One thing we do know, however, is that ray tracing is in the cards. That’s not to say Intel’s hardware will take the exact same approach, or even a similar one. Nvidia recently expanded ray tracing support to its entire family of Turing GPUs, including its GTX series graphics cards, and also its previous generation Pascal parts. I strongly suspect that we’ll see ray tracing hardware implemented into Intel’s gaming GPUs too—if not right out of the gate, then sometime shortly after. It’s not reall

Wibbly-wobbly physics puzzler World of Goo is free on the Epic Games Store now, and in a couple of weeks it will be followed by spooky narrative experiment Stories Untold. I mean I don’t think I have the energy to play it yet again, but if you’ve missed it, it’s a cracking physics puzzler with loads of character. Stories Untold is a bit more exciting, though. No Code’s also working on the intriguing Observation, where you’ll play a space station AI that spends it days watching the station’s inha

(Image: © Flickr via Gage Skidmore)Remember in February when the Federal Communications Commission essentially said that broadband deployment in the US is going great despite 20 million homes lacking access to high-speed connections? Well, the FCC has finally admitted the report “drastically overstated” actual broadband deployment, but still insists everything is just fine. As noted by Ars Technica, FCC chairman Ajit Pai never actually publicly released a full broadband deployment report, and on

Anything at all, be it a spa day, a tranquil night spent dining out alone or—yes—a brand-new graphics card. Because self-care comes first, why not treat yourself to XFX’s $199.99 Radeon RX 590 graphics card on Amazon? Radeon RX 590 is $199.99 at AmazonAmong the best graphics cards for 1080p gaming 2019 has to offer, XFX’s factory overclocked Radeon RX 590 is 30 percent off its list price. Since this RX 590 rendition is overclocked out of the box, it’s primed for faster clock speeds than a refere

Following two prior delays that pushed its release from early 2017 to “not quite yet,” the side-scrolling action-adventure Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has been given a new release date of June 18. And to prove that it hasn’t been time wasted, publisher 505 Games also dropped a new trailer demonstrating how the game has improved over the past couple of years. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is an “Igavania” about Miriam, an orphan in 18th century England who’s been left scarred by an alch

Now that the full lineup of Nvidia RTX graphics cards and GTX 16-series cards are here, PC manufacturers are starting to offload their remaining desktops with older GPUs. One of Acer’s ‘Nitro 50’ PCs with a Core i5-8400 and a 6GB GTX 1060 is just $630 right now—$70 off the original price, and much cheaper than building the same PC yourself. The PC is a strange mix of parts, but still good enough for playing AAA games (or heavy productivity) at 1080p. It has an Intel Core i5-8400 six-core process

Final Fantasy 14’s first expansion, Heavensward, is currently free for all owners of the base game, A Realm Reborn. Heavensward will also come with all five of the expansion’s updates and their trials, dungeons, and storyline additions. A free login campaign is running until June 17, allowing lapsed players to return for a week without dropping a dime. Final Fantasy 14’s third expansion is due out soon, too. Shadowbringers will launch on July 2, and if you do get sucked back into Eorzea, hold of

Steam ID Finder shows that they joined on April 28, netting themselves a Steam ID with a lot of zeroes, but no parade. The problem with using registered accounts as a metric of success or popularity is that some of these users will be banned, bots or already have one or more accounts. 2018 also saw Steam average 47 million daily and 90 million monthly active users, a 23 million jump over the previous year’s monthly figure. Possibly the largest factor in its growth spurt has been the rising popul

To celebrate Golden Week in Japan, Steam is running an aptly titled Golden Week sale. As you’d expect, the sale is almost entirely focused on games developed in Japan, and given the ongoing renaissance of Japanese games on PC, that means there’s quite a lot to sift through. I’ve listed a bunch of games I’d recommend below, but it’s worth perusing the full list here. There’s some nice surprises. Nier: Automata Game of the YoRHa Edition (25% off)Disgaea (65% off)Disgaea 5 Complete (25% off)Steins;

Meet NodePanel 2:Better game server hosting, built with gamers in mind. We’ve created a unique control panel that provides you with real-time access to your servers. It doesn’t matter if you’re a hardcore gamer, parent, or just getting into gaming; NodePanel is easy to use.

(Image: © Pixabay via dlohner)A pair of security researchers say they have discovered a “hack” that affects 80 million American households, by way of information contained on an unsecured cloud server hosted by Microsoft on its Azure cloud platform. As far as the researchers are concerned, the open database is a veritable “goldmine for identity thieves and other attackers.” Our researchers felt that downloading it would be an ethical breach, as they would then illegally own personally identifiab

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice’s Hanbei the Undying is a handy NPC, sticking around to let you beat him up as you hone your skills. He’s also the subject of a new spin-off Manga that’s in the works, starting on May 27. Sekiro Gaiden: Shinazu Hanbei looks like it will fill in some of the cursed warrior’s history, mostly with blood. Like its predecessors, Sekiro is light on exposition and it makes you work for every scrap of story. The Sword Saint, Isshin Ashina, aims for world domination…That is, unti

If you’ve not been converted to the joys of a solid state drive yet, you can remedy that sharpish with this deal on Amazon. It nets you 20 percent off a Samsung 860 EVO 1TB mSATA internal SSD, leaving what we think to be the best SSD for gaming costing just $159.99 . For instance, solid state drives result in quicker file transfer speeds that cut back load times. Although you can increase your PC’s speed yet again with the best NVmE SSDs , it’s generally not worth the extra cost per GB. As such,

Minecraft’s massive new Village & Pillage update, which Mojang reckons is the “biggest Minecraft update yet”, has caused havoc with the AI of villagers: players are discovering them stealing beds, breeding like rabbits, and claiming player-built land for their own. Sometimes, those villagers have been headless—and in one case, the only entrance to the home was a locked iron door. My favorite oddity is when a player discovered villagers breeding behind a bookcase in their home. “, the player wrot

Great moments in PC gaming are short, bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories. Deus Ex Developer: Ion StormYear: 2000Sometimes, it’s the little things. It’s not the first time that a game reacted to something like this, not even close. In practice, it never really does anything like that again, and many of the bigger features like the enemy AI were, well, less than groundbreaking. It only takes a few moments to sell an illusion and encourage you to play a little smarter,

Minecraft Java Edition is still being updated, yes. Its latest update, which brings it to version 1.14, is called Village & Pillage. You can read the full changelog here. “Apparently, it takes a village to raise a child”, as Mojang wrote on their blog. “Frankly, if we’d known how much work putting together the biggest Minecraft update yet was going to be, we’d have probably taken the easy option and tried to raise that child instead.”

Dark Future: Blood Red States is an adaptation of one of Games Workshop’s non-Warhammer games, a post-apocalyptic game of Mad Max-style car combat. Auroch Digital’s videogame version is due out on May 16 as they’ve announced with the trailer above. As the video shows, a ‘command mode’ will let you slow down time to give orders to your car covered in missile launchers and mine-layers. It’s set in the year 2023, because the original tabletop game was made in the 1980s, but you can insert your own

Dying Light 2 was first teased at E3 last year and Techland have said they’ll have more to show at E3 2019. According to their Twitter: “We can’t wait to show you the latest look at our most ambitious project to date.” The trailer we saw last year showed off Dying Light 2’s branching storylines, which change areas of the city based on decisions you make. One thing the previous trailer didn’t show much of is what night-time is like in Dying Light 2. Here’s everything we know about Dying Light 2.

It was looking touch-and-go for Firmament, the next game from the creators of Myst, when it headed into the final stretch of its Kickstarter campaign $350,000 short of its funding goal. But thanks to a late push it got over the line—and then some, with fans backing it to the tune of $1.43 million. The campaign has now finished, but the team at Cyan say they’re “looking into ways” to allow more people to back the game’s development, and that they’ll have more information next week. Firmament is a

Third-person zombie shooter World War Z is selling “way above expectations” on PC thanks to its Epic Games Store exclusivity, developer Saber Interactive has said. The game passed one million copies sold this week across PC and consoles, and more than a quarter of those sales were on the Epic Games Store. He did not expand on how exactly the Epic Store had helped the game exceed expectations. Partly thanks to the sales of World War Z, the Epic Games Store had a “record weekend” last weekend, acc