Month: September 2024

We’ve suspected AMD’s Granite Ridge family of Zen 5 based processors might show their faces soon, given that AMD has already said it’s aiming for a launch in the second half of this year, and CEO Dr. Lisa Su is set to deliver the Computex keynote on June 3. Now Gigabyte has released a BIOS update for several of its AM5 series of motherboards in anticipation of the new chips, and it seems to confirm that they’ll be called the AMD Ryzen 9000 series.

In a news post on the company website, the Gigabyte AM5 X670, B650 and A620 motherboards are confirmed to receive boot up support for “the coming AMD Ryzen™ 9000 series”, with the most recent AGESA 1.1.7.0 beta BIOS. 

While we’ve already seen leaks suggesting this name would be used for the new chips, this is the first o…

An Elden Ring player player has knocked out the game’s most difficult boss on its highest difficulty, New Game+7, in a mere 15 seconds. The speed kill was completed by RS_Lionheart, and takes down Malenia by just… walking in and beating the absolute crap out of her.

Using an extensive suite of damage-boosting effects in a buff-up routine that takes about 45 seconds of the entire video, something like three times as long as the fight itself, RS_Lionheart knocks out Malenia in an impressive 15.7 seconds. In the words of Malenia herself: “Your strength, extraordinary…”

RS_Lionheart’s 15-second kill got a lot of attention when posted over on Reddit, where it inspired a lot of commentary. Such gems as “I would have died and retried 3 times in the amount of time it took you to…

The Steam Deck is good at many things, but a wonderful typing experience it is not. Either you’re furiously flipping away at those thumbsticks like some kind of—shock horror—console gamer, or you’re jabbing your fingers and thumbs at the touchscreen like—even bigger shock horror—a mobile gamer. Well, thanks to some clever modding, the Steam Deck now has a 3D printable design for a keeb of its very own, and it hinges right off the Deck like it was meant to be there in the first place.

The keeb in question is the split ergonomic design Corne keyboard, a typing device available as a kit that’s been given its very own 3D printable frame thanks to custom designs by Thingiverse user [a8ksh4], that in turn allow the keyboard to clip on to the Steam Deck (…

The Chinese Communist Party—who had taken aim at free-to-play monetisation schemes just before the holidays—softened its stance. This was after “nearly $80 billion in market value” bled from Tencent (League of Legends) and NetEase (Diablo: Immortal). 

The draft rules intended to target the live service giant’s favourite toys (such as daily login bonuses) while also threatening a core species of player—the deep-pocketed ‘whale’—completely extinct, with harsh spending limits. While I’m sure us players are tired of these systems, they aren’t so easily toppled. The market panic was inevitable, in hindsight.

Despite analyst’s insistence that the draft rules wouldn’t be changed, adjustments were announced later in the month, according to a report from …

In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Sam Lake—creative director of Remedy Entertainment—revealed that prolific horror writer Stephen King granted Alan Wake’s opening quote for just $1. Remedy is, of course, on the promotional circuit for the upcoming sequel to Alan Wake.

“I really, really desperately wanted a quote from him to start it off,” Lake told Eurogamer’s Chris Tapsell. “It’s my understanding he wanted $1 for us to get the rights to use it. [It was] so very generous.”

The quote is from a piece King wrote for Entertainment Weekly, “Why Hollywood Can’t Do Horror”. In it, he writes that “nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.”

King goes on to cite a m…

By all accounts, space-dwarf mining sim Deep Rock Galactic has one of the last positive communities left in all of videogames. There’s something about rambunctiously stripping the galaxy of resources as a squad of stout ‘n’ shouty guys that brings out the best in people. That must be why—per developer Ghost Ship Games’ own 2023 end of year stats—over 8 million people have gotten in on the action since the game released in early access back in 2018.

Or at least, 8 million have bought the game, and I suppose a fair few of them went on to let it languish in their Steam libraries untouched. Nevertheless, DRG is going from strength to strength, selling a record 2.5 million copies in 2023 alone. But we have to talk about some of these other stats.

Ghost Ship has also p…

I was startled awake this morning when the first email I opened confronted me with the image above: a smooth-faced, blue-eyed Bigfoot gazing contemplatively, or maybe pensively, at the press release that followed, the announcement of upcoming sasquatch sim Bigfoot Life.

Something about that rubber-mask face stupefied me—I also like Bigfoot’s marching gait, seen in the trailer embedded below—but after seeing criticism of his Bigfoot’s appearance online, the game’s creator is considering reworking the cryptid’s face.

Watch On

Bigfoot Life is a solo project by developer Wesley Abrams, who’s previously made games about hunting mushrooms, as well as an action adventure game called Spider Fox that he built for his son. He announced Bigfoot Life today and posted about i…

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT is a good graphics card but one that’s been mostly overshadowed by the both the RX 7900 XTX and RTX 4070 Ti. That said, with a good enough deal it’s right back into contention, and that’s exactly what we’ve got for you today. This stunning AMD graphics card deal does a lot to bring this graphics card out of the shadows and into the spotlight.

You can pick up ASRock’s RX 7900 XT Phantom Gaming for just $720 at Walmart, or if you prefer you can grab it for the same price over at Newegg. That’s a saving of around $90 if you take Newegg’s pre-sale pricing as read, or around $179 off AMD’s launch day MSRP for this card.

That’s significantly cheaper than any RTX 4070 Ti I’ve spotted so far this Amazon Prime Day, and makes this Radeon card worthy of consid…

Steam has been on a roll over the past couple of years. This time last year the platform reached 28 million concurrent users, an increase of three million over the year before. Over this past weekend, SteamDB recorded that number rocketing up to a new peak of 33,078,963 players all logged into Steam at the same time.

A four million concurrent user increase over 12 months is some damn good growth, and it’s not the only record that Valve’s platform smashed over the weekend. While the 33 million concurrent users is just for the number of players logged into Steam, Eurogamer reports that there were also 10,284,586 people actively playing something on January 8. It’s the first time the platform has surpassed 10 million concurrent active users.

Regulars like CS:GO, Apex Legends, D…

The display standards body VESA has rolled out a new 1.2 spec for its DisplayHDR certification regime. The revised Version 1.2 standards add a range of new requirements, but the bottom line is that most so-called HDR-certified monitors still won’t actually be HDR capable.

In theory, VESA is slightly raising the bar for what it takes to qualify as an HDR PC monitor. VESA has added requirements for colour fidelity and static contrast, for instance, particularly to the lower tier certification levels. However, the standards still allow for things like monolithic backlighting on LCD panels, which are not the stuff of true HDR performance.

More specifically, the previous DisplayHDR 400 1.1 definition had no requirement for static contrast or DCI-P3 gamut coverage. The new 1.2 ver…