On Tuesday at 10 am Pacific (find your timezone here), Google is hosting a GDC keynote where it’s announcing its vision for ‘the future of gaming.’ That said, we don’t really know the extent of what Google has been up to, or if there’s anything more to it than cloud streaming. If that’s the big announcement, Google will still have some convincing to do. After the keynote, Google has some high-profile guests lined up for its Developer Day sessions taking place in the afternoon. The Ubisoft connec

But what if you just want to try ray tracing without cracking open your wallet? Nvidia has previously claimed RTX GPUs are up to 10X faster than their Pascal equivalents, but that’s technically only in ray tracing calculations. Besides ray tracing, Nvidia’s Turing architecture includes a reworked pipeline that allows for concurrent FP and INT execution. Given the number of games built using these engines, going forward games built with Unity or Unreal are more likely to use ray tracing. And for

Since it was confirmed for PC last week, many have wondered whether Halo: The Master Chief Collection will support Xbox Play Anywhere, which effectively grants owners of a Microsoft-published Xbox One game a free copy on PC. But unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the forthcoming Halo port won’t be among them. “I think one of the questions we’ve gotten is will MCC PC support Xbox Play Anywhere. And first off I wanted to say, we so appreciate all the support we’ve had from Xbox One community with

Today during the GTC 2019 keynote, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave us another glimpse of the tech in upcoming Nexon MMO Dragon Hound. Each additional domain of ray tracing requires more rays and thus more computational power, which is likely why every other released game to date has only used one aspect of ray tracing. Dragon Hound is doubling down on ray tracing, which implies one of two things. Either it will run slower than the other DXR games, or it will reduce the complexity of the scenes—or p

The Culling: Origins, the free-to-play do-over of The Culling that went live in September 2018, will be closed in May. Developer Xaviant said in a farewell message that it had hoped in-app purchased would generate enough revenue to support the battle royale game, but it hasn’t worked out. Xaviant decided to make The Culling free to play after the release of The Culling 2 in July 2018 went disastrously wrong. Offline modes will remain playable after that, but online play and related features will

Concurrent with the Game Developers’ Conference going on in San Francisco this week, Nvidia also has it’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC). There’s a lot of overlap between the two, as game developers are often looking for ways to better utilize GPUs as well. Regardless, if you’re a fan of black leather jackets and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, the GTC keynote kicks off at 2pm PDT until 4pm.

In other words, its aim is to streamline the implementation of ray tracing for game developers. Crytek may be leveraging unreleased drivers, or it may have taken a different approach to implementing ray tracing. Getting a small environment with ray tracing effects to run well isn’t the same as doing ray tracing in a larger open environment. It’s too early to tell if Crytek’s Neon Noir demo really is indicative of a ubiquitous future for ray tracing. As it stands right now, no games support real-

In our opinion, the best gaming laptop for buyers on a $1,000 budget is Acer’s Predator Helios 300. We still think that, and it’s even better buy at moment because you can snag a version with upgraded specs for just $999 right now. The model that’s on sale wields a Core i7-8750H processor instead of a Core i7-7700HQ, 16GB of DDR4 memory, GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB) GPU, and a 256GB NVMe solid state drive. It also sports the same 1920×1080 resolution as the model we identified as best budget option, b

Portal and Left 4 Dead writer Chet Faliszek and Riot Games senior technical designer Kimberly Voll have launched a new studio called Stray Bombay Company that will focus on the development of AI-driven “collaborative gaming experiences.” Make everyone equals, not just in their impact on the project but in how we divide the loot of our success. “We are supported by like-minded, patient investors with Kevin at Upfront Ventures as our lead, who has known us for years, working with Chet on a gaming

Jonathan-Jacques Belletête brought a very distinct visual style to Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided as the art director at developer Eidos Montreal. He won’t be around for the final game in the trilogy (which I continue to resolutely believe it will be) however, because he is now working as creative director on a brand new project at Mordheim: City of the Damned studio Rogue Factor. “The new position at Rogue Factor is one that I am thrilled to take on, and the wealth of talent that

The 8GB version of the AMD Radeon RX 580 graphics card has held steady at $190-$200 over the past few months, making it the best option for budget PC builds. Now you can get ASRock’s Phantom Gaming X card for $169.99 at Newegg, and it comes with two free games. It comes with two free games—you can pick from The Division 2, the Resident Evil 2 remake, and Devil May Cry 5. ASRock Phantom Gaming X Radeon RX 580 8GB | $169.99 ($30 off)This is one of the best prices we’ve ever seen for an 8GB RX 580

The Apex Legends Season 1 Battle Pass has finally been detailed, and Respawn’s even shared a quick look of all the cosmetics you’ll be able earn on the sprint to level 100. For a breakdown of exactly what the Battle Pass entails, here’s everything you need to know. And if you don’t pay for the Battle Pass, there’s a free tier with a few decent rewards to make you feel included. Apex Legends Season 1 Battle Pass: Free rewardsApex Legends Season 1 Battle Pass: Premium rewardsAs for the premium tra

Next month’s Rise of Shadow’s expansion will see former Hearthstone villains teaming up to create the League of E.V.I.L., and Hagatha the Witch is among the founding members. The character, who was first introduced as the only Hero card in The Witchwood set, is returning in Rise of Shadows as a Legendary minion with a particularly spicy Battlecry effect. Additionally, Hagatha can teach the Horror to cast Shaman spells. However, the second choice won’t have targeted spells if your first choice wa

Less than a month after the last Rakuten sale, Rakuten is back at it again. You can once again get 15 percent off anything from rakuten.com/shop, up to a savings of $60 off. Ebay hasn’t even had a site-wide sale in a while, so Rakuten is the place to be right now. Since the code maxes out at $60 off, buying something around $400 (60 divided by 0.15, or 15 percent) will get you the best discount. Here are some PC-related items we found:All Rakuten purchases also give you a small amount of points,

Bethesda will be hosting its fifth E3 conference this year. EA isn’t doing a press conference this year, for instance, and Sony won’t be on the floor at all. Bethesda’s conference will kick off at 5:30 pm PT on June 9, though it’s still keeping the contents of the show a mystery, aside from the promise of an in-depth look at Doom Eternal. That’s still expected to be a long way off, however, and Bethesda’s got plenty of other games cooking away, including Starfield, Rage 2 and Wolfenstein: Youngb

Electronic Arts has confirmed that Apex Legends Season 1, Wild Frontier, will go live at 10 am PT/1 pm ET tomorrow, March 19, and has also (finally) dropped the details on the Season 1 Battle Pass. Season 1: Wild Frontier coming at 10:00AM Pacific tomorrow: https://t.co/2ppF4L1WfM pic.twitter.com/ee17eJsCByMarch 18, 2019The Battle Pass will go for 950 Apex coins on its own—about $10—or in a Battle Pass Bundle for 2800 Apex coins that catapults you to level 25 from the start. “We’ve tried to crea

(Image: © YouTube via Major Hardware)You never know what you might stumble upon on the web, and today I came across something I’ve never seen before—a video of a guy submerging his CPU air cooler into a tank of icy cold water. It’s never been done (to my knowledge) because there really isn’t much utility in it—you might as well go whole hog on a liquid cooling setup if you want to lower temps below what you’re getting with an air cooler. I wanted to be able to design something that was able to c

Fortnite’s latest injection of whimsy, a giant hamster ball with a grappling gun, has been temporarily removed from the game. The Baller was disabled earlier today, with Epic saying that it was investigating a stability issue via Twitter. It takes them around 30 seconds to get all the way to the other side of the map. Reddit user bbjared7 posted a video of the bug killing them. There’s no reason to believe Epic won’t just put the Baller back in the main game when it’s fixed, however.

Battlefield 5’s Firestorm battle royale mode, which was announced last week, takes place on the largest map in the series. Halvøy isn’t just massive; it’s a whopping ten times larger than Hamada, previously the largest map in Battlefield 5. This is Hamada, currently the most immense map in #Battlefield V. Halvøy is 10 times its size. pic.twitter.com/KVdPvzqlQaMarch 18, 2019Battle royale maps are typically large, of course, but the immense size is even more necessary given that Firestorm features

To help deal with that, Microsoft is porting its Defender Application Guard extension for Edge over to Chrome and Firefox. It’s also tied to its Edge browser, so those secure browsing sessions initiated by the extension don’t actually take place in Chrome or Firefox. If the site is determined to be untrusted, the user is redirected to an isolated Microsoft Edge session. “If the user tries to go to a trusted site when in an isolated Microsoft Edge session, the user is taken back to the default br