Rock, Paper, Shotgun
We’re always on the lookout for the best gaming monitors, and while the catchily-titled Alienware AW3225QF might not be on that list, it’s certainly rated very highly if you look around.
Share: 
We’re always on the lookout for the best gaming monitors, and while the catchily-titled Alienware AW3225QF might not be on that list, it’s certainly rated very highly if you look around.
There was a time when I’d be chuffed to bits to be clicking a new entry-level graphics card into its PCIe home. Think back to the GTX 1050 Ti or the Radeon RX 570 – these weren’t just great GPUs because they were accessible, but because you could practically feel the scrappiness bouncing off their circuitry. Like barking little chihuahuas, throwing down against a pack of mastiffs. You can see they’re no match for the bigger boys. But you kind of love them for not caring.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 is no such card. It is the most affordable of the RTX 50 series, undercutting the RTX 5060 by about £40 / $50, and it does come with a full set of DLSS 4 tools including Multi Frame Generation (MFG) support. Its performance, sadly, leans more slow than scrappy, and it isn’t even really that cheap. Prices start around £220 / $250 and this overclocked Zotac model I’ve tested is £248 / $270, so it’s still going to be by far the priciest component in any budget PC build.
In the realm of pixel artistry, action platformer Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is a pretty work of dither and parallax. It's full of set pieces reminiscent of a misremembered arcade's heyday. Between the more standard run 'n' chop levels, there are jetski chasedowns, motorcycle pursuits, cargo train battles, bulldozer escapes, and gas chamber breakouts. If it didn't frequently result in a death screen, I'd say it barely pauses for breath. The whole game is less a mineshaft of nostalgia as it is a shale fracking job, flushing you with jets of high pressure pseudomemory. I'm just a little sad that its strongest gimmick soon dissolves into the background, overwhelmed by floods of demon baddies.
Update: Elden Ring Nightreign's patch 1.02 is now live. You can check out the full notes here if you fancy, and otherwise say hello from me to whoever your duo expedition partner is.
Original story continues below:
Elden Ring Nightreign's patch 1.02, which'll deliver the Duo Expeditions players have been asking for, has had its deployment pushed back by a day due a tsunami warning.
The update was orginally set to go out today, July 30th, but will now go out tomorrow, July 31st. The tsunami warning that's led developers FromSoftware to have to switch up their plans is one of many consequences of a massive earthquake off the coast of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula.
It pays to know your enemy, so before writing this piece I prompted the free version of OpenAI's ChatGPT software to probabilistically derive a short article in the style of Edwin Evans-Thirlwell from the years of my writing OpenAI have scraped and processed without my consent. The client clipped together a fair approximation of a self-aggrandising lefty writer with a privileged education and a tendency to wank up his intros, but I didn't think the output read much like me. Too crisp and Powerpointed, too figured-out, too composed>. Still, perhaps the fault lay with the imprecise 'engineering' of my prompts.
There are some mods that you need to read up on before you understand why you might want to give them a whirl. There are some mods with which that process can be accomplished via a single GIF. A new Oblivion Remastered work that makes it possible to hilariously reduce the contents of Cyrodiil's cities to chunks of flying rubble just by slapping buildings with spells is firmly in the latter camp.
Before you get too worried about the karmic balance of the modding wizard powerful enough to make this sort of wanton destruction possible, it's worth bearing in mind that they've previously given players the ability to build new homes any displaced citizens could probably move into.
_4hYPvqm.jpg?width=1920&height=1920&fit=bounds&quality=70&format=jpg&auto=webp){kind=tracking}
Samsung’s latest gaming monitor sale is packed with big discounts on some of its best displays, from lightning-fast esports panels to massive ultrawides built for full immersion. If you're after crisp 4K visuals, OLED contrast, or high refresh rates for competitive play in today's deals, you're in the right place. I've also sorted out a round-up of every discounted graphics card I could find, so there's no excuses for swiping an awesome battlestation upgrade today. Let's get into it: