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The first wave of Nvidia 50 series GPUs have arrived. Now they're gone. So, if you need an RTX 5080-prebuilt gaming PCs are currently your best bet of securing. While Dell has got some overpriced $5000+ Alienware 51 desktops up for preorder, there other (considerably cheaper, but not necessarily affordable>) options up for grabs right now.
Several hours in, it’s become apparent that I lack the patience for much of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s much-publicised historical accuracies, like needing to bathe yourself every six minutes or how 15th century Bohemians can take several consecutive sword swings to the neck without dying. Ah well! If you’re> going to play it, know that it’s also a decent performer on PC – despite the almost threatening tone of its recommended system requirements – and, as far as I can see, isn’t anywhere near as bug-prone as the infamously unstable original.
Dell’s new Alienware Area-51 Gaming Desktop lineup has landed, and if you're struggling to find a Nvidia 50 series, or you just want an all in one PC gaming package at (albeit large) simple fee, then this could be the way to go.
The battle for medieval Bohemia is about to kick off again with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, launching on February 4, 2025. Fanatical has a cracking preorder deal that saves you some coin while guaranteeing your Steam key will be delivered on or before release day. No nonsense, no delays, just instant access to swords, shields, and questionable 15th-century hygiene.
Sundays are for walking the dog, cleaning the flat, and playing Dune Imperium - always. I might also try to self-host a Minecraft Java server, though. Let's first roundup some of the week's best writing about video games.
Alice Bell, with whom you may be familiar, asked on Eurogamer: can a Steam profile be a real memorial for a lost life?
I wonder if there's a Rorschach test specifically tailed for games. So one person can look at it and see a blocky Minecraft village, another sees Illidan's face, and a third sees the concept of Inland Empire. Someone should make this a thing.
Not us though, we're too busy playing games, or doing other things that are less interesting than playing games. Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!
Nvidia DLSS 4 has launched under not-terribly-happy circumstances. It’s a mostly AI-powered technology at a time when mistrust in artificial intelligence, fuelled by underbaked applications and anti-creative policies, is at all-time high – not to mention how the new GeForce GPUs it’s released alongside, the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090, have immediately entered 2020-style stock shortage purgatory.
However, having tried it out in a few different games, I suspect time will prove kinder to DLSS 4 than the RTX 50 series launch has been. It is, in fact, a rather nifty collection of upscaling improvements that can help out older graphics cards as readily as the very newest, while building on DLSS 3’s frame generation tool with Multi Frame Generation (MFG) to send visual smoothness skyrocketing. If you care even the slightest iota for how your PC performs in modern games, DLSS 4 demands your attention.
Here, then, I’ll break down DLSS 4’s various tricks and components, looking at how they really affect performance – and whether it’s worth upgrading your rig to maximise compatibility with it.
Bioware released a statement yesterday. It talked of "turning towards the future". It dreamed of "a more agile, focused studio". Nowhere in the post did the word "layoffs" appear. But this is what the post was actually about. The closest it got to addressing the facts of what happened to an unspecified number of workers is the phrase: "we don’t require support from the full studio."
It's one of the most disingenuous announcements of job cuts in a recent and plentiful history of job cuts. A weirdly impressive feat from BioWare, considering the last two or three years have seen some spectacular verbal gymnastics from games companies when it comes to shitcanning people. Let's take a look at some of our "favourite" mealy-mouthed press releases in which people have their jobs poetically "sunsetted" rather than, say, dropkicked out the window.
Sundays are for playing some video games, I think? Seems unlikely but let's find out.
Jonathan Nash died. That name might not mean anything to you, but Nash was a writer for the much-beloved British games mag Amiga Power in the '90s, and he was influential on the generation of games writers that followed - including several founders of this website. RPS co-founder Kieron Gillen wrote about what made J Nash unique in his newsletter:
It's been a busy week of prep here in the treehouse! At least, I assume so. Nothing's broken or in flames around me, so I can only assume we're waiting for the next big thing to break down or burst into flames. In the interim, here's what we'll be clicking on this weekend!