As 2018 draws to a close, now’s the time to start looking forward to the best graphics cards of 2019. It’s been a tumultuous twelve months – the first half of the year saw a prolonged graphics card drought and sky-high prices due to crypto-miners hoovering up every last GPU on the planet, and the second half of year saw the arrival of several new graphics cards such as Nvidia’s trio of Turing RTX cards and AMD’s Radeon RX 590.

The old RX and GTX guard are still going strong, too, though, which now means we’ve got more graphics cards to choose from than ever before. Fortunately, I’ve compiled this handy guide to help you find the best graphics card for you and your budget. Whether it’s for playing games at 1920×1080, 2560×1440 or 4K, I’ve got a card recommendation for you.

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It shall be a white Christmas in Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds this year, as the snowy new map Vikendi has launched on the main client. It’s a mid-size map, 6x6km, with exciting spots including a cosmodrome, castle, and dinosaur park. Here’s a little festive secret for you: all those assault rifles, pistols, shotguns, grenades, bulletproof vests, and boxes of ammunition are lovingly hand-placed for you by Father Christmas before the start of the round. If you only find terrible loot, well, clearly Santa knows what you’ve been up to this year.

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My DayZ are numbered. After spending the past week being murdered in the original multiplayer survival sandbox, I’m not sure I can stomach another. Although Miscreated does have varied zombie types, aggressive wildlife and more interesting weather than ‘rain or not rain’. It’s fresh out of early access, though somehow they’re still calling version 1.0 “a beta release”.

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There’s a pirate MMO on the horizon, and its sea-farers look ambitious. Atlas is being made by Ark: Survival Evolved devs Studio Wildcard, and sets sail on early access today. It plops 40,000 players into the same fantasy world, where they compete to govern territory and can fire at any ship on the sea.

I spoke to project director/lead programmer Jeremy Stieglitz and creative director Jesse Rapczak over Skype. We chatted about singing to stave off boredom on voyages, player politicking, ship combat as a team sports game – and a plan to save every player before they die of old age.

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Hidden role games are normally about looking deep into your friend’s eyeballs, then calling them on their bullshit. Town Of Salem is an online hidden role game with no friends or eyeballs, and a whole load of bullshit.

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Here’s a double giveaway to snap up now before it disappears early tomorrow. Available until 2pm GMT on Wednesday are a pair of good games that couldn’t be more different – Sins Of A Solar Empire: Rebellion by Ironclad Games is – depending on how you look at it – a mega-scale space RTS or a small, real-time 4X strategy game. Geneshift by Nik Nak Studios is a multiplayer (with bots) bit of knockabout fun inspired by the rather cyberpunk Grand Theft Auto 2. Both are free and if you snag them on Steam here and here now, you can keep them forever.

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Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus was one of my more pleasant surprises this year. While held back by being a bit easy and buggy, it was still one of the most creative and charming 40k games released in ages, if not ever. Today’s ‘Tiresus patch’, out now and noted here, goes a long way to hammering out the kinks in Bulwark Studios’s game of tactical techno-monk versus alien terminator mummy combat. Bugs have been squished, and while still a bit easy (difficulty options are planned), steamrolling the Necron is harder now. Arguably more important, they’ve added another seven hidden missions and a new boss battle to the game.

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Home Alone’s idiot burglars – or at least a pair of very similar bumbling thieves with legally distinct surnames – are on Santa’s naughty list, and they’re Agent 47’s target in Hitman 2‘s first Christmas update. While largely a repeat of the previous game’s Holiday Hoarders mission, set in a remixed Paris map, it’s been polished up and remastered to Hitman 2 spec along with a bundle of challenges to permanently unlock a Santa costume. Also included is a bundle of new profession-themed Featured Contracts, and a slew of bugfixes. There’s a trailer under the tree below.

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Super-stylish platform hack n’ slasher Bladed Fury is out now. Heavily inspired by Muramasa: The Demon Blade on Wii and undoubtedly cribbing a bit of Vanillaware’s painterly art-style, it’s a gorgeous bit of Chinese mythological stabbery. A sword-swinging princess is accused of murdering her father, so goes on a quest to address this injustice by stabbing everything in her path instead, including all manner of demons, ghosts and skellingtons. I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve played of it so far and NEXT Studios have launched it at budget price. Check out the trailer below.

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We all know the coming of Christmas means the goose is getting fat, but what about the chicken? She’s warm and cosy, as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has kicked off its festivities by giving chickens wee Christmas jumpers. These jumpers are #2 on the definitive ranking of CS:GO chicken costumes so that’s certainly something to celebrate. Other Christmas festivities include piles of snowballs in spawn points to lob at folks, the return of Militia’s snowy variant, giftwrapped C4, and a new coin trinket for veterans who’ve been Counter-Striking for ten years. But mostly it’s about the chickens.

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