In curling monkey paw news, Doom: The Dark Ages no longer requires mandatory ray tracing effects – because you can now replace some of them with path tracing, RT’s even more extravagant (and even more demanding) tech-sibling. Today’s update for the meaty shooter sequel adds a selection of path-traced lighting, shadow, and reflection options, and while that all comes with Nvidia’s mildly performance-aiding DLSS Ray Reconstruction, my testing suggests even the most framerate-rich GPUs will pay a heavy price for its shinier hellscapes.

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As of March 2025, free web revival host Neocities has over 1,000,000 websites. That is one million tiny or sometimes large acts of creation. A million people taking things that are inside of them and thinking, hey, this would be cool if was outside of me too, and also on average quite pink or quite black or a bit sparkly or with excellent menus.

There is much more internet here than any one person will ever read, and simultaneously much less internet than is needed to even begin to challenge the quanti-dominance of the lumbering, needle proboscis'd mecha Moloch sometimes referred to as the hostile internet. Not all of it is good, but much of it is real and interesting or tells a story about the person who made it.

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"What do you mean the game didn't save>?!", Thilmann had not so much asked Slackbladder as stowed the question in a sack of rocks, spat on the sack until no moisture remained in his body, then swung the sack at Slackbladder's forehead, leaving the thief dazed and more than a little soggy. "What in Odin's gammy eye flap does that even mean>?!".

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I guarantee you'll need something in today's deals. You’ve got top-tier GPUs, fast CPUs, and desktops that could run a small moon base. On the other, there’s a humble Ethernet switch for the cost of a takeaway and an SSD enclosure that does exactly what it says on the tin. Equal parts power and practicality.

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NVIDIA’s latest GPUs are here, and whatever you think about them, the combination of DLSS, Reflex, frame generation and more makes them impressively capable.

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Early in my hands-on for End Of Abyss, the developer sitting next to me expressed surprise at how readily and consistently I was using the game's handheld scanner. I myself was surprised - perhaps even appalled - to hear that other journalists had been neglecting it.

End Of Abyss, you see, takes place in an underground plate-metal labyrinth where every corner is a huddle of waiting shadows, every doorway a mystery, and every ventilation fan a web of fungal grot. I hate to cast aspersions on other members of the press, but you would have to be an absolute chowderhead to explore such a warren using your eyes alone. This is a world that feels like it's holding its breath.

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Today’s list isn’t full of impulse buys and plastic tat. It’s proper kit. Hardware that earns its keep when it comes to upgrading your setup, building from scratch, or trying to coax one more game out of your aging rig without the fans launching into orbit.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! No cool industry person this week. Instead, you are stuck with me. In an elevator. And I have eaten nothing but cabbage-wrapped beans for a week. You'll doubtless want something to keep your mind off that, so let's talk about books instead.

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The weather is supposed to be pretty nice by Sunday afternoon, according to the forecast as I write this, which means that Sundays are for going to the park to read. I'm making my way through Tokyo These Days, a short manga series by Tekkonkinkreet and Ping Pong author Taiyō Matsumoto, about a manga editor who quits his job at a publisher after his magazine folds, but decides to enlist the creators he admires to launch something of his own. Hm.

If you don't understand the Switch 2, you won't understand the modern world, argues Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. The FT paywall their content and there's nothing I can do about that, but I'm sure you can figure it out.

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