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AMD’s next-gen Zen 5 CPU is shaping up very nicely. Well, it is according to the latest rumours which indicate the new CPU design will crank out roughly 30 percent more performance than AMD’s existing Zen 4 architecture, as used in Ryzen 7000 Series chips like the Ryzen 9 7950X. That would make Zen 5 the biggest ever upgrade since the original Zen CPUs arrived back in 2017.

The latest purported data dump comes from YouTube channel RedGamingTech. A number of rough performance estimates for multiple core configurations are provided. 

According to the channel, the 16-core variant of Zen 5 will knock out around 49,000 points in the multi-threaded run of Cinebench R23. That compares with the 38,000 points that the Ryzen 9 7950X achieves. Similar uplifts are claimed for 12, e…

Earlier this week, Epic revealed its latest cross-marketing campaign, which brings Tesla’s Cybertruck—a vehicle that’s earned four NHTSA recalls in seven months and has been called a “guideless missile” by safety experts—to Fortnite. The announcement earned a rare sense of unity from Fortnite players, though perhaps not the one Tesla might’ve hoped for.

On X, users reacted to the crossover by declaring open season on Fortnite Cybertruck drivers, with players making a general commitment to focus fire on the detestable polygon as soon as they see it—all other targets be damned.

It’s not just Fortnite players expressing Cybertruck discontent. Some of Fortnite’s own developers have shared their frustration with seeing Tesla’s infamous truck/icon of excess in …

Here comes Fractal Design with the new Terra Mini-ITX PC. And it’s making me feel very much okay about not loving the RGB-bathed monstrosities still dominating the PC gaming space.

I’ve been complaining about my hatred of the Cyberpunk aesthetic, and from that you’d probably guess I’m not so into PC cases heavy with RGB lighting. Thankfully, as Fractal’s Head of PR, Victor Elveljung, told me today at the product launch event, “We have your back on that one.”

“We have a different take on it,” Fractal Design’s, Susana Hernando tells me about the company’s thoughts on the prevailing RGB LED aesthetic. “This is kind of Scandinavian, and builds on the Aurora Borealis, that’s the idea behind this.” 

It’s certainly a much more subtle approach, and I appreciate that. But …

I’ll make no bones about it: I preferred Grand Theft Auto 4 to GTA 5. The latter is great and all but I never got over the more grounded and gritty take of GTA 4 and in particular its tragic central cast, defined and trapped by their lives in the criminal underworld. GTA 4 had two great expansions, The Ballad of Gay Tony and The Lost and the Damned, both introducing their own protagonists and side stories. One of them was the biker Johnny Klebitz, who, unlike many of Rockstar’s leads, ends his GTA 4 arc in a better place.

An early twist in GTA 5 upset the apple cart: One of that game’s three protagonists, the psychopathic Trevor, finds a drug-addled Johnny and beats him to death. This has always been an unpopular twist, which perhaps indicates narratively it was a good one (boo!),…

Helldivers 2 is one of my favourite games of the year so far. I also barely get to play it at the moment, thanks to a payload of server problems that’ve knocked its Steam user review average down to “Mixed.”

It’s hardly the first game to suffer from server problems at launch. I’m used to the catastrophic waiting times of MMORPG expansion launches like Final Fantasy 14’s Endwalker, which fully had to stop selling copies while it waited for things to calm down. I anticipate Dawntrail will be much the same.

It’s a frustrating situation for players—some of which are more understanding than others. A small contingent of not-so-patient ones have been calling for the Helldivers 2 team to ‘just buy more servers’ or some variant thereof for a while now, which came to a head the…

Fortnite is re-introducing its big live events on December 2, with a blowout called Big Bang headlined by Eminem. The rapper posted a short video to X with the line “calling all grandmas”, with the lyrics to his 2020 song Tone Deaf playing atop it:

Bitch, I can make “orange” rhyme with “banana” (Yeah)

Ornana

Eating pork rinds, sword fightin’ in pajamas

At the crib, playin’ Fortnite with your grandma

But I’m more like a four-five with the grammar

Ornana. Fortnite OG, the wildly successful return to the game’s roots, is running for another week, and following some scheduled downtime earlier this week the data-scrapers were straight in there to dig out some promotional images showing the star in two fla…

Football Manager 2024 will be the 20th game in Sports Interactive’s Football Manager series and, the studio says, “will be the last of its kind [and] the closing of this chapter of our history.” The game aims to be the “most complete” Football Manager the studio has ever made, but one new feature is the single most-requested addition to the series: the ability to transfer saved games from one iteration of FM to the next FM.

“I’m delighted to announce you’ll be able to bring your FM23 career into FM24 across all platforms,” said studio head Miles Jacobson. “This means, when you first launch Football Manager 2024, you’ll be given the option to continue your FM23 story, picking up exactly where you left off: powered with the new features and revamps that FM24…

There’s a new challenger to The Sims on the way, and this one is led by a former Sims developer. During its showcase today, Paradox delivered a short teaser for a game called Life By You being developed by Paradox Tectonic and led by former Sims studio head and Second Life studio CEO Rod Humble.

Today’s announcement video above was a very quick teaser giving the suggestion of green, suburban neighborhoods, house construction, and simulated people doing real people-y stuff like hugging and microwaving a meal. Yup, it sure looks like Life By You is angling to be a direct competitor to The Sims—North American suburbs and all.

That’s about all the initial reveal gives us to go on, though you can frame hunt down hints about the building interface and specific home decor sty…

I knew Baldur’s Gate 3 was going to be big, but I didn’t think it was going to be this big: In its second day of release, Larian’s epic D&D RPG has surpassed 500,000 concurrent players on Steam.

That’s not enough to put it atop the Steam chart, which is immutably dominated by Counter-Strike: Global offensive, a game that routinely has well over 1 million people playing at any given time. But it does put it within spitting distance of the perennial runner-up, Dota 2, and well past other heavyweights like PUBG, Apex Legends, Naraka: Bladepoint, and Grand Theft Auto 5.

Notably, Baldur’s Gate 3 is the only one among the top five that isn’t a multiplayer game, and the only one that isn’t free to play. Even more remarkable is that it is not, by conven…

This year marks the 45th anniversary of Space Invaders, the landmark Taito coin-op that conquered the world and remains one of gaming’s most recognisable visual icons. Google clearly employs some big fans of Space Invaders, because the tech behemoth has gone all-in on celebrating this anniversary and, in collaboration with Taito, has both made a new game and created a small but beautifully presented history of the series.

The big shock is that Space Invaders: World Defense is an AR game that actually looks like the business. We’ve probably all played Pokemon Go but, beyond that, AR games felt like a bit of a fad (though admittedly I’m not the most informed about mobile gaming). Don’t get me wrong you won’t be mainlining this thing for weeks, but something about using your p…