It’s official, the iPhone has gone full Nvidia. Apple rolled out the new iPhone 15 Pro yesterday and announced that it has adopted DLSS and ray tracing. OK, not actual DLSS. But Apple’s smartphone now supports upscaling and hardware accelerated ray tracing, which is an awfully Nvidia-ish GPU feature set.
Specifically, the new A17 Pro SoC has what Apple claims is the biggest GPU redesign in the company’s history with a heavily revised shader architecture and that hardware ray tracing support.
In the iPhone the GPU count is bumped from five to six and Apple claims 20% more performance. As for the upscaling, that’s enabled by using the A17 Pro’s Neural engine in parallel to the GPU. That’s an approach that looks very similar on paper to Nvidia GPUs doing DLSS upscaling with help from their AI-accelerating Tensor cores.
Who cares, you might well ask? After all, who among we PC gamers takes iPhone gaming seriously? An astute point, but there is an at least somewhat intr…
Starfield game director Todd Howard continues to make the rounds in advance of Starfield’s September release, giving us a little more insight into just what the sci-fi epic is going to be when it finally comes out. Turns out that it’s going to be pretty lonely, apparently: Howard says that “about 10 percent” of the game’s 1000+ planets will have life on them as Bethesda tries to capture “the magnificent desolation” of the universe.
Howard was chatting Starfield in today’s episode of the Kinda Funny Xcast when the question of the game’s many, many procgen planets came up. Asked about how much handcrafted content there would be on those planets, and whether there would really be much for players to do, Howard answered, “there’s no way we’re going to go and handcraft an entire planet”.
Instead, Bethesda handcrafts “individual locations and some of those are placed specifically,” meaning stuff like cities and locations associated with quests, “and then we have a suite …
World of Warcraft’s Seeds of Renewal patch is out: adding worldwide dragonriding, the reclamation of Gilneas, follower dungeons, and an altogether surprising amount of meat for an interval patch.
Included in the update was a cheesy—though warranted—little scene where the dragon aspects congratulate you for your part in knocking over all their raid bosses for them, with Vyranoth’s proto-dragon form (pictured left below) kinda making her look like an intern that stumbled into the wrong meeting.
“We proclaim you: Champion of the Dragonflights!” announces the life-binder Alexstrasa to a swelling chorus of music. Your character raises their weapon to the air surrounded by a fleet of drakes, it’s all very cute.
Only, some players noticed something was wrong—you never actually get the title. For the uninitiated, WoW has a ‘title’ system that’s become all-but standard for MMORPGs these days, giving you something to slap next to your name for bragging righ…
Ten years later the fantastic job that Crystal Dynamics’ did with its 2013 Tomb Raider reboot has become even more apparent to me. The mature, 18-rated game took the campy, bright and cartoonish Lara Croft of earlier games and, instead, delivered a dark, hyper violent and at times gripping coming of age origin story with a strong female protagonist.
View Tomb Raider on Steam
Yes, there’s absolutely no doubting that this game, as well as its sequels Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, owed a lot to the excellent Uncharted series of games, but Crystal Dynamics delivered an action adventure platformer with a markedly different tone, protagonist and cast of supporting characters. It was a hit.
Fast forward and that hit Tomb Raider reboot is now $2.99/£2.49 at Steam, and after picking it up myself, I thought I would bring it to the PC Gamer community’s attention, as I think it’s a great PC gaming experienc…
Here at PC Gamer I review a bunch of peripherals and hardware all designed to make PC gaming sing. Peripherals especially have come a long way since the early days. There’s countless brands out there all pushing their own ideas, which is why it’s odd to me that most peripherals still come in the same boring combination of colours and styles. Those of us wanting more colourful accessories often have to rely on RGB lighting to get us through, but sometimes themed releases have our backs.
A perfect example is the Destiny 2 Lightfall SteelSeries collection. Not being a Destiny 2 player, I was caught unaware by this beautiful set of peripherals, which fade from purple, through pink to a yellow highlight. Through the gradient are lovely white detailed swirls. The designs are inspired by Destiny 2’s megacity of Neomuna on the planet Neptune. That doesn’t mean much to me, and I still want these very badly.
The SteelSeries range includes a headset, mouse, and RGB-lit mouse pad th…
Deals in this article:
- Samsung 2TB 990 Pro |
$199.99$119.99 - Lexar NM790 2TB |
$124.99$109.99 - WD Black SN850X 2TB |
$131.49$119.99 - Nextorage 2TB |
$249.99$99.99
Cyber Monday PC gaming deals are now well underway, and everything from CPUs to SSDs is seeing discounts. But when it comes to the latter, there’s a recommendation that keeps hitting our feeds that I somewhat disagree with: The Samsung 990 Pro Series 2TB.
Don’t get me wrong: The 990 Pro is a fine drive, and I’d even go far as to call it excellent when it comes to raw performance. 7,450 MB/s sequential read speed, 6900 MB/s write, and it comes from a well-known brand. (Albeit one that suffered some PR damaging firmware issues recently.)
But when it comes down…
Can I make a confession? Can I make it even if I’m pretty sure I’ve said it before, multiple times, on this very website? I can? Great. Lae’zel is my favourite companion from Baldur’s Gate 3. Yes, yes, everyone loves Karlach and the fancy vampire boy, but for me? I couldn’t go anywhere without dragging my Songun BFFL along for the ride. Much like real life, I just can’t get invested in someone if there isn’t some implicit threat of violence against my person at all times.
What was I saying? Oh right, Lae’zel’s the best, and it’s in no small part down to the stellar voicework by her actor, Devora Wilde. And you know what? It turns out she kind of had the character absolutely nailed right from the start. In a post on Twitter earlier today, Wilde posted the “forty six seconds that changed her life,” her “one and only audition” for the role of Lae’zel in BG3 that ended up landing her the part.
Toe to tip, that’s Lae’zel. Sure, Wilde clearly refined the character i…
Get all the help you need with your daily Wordle right here. Polish up your general guesses with our tips and guides, give yourself a helping hand with our clue for today’s game, or guarantee a win with a quick click down to the July 25 (766) answer.
Some days I just know I’m in for a quick win—like today. Wordle very kindly dropped exactly the right sort of clues in exactly the right sort of order, and that meant I found today’s Wordle answer in an effortless three. All that’s left to do now is wait for tomorrow’s new puzzle.
Today’s Wordle hint
A Wordle hint for Tuesday, July 25
The answer to today’s Wordle is probably one of humanity’s greatest inventions, and has existed in some form for millenia. This transportation aid can be made of pretty much anything, so long as that thing can be made round.
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Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle?
Yes, a letter is used twice in today’s puzzle. …
Looks like we’re getting another foodie crossover in Final Fantasy 14. Yesterday, the Twitter/X account for KFC Japan posted a short, ominous video of the Colonel overlooking the cliffs of La Noscea with the caption (courtesy of Google translate): “Colonel Sanders is steadily preparing for a new adventure in another world…”
Listen, I know Mr. Sanders is probably meant to be framed as a hopeful adventurer looking out upon a vast and noble sea. But a slow, jump-cut zoom on his pristine white hair followed by a cyberpunk-worthy glitch effect leads into an unpunctuated “Coming Soon”: stark white on a pitch black void. I’m not sure I’m feeling the finger-lickin’ comfort here.
This is made worse by the confirmation that Colonel Sanders is a Black Mage. As some kind of horror-movie stinger, he pulls out a gnarled staff and uses Triplecast, an ability that lets Black Mages instantly cast three of their destructive spells in devastating succession.
This also puts Col…
V Rising, a game that ah-ah-ah’d its way into a fairly successful early access in 2022, is finally hurling aside the stone lid of its early access tomb to suck away some more hours of your life.
A nifty isometric ARPG-slash-survival-game by Stunlock (previously known for Battlerite and, more unfortunately, Battlerite Royale), V Rising landed pretty well with audiences—selling a million copies in short order, then tripling that number by 2023. However, despite some major content updates, Dracula’s castle has been a little quieter since.
That’s only normal, though—no vampire lord reigns forever, and the double-edged sword of early access is that players will, generally speaking, finish up then go play something else. The game still has “Very Positive” reviews on Steam in both “Recent” and “All” categories at the time of writing.
As per the announcement on Steam, V Rising’s 1.0 update will arrive May 8. The full release will feature a new endgame zone name…