher resolution with those cards, you might want to start tuning your DLSS upscaling settings to relieve VRAM pressure, even if it doesn't result in additional performance with DLSS 5.

But you really want an RTX 5060 Ti at a minimum here to get acceptable input latency with DLSS 5 enabled, and the RTX 5070 is the true baseline for a good experience. At the higher end, the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080 both provide fluid frame rates even without MFG, and you have the latency budget to enable framegen without worry on anything from the RTX 5070 on up.

DLSS 5's power consumption on all these cards (except the chugging RTX 5050) rises as expected with the higher-resolution output frame we're asking it to generate. Everything from the RTX 5060 up to the RTX 5070 Ti ends up running at its power limit, while the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 still have room to stretch out. The unconstrained MSI RTX 5090 Lighting Z sucks down a ton of power to deliver its scorching performance.

NBA 2K27 4K performance

Running NBA 2K27 at 4K with DLSS 5 is extremely demanding, since the model has to generate an output frame with more than twice as many pixels than at 1440p. Even the RTX 5070 Ti is straining here, as its input latency with DLSS 5 is potentially too high to enable MFG while still delivering a responsive gameplay experience.

You can see why Nvidia only recommends the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 for a 4K DLSS 5 experience in this title, as they're the only two cards that deliver high enough baseline performance with low enough input latencies to make MFG practical. And even then, the RTX 5080 is on the edge of what we'd consider an acceptable input latency before enabling MFG.

Our power consumption chart at 4K is a bit of a mess at the low end since the RTX 5050 and RTX 5060 are crushed by the demands of DLSS 5 and end up chugging. Really, though, we're here to see how the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090s handle this incredibly Tensor Core-intensive work. Both cards end up running at their power limits.

The MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z shows how much power scaling the GB202 GPU has left in it once you remove the constraint of a single 12V-2x6 connector. We were wondering whether the power numbers we saw from a modded version of Control were a fluke, but DLSS 5 in NBA 2K27 goes even harder and pushes the RTX 5090 Lightning Z to nearly 850W on average in this test. For 48% more power than the RTX 5090 Founders Edition, you get 22% higher performance.

On a big 4K screen like an OLED TV, a fluid 90 FPS at a native 4K resolution with the level of detail and realism that DLSS 5 adds is an astounding gaming experience. You really haven't seen anything like it. But mere mortals with single-plug 5090s will probably want to enable MFG 2X at a minimum.

Bottom line

It's early days for DLSS 5 performance, and in its first official showing in NBA 2K27, it certainly has a large performance cost—sometimes well over 50% on lower-end hardware. But the generational leap in realism it provides for every human on screen is well worth it to my eye, at least. Now that I've seen a first-party, developer-driven implementation of DLSS 5, I want it in every game where its photorealistic enhancements would make sense, without question.

And as it's implemented in NBA 2K27, our performance results show that the tech is accessible enough that almost anybody with an RTX 50-series graphics card can try it out and still enjoy a fluid and responsive experience, even without Multi Frame Generation. Most of us aren't playing on 4K monitors, and at 1080p and 1440p, the Blackwell card you may already have is probably up to the task of running DLSS 5 with acceptable baseline performance.

DLSS 5 does upend some intuitions we've developed around the interactions of upscaling and frame rate. The large fixed frame-time cost that's required to generate the DLSS 5 output frame is entirely dependent on your target output resolution, making the lowered input resolution of DLSS 4.5 upscaling far less of a performance multiplier than it might otherwise be.

Given those realities, DLSS MFG can still make for a more fluid experience alongside DLSS 5 with a couple of clicks in a menu—at least assuming you have enough VRAM to hold the game assets, the DLSS 5 model, and the MFG model all at once. On 8GB graphics cards, this may require some tweaking to get working.

Nvidia has promised to continue improving the fundamental performance of the DLSS 5 model with time, and the fact that it's moved from requiring a dedicated RTX 5090 to run in the demos we saw at GTC to running on an RTX 5060 today is a sign that such promises do bear fruit.

Boosting the fundamental performance of the DLSS 5 model is vital, because as we all well know, prices for most Blackwell cards have spiked across the board to the point that former midrange options like the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and RTX 5070 are many hundreds of dollars more expensive than their MSRPs and well out of whack with their former performance-per-dollar propositions. A hardware upgrade to get better performance is no longer a no-brainer for many PC builders, and that problem is going to get even worse as the AI boom continues unabated.

Those elevated prices are also why Nvidia's post-launch pledge to bring the DLSS 5 model to RTX 40-series cards later this year is a welcome development. In our limited experience with community mods, Ada GPUs run the current DLSS 5 model about as well as Blackwell cards do, and gamers who haven't already upgraded from their 40-series cards certainly won't be raring to move off that hardware any time soon. Locking DLSS 5 to new GPUs that are prohibitively expensive to buy for non-technical reasons isn't a winning strategy for goodwill or broad adoption, and it's good to see Nvidia acknowledge that reality.

For all that, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that DLSS 5 is a huge, exciting leap forward in the never-ending pursuit of photorealism in real-time graphics. When you toggle it on and off in NBA 2K27, it feels like a generational improvement in rendering technology at the press of a button. Now that I've seen it in action, I don't want to play NBA 2K27 without it, and I hope to see more first-party integrations of it soon.

When NVIDIA launched the GeForce RTX 50 series, a major part of the hype surrounding the new GPU family was its support for DLSS Multi-Frame Generation. This feature was officially locked to the new RTX 50 "Blackwell" GPUs, but modders have been working on unlocking it for RTX 40-series cards for a while now. NVIDIA is clearly aware of these efforts, as it recently pushed an over-the-air update via the NVIDIA App that seemed targeted at blocking them due to its odd changes. Yet, as pointed out by Sebastian Castellanos on X, enterprising hackers had already found a workaround just hours later.

At the launch of Blackwell, NVIDIA explained that bringing Multi-Frame Generation to previous-generation RTX 40-series cards wasn't possible because those GPUs relied on a hardware optical flow generator incapable of producing multiple interpolated frames per rendered frame. Instead, Blackwell introduced a software-based optical flow method executed directly on the GPU shader cores without requiring the hardware unit. To tech-savvy gamers, the obvious question arose: why not use that same software method on Ada Lovelace GPUs and bypass their hardware optical flow units? NVIDIA showed no interest in enabling this, leading many to assume it was technically impossible.

Put simply, it's possible. There are apparently various roadblocks within NVIDIA's software, but the strength of the PC platform lies in its openness; users can freely modify software running on their own hardware. And so, at least three distinct mods have emerged to unlock DLSS Multi-Frame Generation across multiple titles. It began with a Cyberpunk 2077 mod by creator "dashdogy" that relied on game-specific modding frameworks, but the technique has since been adapted into a broader ReShade plugin applicable to almost any game, and that's just one of at least three different multi-game unlock mods I found.

It's obviously in the company's best interest to protect its marketing narrative, and the narrative is that Multi-Frame Generation doesn't work on GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards. However, user reports across X and Reddit tell a different story. Users report that the mods not only work, but also deliver surprisingly smooth frame pacing. NVIDIA had previously warned that Blackwell's specialized hardware flip metering was mandatory for proper frame pacing with multi-frame generation, but dashdogy noted that his mod backports "Blackwell-specific frame timing instructions to allow Ada to place the frames in the correct positions," suggesting that MFG's purported hardware dependency was greatly exaggerated.

Earlier attempts to enable multi-frame generation on Ada Lovelace relied on GPU spoofing or hybrid solutions, like combining standard 2x DLSS Frame Generation with AMD's FSR 3 or Lossless Scaling's software frame generation. Those workarounds were significantly clunkier than native game mods that utilize NVIDIA's own DLSS-G framework. While I couldn't get this latest mod working in the limited time before publication, community developers have not only bypassed the latest roadblocks thrown up by Mean Green, but in fact, they've released at least two more updates for the mod in the last ten hours since Castellanos' X post.

All of this coincides rather neatly with the contentious rollout of DLSS 5 "Neural Rendering," which is another technology originally pitched as an RTX 50-series exclusive before NVIDIA made a last-minute reversal to promise it for RTX 40-series cards as well. That shift may well have been driven by hackers porting DLSS 5 Neural Rendering not just to older NVIDIA architectures, but even to AMD Radeon GPUs. Once it became common knowledge that DLSS 5 runs on non-Blackwell hardware, continuing to claim hardware exclusivity risked a major loss of consumer trust. It'll be fascinating to see if NVIDIA will pivot on DLSS Multi-Frame Generation in the same way. While it would be a nice bone to throw the company's loyal previous-generation customers, we wouldn't bet on it.

Developers at RPCS3, the open-source PlayStation 3 emulator, have criticized Nvidia’s DLSS 5 technology, calling it an “AI-slop generator.” A number of modders managed to port DLSS 5 to various games last week after the latest neural-rendering tech leaked before the official launch. A few people also went ahead and apparently tested the leaked DLSS 5 DLL on the RPCS3 renderer. According to a post by the official RPCS3 account on X, “Whilst the gaming industry pushes more upscalers and frame generation to hallucinate games and hide their lack of optimisation, we do not ship any of that slop.”

The post has drawn criticism from certain users, with one calling RPCS3’s response “possibly the dumbest” they could have expected. They argued that DLSS and FSR frame generation can complement game-engine optimizations rather than simply mask poor performance, while Nvidia’s Reflex can help mitigate the latency penalty associated with frame generation.

In its response, RPCS3 said that emulators have never-ending goals, and they do not simply target high-end hardware to achieve playable status. The developers also added that modern temporal upscalers are difficult to implement because PS3-era games do not expose the motion-vector data they require. At the same time, RPCS3’s low-level RSX emulation makes reconstructing that data impractical. As a result, the emulator currently relies on spatial upscalers such as FSR 1, bilinear, and nearest-neighbor scaling.

DLSS 5 is expected to officially roll out starting today, with NBA2K27 being the first game to support the latest tech. Focusing on 3D-guided neural rendering, DLSS 5 aims to deliver movie-grade visual realism and photorealistic lighting in games. The AI model is trained to deduce how complex features of game scenes like characters, skin, hair, and environmental lighting should look in the real world given certain inputs from the game engine, like color buffer and motion vectors, in combination with an input frame.

According to Nvidia, DLSS 5 will also provide different AI models and controls, allowing artists to decide what gets enhanced, where the effect appears, and how strongly it is applied. For players, however, Nvidia wants to keep things simple as DLSS 5 essentially becomes an on/off graphics option, while the detailed decisions about how the AI-generated visual effects are used are handled by the game developer.

Since DLSS 5 is resource-intensive, gamers should expect a noticeable drop in frame rates, especially with the initial release. Nvidia has also confirmed that DLSS 5 will only be compatible with RTX 50-series desktop and mobile GPUs, as well as GeForce Now. Notably, the recently leaked DLL has allowed some modders to successfully port DLSS 5 to older RTX 40-series cards.

It may come as a surprise to many readers (and me) to realize that the venerable SteamDB, used and beloved by a good chunk of PC gamers, was actually a one-man effort. The hero in question is Pavel Djundik (aka xPaw), who's been single-handedly developing, designing, managing, and doing systems administration for most of the site's 13 years of existence. He's earned his figurative retirement and now handed over the reins to well-known modding site Nexus Mods.

In a public statement and subsequent FAQ, Nexus Mods (NM) clarifies the acquisition situation. To immediately assuage fears, NM says that SteamDB will remain ad-free and won't have any paywalls placed on existing content. Users won't be required to use a NM account to browse the site, nor will there be any forced integration between both properties. The FAQ clearly states that NM "[is] not interested in changing SteamDB into something it isn't."

The new owners also explain in detail how meshing together both NM and SteamDB has the potential to be extremely beneficial for the modding community, at least at face value and our own experiences with game modding, they appear to have an excellent point. Installing and maintaining a set of mods for a game in this day and age is relatively easy, but anyone who's ever done it knows it's all sunshine and rainbows until a game update drops and breaks your careful curation.

SteamDB keeps track of game versioning down to individual deployments, complete with release dates, and changed files (a rough analog to a GitHub commits) — here's the info for Stalker 2 as an example. Nexus Mods can leverage this information to warn you there's a pending update, execute version pinning (keeping the game locked at a version that's compatible with the mod list), and also know if a mod install or uninstall broke the game installation, since it'll know what the unmodified files are meant to look like. This ought to allow for far better troubleshooting, too.

As far as the future of SteamDB goes, NM says straight up states the site "needs to make money," as it's relied on donations to Djundik and his daily work for a long while. Despite the monetization intentions, NM says "[it wants] to be smart about it," isn't looking to put ads on SteamDB, sell personal data, or put up paywalls or login walls. The NM folks mention partnerships, integrations, and affiliate links with publishers as ways to keep the numbers in the black, particularly as they intend for SteamDB to have an actual team running it.

For his part, Pavel Djundik tells a sadly familiar story: SteamDB was one of his passion projects, but as the site grew, the "self-inflicted workload [took] its toll." According to Djunidk, the radical change of the internet after COVID and the rise of AI sapped his passion further, and working as the sole man in the operation was unsustainable. He'd wanted to hand over the reins for years, but it wasn't until now he found "a worthy partner," particularly one that wouldn't riddle the site with ads. A hearty salute for your service, sir.

Valve might've just suffered its biggest data leak in history, but it wasn't a hack or a security breach. Instead, the company left an endpoint to its legacy infrastructure accessible to the public, from where archivists extracted 12-13TB of old game content. The files are still being explored, but we know they include both Valve's internal projects and third-party releases, with an early weapon asset from Half-Life 2 Episode 3 being the key discovery, along with scrapped Portal 2 concepts.

The archive consists of old Steam content-server data from 2003 to 2013, overlapping with the timeline of the platform's upgrade from the old Steam2 system to SteamPipe. Valve used to distribute games via proprietary NCF (No-Cache File) and GCF (Grid Cache File) formats during the Steam2 era before it transitioned to a standard HTTP file-tree system around March 2013. Therefore, this dump basically acts like a preserved time capsule.

During this period, Valve was a much more active game developer, so we get a rare insight into their projects. First up is Left 4 Dead, and the files include an entire early build of the game from June 2008. It has a different HUD, different voice lines cut from the retail release, altered sections of the map, and many unfinished early assets that Valve was recycling from the Terror Strike mod (for Counter-Strike: Condition Zero).

Then, there's Portal 2, which is actually said to have been hit the hardest, and modders have similarly reconstructed a playable build from the files. It's a beta dating back to July 2009 when the game was still in its Core Hub era before that concept was scrapped in favor of a more direct sequel. We also get to see early assets from the F-Stop prequel that was in development the year prior, featuring camera mechanics for gameplay.

An intro sequence shows the player falling down one of the labs. The beta features a completely different GLaDOS, with a more passive role, different voice lines, and new animations. Some of the scenes in this build are so unfinished that they use assets from Team Fortress and Half-Life as placeholders. But perhaps the most exciting discovery here was a 3D weapon model for "Weaponizer."

Weaponizer is supposedly a concept weapon from the canceled third episode of Half-Life 2. It's been leaked for years and officially shown off by Valve, too, but never in a build form. It's used to turn objects into ammo, but Valve was using it as a placeholder for a handheld Paint Gun before switching to gel drops. Still, the fact that it exists in this early build of Portal 2 just goes to show how close we were to getting Episode 3.

Finally, we got a decent look at CS:GO as well, which looked much more like Source in its early development days, with a more stylized UI and alpha versions of maps. There was an MP5-Active weapon found in the files, suggesting it was part of the original launch roster at some point, along with a bunch of early knife models, cut grenade mechanics, and a Riot Shield brought back from Counter-Strike 1.6.

The archive also includes builds from 2011 that run on Source physics and movement but feature early Left 4 Dead 2 engine code and prototype CS:GO UI elements. This was right around the time CS: GO was born as a whole because, up until then, Valve was simply trying to port Source to home consoles. The extensive upgrades made by Hidden Path Entertainment convinced the company to release a new Counter-Strike game entirely.

Those are just a few tidbits from the giant dump that's sure to dish out more information over the coming days. Someone found an early beta build of Sonic 4 Episode 2 in the files, so expect to see more from third-party games as well. Valve has not acknowledged the leak so far, but given that even the latest "leak" in this archive is over 13 years old, it's probably not a major internal concern. Besides, all this data was only discovered because of a mistake on Valve's part, not a breach.

Several developers and game publishers at Gamescom 2026 in Cologne, Germany, have reported equipment theft at the exhibition. According to Video Games Chronicle (VGC), Mimic developer Ryan Laley, game publisher iam8bit, and Tessera Studios were all hit during the week.

Laley reportedly lost all his laptops from his booth, while iam8bit said in its X post that it’s missing two laptops as well. Meanwhile, Tessera Studios had two laptops and a Steam Deck taken from its cabinet. Laley’s and iam8bit’s booths are located together in Hall 4.1, next to the west entrance gate, meaning they’re both easy targets for thieves looking for a quick score. However, Tessera Studios is in Hall 10.2, putting it quite far from the other two targets.

The cost of the stolen equipment will certainly be a huge setback for these developers and publishers, especially for smaller indie creators. However, the bigger loss would be the data on the machines, which often includes unreleased builds of the games they’re demoing at the expo. While they may have backup copies of their work stored in some of the best external SSDs, the fact that a copy of the games they’re working on is out in the wild and could potentially be leaked would chill the blood of any developer and could be “heartbreaking” for the team working on it.

“Today at gamescom we arrived at our station in the business area hall to discover that our two laptops had been stolen overnight, despite the presence of Koelnmesse security,” iam8bit said in their X post. “These were machines we were using to demo iam8bit Presents titles Petal Runner and Escape Academy 2 to media and content creators during the show. On top of obviously disrupting our very busy appointment schedule, this theft has potentially put unfinished builds of these games at risk of being leaked.”

“On Wednesday, we arrived at our booth in the Indie Area to find our cabinet forced open. Two laptops and a Steam Deck were gone,” Tessera Studios posted on X. “The devices contained not only our Gamescom demo, but also personal, company, and critical information.”

Gamescom organizers responded to the issues, saying that although they have arranged for uniformed guards to provide general security, individual booth security must be booked separately. They’ve also advised exhibitors to have insurance against theft, and said these warnings are noted in the terms and conditions for participants, as well as in the event’s technical guidelines.

“All cases have been reported to us and to the police, and investigations are already underway,” the organizers’ statement read. They also said that security is one of their priorities at the event, but also added, “At an event of this size, however, there will always be individuals attempting to take advantage of the situation.”

Game studio MiTale Ltd. is at Gamescom promoting a narrative-driven post-apocalyptic RPG dubbed C.L.A.Y. - The Last Redemption. You may well have heard the same or very similar descriptions of a new game before, but C.L.A.Y. stands out for its use of quantum computing techniques in the creation of game assets as well as for game narrative and procedural systems. MiTale worked with experts from IBM Quantum Computing and claims this is the “first commercial game on the market utilizing quantum computing in an immersive narrative experience.” Moreover, it reckons this is “the first step toward using real quantum hardware in games to accelerate complex tasks in a manner similar to a GPU,” which is rather bold.

The official game page on Steam (linked above) doesn’t mention quantum computing, but perhaps it hasn’t been updated with details from this Gamescom announcement, or kept up-to-date with the game development process. A little bit of investigation reveals that C.L.A.Y.’s development seems to have spanned at least six years so far. We’ve been emailed a fuller statement about MiTale’s exploration of quantum games, and there is some more public information about MiTale’s IBM Quantum collaborations on the game’s Gamescom 2026 press kit.

MiTale has been exploring quantum games since 2019. Its work in the games development field has included connecting quantum systems with familiar development environments, including Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot, and the Ink narrative system. However, it has a longer-term goal of integrating real quantum hardware into game development. It hopes to enhance the player-centered design this way, as well as to provide truly unique real-time adjusting experiences in every gaming session.

Back to C.L.A.Y., this game has leveraged IBM Quantum tech to help MiTale developers generate maps, characters, and graphic simulations. It also hints that using real quantum hardware in PCs could become the new normal, one day. Discrete or integrated quantum accelerators could “accelerate complex tasks in a manner similar to a GPU.” Certainly it wouldn’t be more of a waste of silicon than the NPUs in my current AMD Ryzen AI and Intel Core Ultra PC systems.

Often quantum computers are pitched as a hifalutin solution “to solve problems that affect all of humanity.” But their touted strengths in complex modeling, optimization, simulation, discovery, and ability to handle vast numbers of variables could also be applied to huge next-gen gaming universes.

Gaming on quantum computers? Quandoom has already been there.

Today marks Valve’s 30^th birthday. The company was founded on August 24, 1996, by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, both Microsoft veterans. It didn’t take long for the PC gaming world to feel Valve’s influence after it rewrote the FPS genre with Half Life (1998) and pioneered an internet-connected games retail model with Steam (2003).

Valve didn’t come from nowhere, and it doesn’t have a bedroom coder story like many of the game publishers of the 8- and 16-bit eras. Both Newell and Harrington were time-served Microsoft employees, with experience spanning 13 years and 9 years at the massive software corporation, respectively. Their in-depth knowledge of OS engineering, large-scale software projects, game porting and programming, and technical ambition were a great foundation for what they would achieve with Valve.

Only two years after its formation, Valve released Half Life. This title changed FPS gaming forever with its scripted sequences, smart enemy ‘AI,’ storytelling, seamless level design, and application of physics. It broke the Doom-a-like mold that many devs had settled into, and Half Life’s influence is still felt in modern-day FPS games.

Steam is probably Valve’s greatest achievement, though, and powerful rivals are still trying and failing to replicate its success. This online games retail platform got better and better with features like automatic patching, cloud saves, communities, achievements, indie publishing, and - importantly - mod distribution.

Valve was quick to 'industrialize' its game engine and modding to appeal to gamers. The firm’s Source Engine was used by a host of successful games, and its Steam Workshop modding wasn’t just casual fun, with billion-dollar franchises beginning as Valve-supported mods. Valve’s embrace of the above helped it fight off rival online distribution platforms made by powerful and wealthy rivals, and that it prevented deep fragmentation was probably good for the PC platform as a whole.

We remember the first wave of Steam Machines, so Valve isn’t immune to strategic missteps. However, it seems to have found much greater success in the hardware realm with the introduction of the Steam Deck handheld. It clearly wants to rekindle the Steam Machine desktop dream, but the PC industry is having something of a moment right now, with the AI-pocalypse making so many key components of PCs (and consoles, and smart devices) unaffordable. However, the software support for the new hardware thrust, things like SteamOS and Proton, seems to be improving at an enviable pace, clearly worrying Microsoft's Windows and Xbox divisions. If and when we get past this difficult hardware pricing cycle, perhaps other console makers should be worried too.

A GTA gaming enthusiast highlighted on social media that a 113GB GTA VI ISO file is being shared online and asked their followers to “take one for the team” to confirm if it’s a valid build of the game. X user @GTAGolden_ did not mention where they saw the file, but it’s alleged that it was circulating on various Torrent sites. In a reply on X @Aidas29506493 said that they “did some reverse engineering” and confirmed that “it is fully fake and full of viruses.” Further analysis by the internet sleuths indicates that the huge ISO is mostly junk data alongside a 50KB virus.

“The decompiled bytecode literally contains commands to whitelist the entire C:\ drive in Windows Defender (powershell Add-MpPreference -ExclusionPath %SystemDrive%\) and kill security software (taskkill -f),” Name said in one reply to their X post. They also added in another response, “It’s not 100 GB of actual code—it’s just a tiny 50 KB virus padded with 99.99% empty junk (literally endless zeroes).”

Grand Theft Auto VI is one of the most anticipated games in history, with Rockstar set to release an extended look on Netflix this coming August 27. However, someone has been releasing leaks of GTA VI gameplay and the entire map of Leonidas, where the game is set. The leaker, who goes by the name of Cyberleek, said that they are doing it because of Rockstar’s decision to release pre-selling digital copies of the game, which Cyberleek claimed to be anti-gamer. They then threatened to keep on revealing clips and snippets of actual gameplay until the publisher issues a public apology and promises “to be better.” Take-Two Interactive has already taken steps to identify the leaker, asking for the device IDs of every member of three Discord servers in an effort to plug or prosecute the leaks. Still, it appears that it will take time before the company could even identify the person or people behind Cyberleek, which could be disastrous as the leaks, so far, have continued daily.

The hype behind GTA VI, plus all this news of leaks and even a complete build, means that many gamers are curious about the game and are likely trying to find a copy online. Because of this, it seems that bad actors are trying to take advantage of the situation and are releasing fake GTA VI ISOs to try and spread malware. While it’s never a good idea to download pirated software online, torrenting an unreleased game is 100 times worse. That’s because it is more likely than not just a virus disguised as a build of the game. The best thing that any GTA VI fan can do presently is to patiently wait for the game’s release in November and to only purchase it as it becomes downloadable. It might even be wiser to watch reviews first before buying the AAA game, so that you know what to expect before spending your hard-earned money.

GTA VI is one of the most hotly anticipated games in history, but Rockstar’s decision to not release a physical copy has hit a sore nerve among fans. Apparently, one of them is a talented hacker who somehow landed their hands on GTA VI gameplay and the entire map and decided to leak them. According to gaming creator NikTek on X, Cyberleek allegedly leaked the two clips and the entire map of Leonida as a protest against the publisher’s decision to sell pre-selling digital copies of the game. They said that they will not stop dropping leaks until the company issues a public apology and commits to doing better.

"No consumer shall pay for a game through digital storefronts before release and independent review. Physical preorders for tangible media remain permitted. Preorders were not created for gamers. They were created because physical discs had manufacturing limits. In digital distribution, there is no inventory. There is no stock shortage. A digital copy cannot sell out. Yet publishers kept the preorder system and stripped away its only consumer benefit. Now gamers pay early and receive nothing in return except a countdown timer and a cosmetic skin,” Cyberleek said on their website. “If publishers want revenue before launch, they can press discs. Print boxes. Put them on shelves. Earn that money through physical production."

Aside from this, Cyberleek has two other points in their manifesto: that publishers should not sell “fake” single-player DLCs that unlock content already included in the base game and that any title featuring single-player content must always be available, even when server support ends. These points are issues that many gamers are fighting for, especially as many companies focus on digital games and subscriptions over physical media and one-time purchases. One major example is Sony’s decision to cut physical media. This move has angered gamers, with many complaining that we no longer own the games we buy. Unfortunately, Rockstar is following in this trend — even though you can still physically buy GTA VI from retailers, these copies only contain a download code, not physical game discs you can insert into your console.

NikTek said in another X post that the leaked clips showed various gameplay details, including basketball games, vehicle loadouts, and openable and closable trunks. There’s also a stamina bar and an honor system similar to Red Dead Redemption 2. The map leak also showed details of the five counties, as well as revealing that there is a massive rail system and many tiny islands that players can explore. Another creator said that these leaked details are already over a year old, but Rockstar has been actively issuing DMCA takedowns against posts that showed these details, meaning these are likely clips of the real thing. After all, the base gameplay has likely already been completed, and the developers probably spent the last few months finalizing the game ahead of its November launch.