Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS tech arrived in Final Fantasy XV last week, allowing all three people who’ve actually bought themselves one of Nvidia’s new Turing RTX cards to finally start making use of what makes the GeForce RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080Ti so special. I’m still a bit miffed this fancy, AI-driven edge-smoothening magic only works at 4K at the moment, thereby making it even more niche and harder to use than FFVII’s Knights of the Round summon (a little joke for you there) but I do realise that this is the resolution that arguably needs it most. And after running some tests on the RTX 2080, the results are pretty encouraging.

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Anyone who didn’t uninstall Final Fantasy XV in a fit of despair and/or rage last month after the abrupt cancellation of 75% of its upcoming DLC will have noticed a delightful 15GB update waiting for them on Steam today, in which finally arrives support for Nvidia’s frame rate rocketing tech, DLSS (or deep learning super sampling, if that makes things any clearer).

It’s one of the things I’ve been most looking forward to testing on Nvidia’s new Turing RTX GPUs, but as with almost everything to do with the launch of Nvidia’s RTX family, there’s a catch. You can only enable it if you have a 4K display.

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Is… is it over yet? Are the Black Friday and Cyber Monday PC gaming deals finally finished? Just a couple more hours to go now, you can do it deals herald, you can get through this. You’ve got a week and a half holiday coming up soon, just get through the afternoon and then you can go and lie in a dark room and not dream about Cyber Monday graphics card deals you might have missed for the seventh night running.

Ahem. Sorry, I don’t know what came over me there. Probably the Cyber Monday PC gaming deals fatigue settling in, or the Black Friday fever dream I seem to have been living this past fortnight. But your deals herald is stronger than that. Nay, THE DEALER is stronger than that, and with a renewed sense of vigor that may in fact be frenzied despair, I thus present to you the final monolithic installment of our Black Friday and Cyber Monday PC deals bonanza. Gone are the deals swept away by the ever-grabbing hands of internet shoppers. All that’s left is the best of the best that are still up for grabs, from graphics cards and monitors to SSDs, gaming headsets, CPUs and mice and keyboards and more. If you’ve yet to do your Cyber Monday shopping, act fast, as these PC gaming deals won’t be around for long.

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I’m sure everyone’s feeling a bit of Black Friday fatigue by now (trust me, I want this all to be over just as much as you do), but in the interests of those after that one, last, final deal to end all deals, I present to you our newly refreshed Black Friday and Cyber Monday PC gaming deals hub. I’ve cleared away all the deals that have been swept into oblivion by the almighty wave of discount-grabbers, leaving you with the best of the best PC gaming deals that are still available. Whether you’re after a new graphics card, monitor, SSD, gaming headset or even a new CPU, mouse and keyboard, your deals herald will provide. Here are all the best Black Friday and Cyber Monday PC gaming deals you can grab right now.

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The saga of Final Fantasy XV will cut off abruptly, as Square Enix last night announced they’ve cancelled three of its four upcoming story DLCs. FFXV director Hajime Tabata has left the company too, planning to start his own company for his own project. So… that’s about the end of that. The DLC story episode starring antagonist Ardyn is still coming, as are more of the multiplayer Comrades and some FFXIV crossover gubbins, but the DLCs focused on Aranea, Lunafreya, and Noctis are in the bin.

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Here ye, hear ye! The most honourable nobles of this treehouse do hereby declare that the RPS Podcast, known in various lands as the Electronic Wireless Show, is now royal majesty of recorded games chat, lord over all, King of the Podcasts, ruler of headphones, holder of hot takes, overseer of opinion. Welcome to this coronation, feeble folk of the videogame fields. Come listen to us chat about the best kings and queens in PC gaming.

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Walk a mile in someone else s shoes.

It s a common enough idiom, a plea for empathy and understanding. Taken literally, it s also a phrase that rings true for gamers. We walk countless miles in the shoes of our favourite characters, learning to love and feel for them along the way. But despite all the miles we travel, we rarely give our well-worn virtual footwear its due. Virtual shoes are just another one of the many small, mundane details that make the worlds in which we play believable, and most players ignore them. Luckily, one photographer has made it his mission to document the art of virtual shoes.

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Last week, after much hype and excitement, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card was finally unleashed on the world. Today, it’s the turn of its beefed-up big brother, the RTX 2080Ti, whose release was delayed by a week for reasons lost to the bowels of Nvidia’s marketing department. As you can see from my Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080Ti review, this is hands down the best graphics card for 4K I’ve ever seen, and that’s all down to the monstrous power of Nvidia’s new Turing GPU. But how much of a leap does it represent over its immediate predecessor, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080Ti? To the graphs!

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Mega-budget as it may be, Final Fantasy 15 has always been content to walk its own road, so it’s not that> weird that its latest cross-promo update is with a game that doesn’t exist yet. In a big patch released today, Prince Noctis can stumble into a new adventure with Sarah, protagonist of upcoming mobile RPG Terra Wars. It’s being developed by Mistwalker, a team of ex-Square Enix folks. Those playing FF15’s online multiplayer can now also dress up in Lara Croft’s iconic tomb-delving gear, and listen to some Tomb Raider tracks on the radio in-game. Nifty.

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In my Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 review last week, we discovered that Nvidia’s super duper new graphics card was about as fast as their GTX 1080Ti when paired with Intel’s Core i5-8600K CPU, representing only the teensiest bit of improvement to your overall frames per second output if you were to bung one in your PC today. That may well change once we start seeing more games take advantage of the Nvidia’s clever speed-boosting AI-driven Turing tech, but until developers get their act together and start patching in support for all of Turing’s best features, all we’ve got to go on right now is raw performance data.

With this in mind, I thought I’d take a closer look at how the RTX 2080 compares to its direct predecessor, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080. The former might not represent much of a leap past the GTX 1080’s souped up Ti cousin, but regular 1080 owners should see much better results compared to what they can do now, particularly when it comes to gaming at 4K. Let’s take a look.

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