Last year’s annual CPU tug-of-war was cleanly won by AMD, its obscenely fast Ryzen 7 9800X3D almost singlehandedly leaving Intel and their Core Ultra chips in a heap of mud and P.E.-spec rope. Coming soon to press that advantage are the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D, a pair of even higher-spec processors that headlined AMD’s plethora of CES 2025 hardware announcements.
No pricing (or exact release date) on these yet, but they both up the core and thread counts over the 9800X3D while peaking at higher boost clock speeds. And, of course, they share the same 3D V-Cache design that makes the 9800X3D such a superlative CPU in the first place. If you don’t know what this is and how it helps game performance, imagine how much faster you could eat Wotsits if you had a massive bucket of them on your desk at all times, instead of having to get up and walk to the kitchen to grab individual packs. In this case the Wotsits are data, the bucket is 3D V-Cache, and the hastened ruination of your digestive system is games running faster.
]]>There’s a new Lenovo Legion Go on the way, and while it’s ditching the signature detachable controllers, it’s still got something unusual to stick on its CV. The Lenovo Legion Go S is a smaller, cheaper take on Lenovo’s portable gaming PC, and it’s on track to become the first officially licensed SteamOS handheld outside of Valve’s own Steam Deck range.
]]>Last night, at CES 2025, Nvidia finally announced their RTX 50 series graphics cards, and can I just say that I am wise to the RTX 5090’s tricks. A GPU that eats up to 575W and costs £1939 / $1999? Yeah, nice try, Geoffrey N. Vidia, but such a mad card couldn’t possibly exist in reality. It’s clearly only here to make the other ones, the RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070, look like better deals.
]]>It’s not being spelt out overtly, but there is a whiff of Intel’s new Battlemage GPUs being pitched as what the Alchemist generation should have been. Those eventually grew into their PCIe shoes, but only after months of dial-shifting driver updates – whereas the flagship B580 promises Nvidia-besting games performance from the off. Even at such a stage in the current graphics generation (the GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 could be revealed literally tonight, at CES 2025), there is something enticing about that proposition.
]]>I’m hoping you’ll forgive a spot of mission-bending here, given Should You Bother With? Is usually intended to test out the new and the strange of gaming hardware. Instead, I want to talk about mini PCs – not just small-form-factor desktops, but properly tiny, box o’ chocolates-sized computers – which have, of course, been around for decades.
Recently, however, I’ve been wondering if mini PCs are finally on the cusp of having their moment as serious games machines. Between rising desktop component prices and ever-ballooning electricity bills, it would make sense that a smaller, cheaper system would take on a new appeal, and the success of handhelds like the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally show that convenience still trumps out-and-out performance for a lot of PC players. There have even been hints that Valve are resurrecting their Steam Machine mini PC concept, years after a flopping first attempt. Should you be interested?
]]>The Steam Deck OLED has joined Valve’s Certified Refurbished programme, offering a much cheaper way of getting your hands on the best handheld PC around. Provided you don’t mind it being in someone else’s first, anyway. As with official refurbs of the original Steam Deck, "certified" Steam Deck OLEDs are formerly-broken models that have been returned to Valve, fixed up and tested in-house, then put back on the market at steep discounts. You’re looking at £389/$439 for the 512GB spec and £459/$519 for 1TB, down from £479/$549 and £569/$649 respectively.
]]>If you’d told me last year that face of all-out, GPU venerating, fully ray-traced PC game visual excess would be that of a de-aged Harrison Ford, I’d have asked which exact colour of paint you’d been eating. And yet here we are, with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle loving its ray tracing so much that the effects can’t ever be fully switched off.
]]>Well slap my backplate and call me CUDA, because not only are Intel’s Arc Battlemage graphics cards not dead – having once been mired in production trouble rumours – but they’ve got names and are out from next week. The CPU makers’ second batch of dedicated gaming GPUs (following the decent budget-end Alchemist series) will comprise the Arc B580, releasing December 13th at $249, and the Arc B570, which arrives on January 16th from $219.
]]>In hindsight, it’s surprising that it took so long for hardware manufacturers to start making "gaming" earbuds. If the likes of chairs, glasses, and chewing gum can be painted stealth-bomber black and prefixed with the G word, why not something that can actually get off its harshly angled bum and help pipe the games themselves into your head?
Then again, maybe gaming earbuds were just waiting for their moment. Obviously the Nintendo Switch is the Nintendo Switch, but the rise of handhelds like the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally has driven desires for more portable (yet games-friendly) noise-deliverers 'round these PC parts as well. Thus, for another edition of Should You Bother With – the RPS column where a diaphragm of testing vibrates advice directly into the cochlea of understanding – let’s have a listen of these wireless buds and find out whether they’re a worthy replacement for your current go-to headphones.
]]>Microsoft have "applied a compatibility hold" to – i.e., blocked the installation of – a new Windows 11 update that’s causing havoc with certain Ubisoft games. Star Wars Outlaws, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora are among the weirdly publisher-specific victims of Windows 11 version 24H2, which by Microsoft’s admission (well spotted, Bleeping Computer) is causing crashes and crap performance in the affected games. Even after, in Outlaws’ case, Ubisoft responded to the complaints with their own patch.
]]>I’ll stand by my review when I say that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is worth playing, in spite of it the many and varied ways in which it’s utterly broken. To be clear, though, it is utterly broken, in many and varied ways.
That makes my usual new-game performance analysis/settings guide song and dance harder to pull off, with or without the appropriate soundtrack. Is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 in such dire technical straits that we should wait for a few patches before giving it a shake? And how can its best settings be anointed if some, particularly FSR 3 frame generation, simply don’t work as they should?
]]>The gaming keyboard market is currently tripping over itself, trying to equip everything with the technology most commonly known as Snap Tap: a feature that promises hyperfast inputs of two alternating keypresses, making you an unkillable side-strafing blur in your FPS of choice. Introduced on Razer’s Huntsman V3 Pro series and quickly followed by Wooting’s (functionally distinct but effectively identical) Rappy Snappy, Snap Tap is now wearing multiple names as it takes over the world of RGB peripherals, from SteelSeries’ Rapid Tap to Corsair’s FlashTap and Keychron’s... Last Keystroke Prioritisation. Which doesn’t sound as sexy, but still.
However, Snap Tap is also drawing a level of ire that exceeds the usual baseline scepticism of hardware marketing. Because it enables a form of input automation – where you can quickly move in two directions by rapidly tapping one key, while holding down another – it’s considered by some as tantamount to cheating, allowing players to cross the line that divides unfair play from the accepted comforts that come with simply using a responsive Hall Effect keyboard or high-refresh-rate monitor. It’s even become a bannable offence in certain games, most notably in Counter-Strike 2.
Neither side is backing down; in an astonishingly worded tweet, Wooting went as far as to concede Snap Tap "should be considered cheating. But if it’s allowed, you need it." But do you?
]]>After nearly a year of public beta honing, the Nvidia App – Team Green’s new one-stop shop for desktop GPU management – is out in full. Not alongside the upcoming RTX 50 series, as rumoured, but right-now-today-this-minute. I’ve been testing out the launch version and while it’s not without some dud features, it does agreeably achieve its stated goal of combining the functions within Nvidia Control Panel and GeForce Experience. And if installing it means never having to use the latter again, well, that’s 149MB well spent.
]]>The Steam Deck OLED – which is like a Steam Deck but better in almost every way – is getting a new, if potentially more smudge-susceptible Limited Edition. A successor to the translucent version that only went on sale in the US and Canada last year, the Steam Deck OLED: Limited Edition White offers both a snowy look and, for those of us outside North America, the chance to actually buy one. It’ll go on sale November 18th, in all the countries that the Steam Deck currently ships in.
]]>Discourse? Look mate, I’m just here to test the Steam Deck. Dragon Age: The Veilguard runs like a tap on any halfway decent desktop hardware, so was naturally going to be worth trying on the weaker Deck. And sure enough, Bioware’s RPG (which is really more of an action game with the occasional verbal spar) settles comfortably into handheld life.
In fact, Valve have festooned its Steam page with a Verified medal, a seal of approval for any game that performs and controls well on the Steam Deck without any glaring weaknesses or impractical annoyances. It’s still worth playing around with the settings – more on those later – but I’ll back up that official assessment, having played for several hours without so much as an undersized tooltip.
]]>There’s plenty that you could justifiably expect from a Bioware RPG: chats with mates, opportunities to get those mates horribly killed, surviving mates turning to the side then walking offscreen. But I don’t think anyone expected Dragon Age: The Veilguard to be, at least on a purely technical level, one of the smoothest-performing, settings-rich AAA PC releases of the year so far.
]]>The Steam Deck is something of a talisman for gaming on Linux, its popularity and penguin-powered SteamOS having almost singlehandedly dragged it past MacOS as the second-most-used operating system among Steam users. Sadly, this also means the Valve handheld is the primary casualty when developers decide to stop bothering with Linux support, as Respawn Entertainment have decided to do for Apex Legends.
]]>It’s always nice to say that a big, look-how-much-we-spent-on-pore-rendering AAA game actually runs quite well on PC, as Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 does. Unfortunately for Bl6ps, and for us, that technical success is balanced on the knife tip of some seriously overwrought infrastructure. Mainly in the form the UX nightmare that is the Call of Duty HQ launcher, as well as a meddlesome always-online requirement, itself serving a feature that doesn’t even work that well.
]]>Zotac are one of the better graphics card makers of the post-EVGA era, so even as the early pangs of handheld gaming PC fatigue start to creep in, I’ve been keeping a hopeful eye on the Zotac Zone. This is their take on a Steam Deck rival, or more specifically, the Steam Deck OLED, as this is the first real competitor to go for a similarly star-bright, colour-erupting AMOLED display. Cor, phwoar, and indeed, wowzers.
Much like a Zotac GPU, the Zone is chunkier than you might like but ultimately well-crafted. It successfully combines that rich screen with oodles of input features and Deck-thrashing performance, though between its high price and a downright vampiric thirst for battery juice, it’s definitely more of a specialist tool than a crowd-pleasing portable.
]]>It’s hard to pick out the highlights from the Steam Deck’s latest SteamOS update, 3.6.19, just because its collection of tweaks and fixes seems to span the entire gamut of handheld PC hardware as a concept. Graphics driver improvements! Third-party SSDs working better! More balanced display colours! No more "spurious power LED blinking"! Brilliant, I hate spurious power LED blinking. The original LCD Deck also now gets the Steam Deck OLED’s overclocking controls in the BIOS, which you’re welcome to try if you’re braver than I am about cranking up the temperatures of a already squished-in handheld chip.
]]>‘Tis the season for new gaming CPUs. While Intel gear up to release their efficiency-focused Core Ultra 200S chips, AMD have announced a November 7th launch date for their Ryzen 9000X3D series – the latest to use their framerate-juicing 3D V-Cache. No specific CPUs have been named, for some reason, but we can be reasonably sure from leaks and retail listing whoopsies that this launch will include at least one of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, Ryzen 9 9900X3D, and Ryzen 9 9950X3D.
]]>Few games demonstrate the disconnect between graphics and aesthetic like Metaphor: ReFantazio. A pure technical analysis would conclude that it has the fidelity of an early Nintendo Switch game at best, and yet anyone whose heart flickers with even the tiniest ember of sentiment will instantly fall in love with its lavish pause screen animations. Yes, this RPG has style for days, maybe even an entire calendar, and an upside of its more dated aspects is that it runs fine on the modest internals of the Steam Deck.
]]>Intel have announced their latest batch of desktop CPUs, the Core Ultra 200S series, and it's got the component giants singing quite a different tune. Instead of trying to stuff in ever more threads, and ever more PC-incinerating clock speeds, the Core Ultra 200S family – spearheaded by the Core Ultra 9 285K when it launches later this year – will dial back certain specs compared the 14th Gen range. Instead, the focus will be on power efficiency and lowering temperatures.
]]>The Silent Hill 2 remake is only out today, but it’s been nearly two years since the first system requirements appeared, immediately distressing our PCs so badly that they started having their own nightmares of fog-smothered towns and James Sunderland in an uncomfortably high-poly nurse outfit. Those requirements have since lowered and risen, and now we know for sure that nu-Silent Hill 2 is one tough customer for performance – albeit one that benefits greatly from just one or two key settings tweaks.
]]>One blemish on Throne and Liberty’s barnstorming release – one day in and it’s so far up the Steam charts it’s only visible by telescope – has been some unexpected Steam Deck trouble. Despite the fantasy MMORPG having worked fine on the Deck in previous betas, a celebrating Amazon employee must have drunkenly nudged the 'Break game on Linux' lever at the office launch party, as reports began trickling in of handheld players being kicked from servers. The cause: Easy Anti-Cheat, Throne and Liberty’s hacker thwarter of choice, declaring an error.
Fortunately, as of right now (October 2nd), all seems well again – I’ve got Throne and Liberty running on a Steam Deck OLED as I type this, and can mosey around next to fellow online players without issues. A lot of them are turning into wolves. Most of them, in fact. Maybe too many.
]]>For reasons that seemingly amount to japery, Google have unveiled a double-sided, endlessly looping keyboard design – but only in Japan, and they’re not actually making it. However, the blueprints for 3D-printing it are freely available on GitHub, which is enough to convince me that someone needs to develop some kind of chaotic party game that uses the Möbius strip-shaped Gboard (good spot, Tom’s Hardware) as a controller.
]]>We’ve known for years that consoles have simply become preboxed PCs, and now look: we’re getting into their controllers as well. The Razer Wolverine V3 Pro (and its wired cousin, the Wolverine V3 Tournament Edition) has looked to desktop peripherals in search of superior button-bashing, cannibalising the rather good Razer Viper gaming mouse series for its switches. The result is a high-performing, satisfyingly clicky pad that, yes, works wonderfully on PC – albeit one that rinses you for four times(!) as much as a standard Xbox controller.
]]>Two monitor-themed Should You Bother Withs in a row? Normally my desire for editorial heterogeneity wouldn’t allow it, but while ultrawide screens have been around for donkeys' years, 2024 seems to be welcoming a genuinely new take on gaming displays: the dual-mode monitor.
]]>Valve are likely up to something hardware-related again, report NotebookCheck. Their next chunk of plastic and wires – following the Valve Index, Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED – could swap PC gaming’s favoured x86 architecture for ARM, the type of processor favoured by the Nintendo Switch, Macs, and mobile phones.
]]>God of War Ragnarök initially looks like it has little trouble with squeezing itself into a Steam Deck. Yet like a flask of mead laced with Odin’s raven piss, the seemingly crisp treat of Ragnarök’s handheld performance masks a nasty blend of technical troubles and what is, essentially, an always-online requirement by stealth.
]]>Fifteen months on from its PS5 release, Final Fantasy XVI – that actiony RPG of emo-fringed hack ‘n’ slashing and disquietingly sexy Ralph Ineson characters – is now on PC. Enough time, you’d think, to do a proper job of rejigging it with Windows spanners, especially after Final Fantasy XV’s port got so much stick for its lack of features and performance issues.
FFVXI does make some improvements, adopting a full set of DLSS and FSR upscalers and frame generators, and its mouse and keyboard integration feels generally slicker than XV. Sadly, it’s still no first-rate adaptation, neglecting numerous PC features and giving low-end systems an even deeper kick in the plums. Cutting the quality settings can help, as per the guide down below, but overall performance is so up-and-down than you’ll likely never achieve a perfectly smooth ride.
]]>Having gone to bed last night with Final Fantasy XVI installed yet unplayed on a Steam Deck, I awoke to find Valve have slapped the moody RPG with Unsupported status for the handheld. Its crime: an inability to "run well" on the Steam Deck’s internals, regardless of settings changes. Dammit, Clive.
]]>Today’s big news from the other side is that a tuned-up PS5 Pro is on the way, and a base spec, Blu-ray-driveless model will set you back £700. Or $700, in Ameridollars.
That’s a lot of cheddar for a living room games box, and while us Windows lot can’t quite claim pointing and laughing privileges – speccing a 4K-capable, DIY build desktop for seven hundred quid is certainly beyond me – the fact is that if you can get some pretty nifty PC kit for less. While still, let’s not forget, being able to play most of the PS5’s best games. It would not surprise me if someone from Sony’s PC division is already trying to entice Astro Bot underneath a cardboard box held up by a stick.
]]>I’ve been looking forward to playing Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 for yonks, but had convinced myself that performance-testing it would have some of my lesser graphics cards quivering in their PCIe slots. All those onscreen 'Nids, yeah? And the stutterfest that was the recent preview build? Surely enough to make a Tech-Priest shed at least one oily tear.
But nah, turns out it’s fine. Pretty good, actually – perhaps not to the extent that you should tackle Space Marine 2 on a crusty notebook (or, for the record, a Steam Deck), but it runs decently on minimum specs and is noticeably more stable than in that preview. The only thing that might offend your PC’s machine spirit is some quality setting weirdness, where dropping or raising the graphics options can produce inconsistent results.
]]>Unlike Ed, I wasn’t deemed important or youthfully handsome enough to get Black Myth: Wukong review code, leaving my only hopes of conducting some hardwarey performance investigation with the recently released benchmarking tool. The one that, by the admission of developers Game Science themselves, "may not fully represent the actual gaming experience and final performance at the time of the game's release". Monkey nuts.
]]>What if the company that sold your cheese also sold your PC gaming hardware? This is not the murmuring of some poor sod on a nineteen-hour Dota 2 binge who’s started thinking that the crumbs in his keyboard resemble a viable snack, but a bold new reality, one I recently found myself staring down during a trip to Asda. The supermarket chain – third biggest in the UK by turnover and purveyors of ill-fitting clothes and surprisingly good doughnuts alike – has added light-up gaming mice, keyboards, and headsets to its mountain of own-brand wares.
Asda being what it is (Americans, if you’re unfamiliar, think Walmart with less gun violence), it’s all dirt cheap as well. £17 for a full-size keyboard. £16 for an FPS mouse. Overwhelmed with curiosity, I ended up taking home a complete starter set (keeb, different mouse, headset, and mousemat) for £45, or about a third of the price of the Logitech G515 Lightspeed TKL that I’d shortly kick off my desk. Could this be a new frontier in affordable PC hardware, bringing tech to the masses in a way no specialist retailer ever could, or should supermarkets stick to cereal and meal deals? Surely the Asda Tech (real name) 4-in-1 Gaming Kit would have the answers.
]]>Is early adoption a chump’s game? I dunno about that, though between the Asus ROG Ally X and the Steam Deck OLED, those who stayed their hand on their earlier handheld gaming PC counterparts do have a couple of quality second-genners to choose from. Valve’s effort manages to wring multiple performance, design, and battery life improvements out of its new display, while the ROG Ally X makes similar upgrades with a bigger-yet-better take on the original ROG Ally.
The only thing to do, clearly, is make them fight. It’s probably in the Irish Code Duello or something: "Should one portable games box impugn another’s honour by releasing shortly after it, satisfaction must be claimed through a comparison article." My hands are bound here, folks, though if you yourself have been playing the waiting game on a handheld purchase, perhaps this little head-to-head can help you pick the right one.
]]>"Again, but better" has become the maxim of post-Steam Deck portable PCs. Or, to be more specific, post-Steam Deck OLED ones. Now that Valve have shown it’s possible to quickly turn around an upgraded handheld without enraging owners of the original, Lenovo have hinted at a new Legion Go, MSI have revealed an improved Claw, and Asus have released this here ROG Ally X. A ROG Ally, again – but better? Yes, it is, in almost every way except the speed at which it’ll plunge you into financial destitution.
]]>There’s a new version of AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF) available to try, and good news for Radeon GPU owners: it is drastically, almost comically better than the original version. Whereas AMD’s first take on driver-level frame generation – the same kind of framerate-roiding image generation trickery that FSR 3 and DLSS 3 are based around – came yoked to a barrel of jittering, stuttering, and visual artefacting issues, Fluid Motion Frames 2 is as smooth and you’d like. Without compromising on the ability to deploy it in theoretically any DirectX 11- or 12-based game, too.
]]>In a certifiably not-great week for gaming CPUs, AMD have announced that the new Ryzen 9000 series is being delayed for a few days. That’s thanks to initial production units not being up to standards, an AMD executive admitted, and comes shortly after rivals Intel copped to a potentially chip-killing fault in their latest Core processors. Ah well, there’s always – oh, wait. No. Those are the only two.
]]>Enabling the performance overlay on your Steam Deck takes but a moment, yet can deliver oodles of information on how your games are running. That makes it useful whether you simply want to know how much battery life to expect, or if you’re going full tweak mode on the Steam Deck’s hardware settings and need to scarf down as much performance data as possible.
]]>Intel have identified the fault behind reported stability issues with their 13th and 14th Gen Core CPUs, many of which have been failing after feeding themselves excessive voltages. The blame, Intel told PCG, lies with the same kind of pernicious force that fills your Twitter feed with pillocks, has turned Google into an AI-sodden shell of its former self, and keeps making Spotify suggest I listen to ninety different electroswing arrangements of Everybody Wants to Be a Cat. That's right: an algorithm.
]]>Learning how to play Game Pass games on your Steam Deck will both demonstrate the handheld’s compatibility limits, and show you how flexible it can be in bending them. See, while it’s not actually possible to install PC Game Pass games onto your Steam Deck’s SSD, Xbox Cloud Gaming – a streaming service included with Game Pass Ultimate subscriptions – can be unlocked on the Deck, making the all-you-can-eat library available to play. Here, we’ll show you how.
]]>As someone who hasn’t been able to aim with thumbsticks since about 2008, the ability to calibrate, customise, and ultimately deploy gyro controls on the Steam Deck has me considering the internal gyroscope as one of the Deck’s hidden gems. Not every game will support motion input, but in those that do, it can be a more comfortable alternative to the sticks and trackpads; you are, after all, harnessing the precision of using both hands in tandem, rather than a single crooked thumb.
]]>Knowing how to format a microSD card on the Steam Deck is as essential as the card itself. While the Deck is compatible with any microSD card that meets at least the UHD-I specification – loads, in other words – it doesn’t format them automatically, leaving one final DIY step before your expanded storage card can actually serve as expanded storage. It’s easily done, though, as the shortness of this guide attests.
]]>Edwin’s been appreciating the acrobatic twist that Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn puts on the Soulslite formula, but not everybody’s magical zip-zooping has been going as smoothly. Following the Steam and PC Game Pass releases yesterday, there are widespread reports of heavy stuttering spoiling the fun; I’ve given both versions a test, and indeed, Flintlock does have a serious case of the framerate stammers. Especially the Game Pass build, which is significantly worse for it.
]]>Installing Zenless Zone Zero on a Steam Deck is pretty straightforward, especially compared to the nightmare that was getting fellow anime-styled RPG Wuthering Waves to behave on the handheld. Despite ZZZ’s lack of native Linux/SteamOS support, the Deck has more than enough compatibility-boosting tools available to make it launchable – and enough graphical power to run it smoothly on Medium settings.
In fact, there are a few different ways of installing Zenless Zone Zero on your Steam Deck. One of the more popular methods I’ve seen involves configuring the Heroic Games Launcher to run the Epic Games Launcher, which in turn can run the Zenless Zone Zero (Games?) launcher. However, I’ve discovered a much simpler and easier technique, based around Lutris; it’s this method that I’ll walk you through below.
]]>Gaming hardware makers have often walked the line between enabling a player’s true skills, and simply delivering them an unfair advantage. Sometimes, honest accessibility aids are falsely accused of being cheating tools; other times, a monitor will straight-up play League of Legends for you. This week, developments in gaming keyboards have sparked a new debate on what does and doesn’t fall within the scope of fair play, with mechanical keeb specialists Wooting declaring in no uncertain terms that "Rappy Snappy is not the same as Snap Tap." Cool, glad that’s cleared up.
]]>Read enough of our hardware articles and you’ll eventually come across someone, probably me or Katharine (RPS in peace), banging on about the Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless. After half a decade on shelves, it’s still the best low-profile mechanical gaming keyboard going, and quite possibly the best wireless keyboard to boot – while the tenkeyless version, the G915 TKL Lightspeed, is just as lovely to use.
Between their nimble performance, crisp mech switches, and impeccable build quality, the only way in which the G915 duo underwhelms is their high pricing – very much the kind you’d want to wait for a Prime Day or Black Friday to dull the pain of. Now, though, there’s an alternative: the new Logitech G515 Lightspeed TKL. I’ve been using it. It’s good!
]]>Steam’s Game Recording feature has launched in be- wait, no, it's out properly now! Valve have added this (impressively rich) set of video clipping tools to Steam's default Stable branch, effectively bringing it to everyone who hasn't tried it since the Beta branch launch back in June. It comes with tooltips to give you some pointers, but they’re light on detail, so read on for a more comprehensive guide on how to record game clips with Steam – and how to share your clips around.
]]>Wuthering Waves, that recent gacha RPG of anime styling and impenetrable jargonblasting, just didn’t work on the Steam Deck when it launched in May. It also doesn’t work right now. But for one brief, debatably glorious day on June 29th, it did. And thus, Deck owners who’d persevered through a slightly fiddly installation process (explained here by YouTubesmith Deck Wizard) could finally take their first joyous steps into Wuthering Waves like a David Hasselhoff-buoyed East German in 1989.
Unlike the Hoff, it wouldn’t last. Within hours, Steam Deck players were being booted back out of the game by a hitherto-unseen anti-cheat failure. What gives? Or gave?
]]>While Prime Day 2024 enters its final hours, we’re still rounding up the best Anti-Prime Day deals on PC gaming hardware. Don’t have a Prime membership? Boycotting Amazon? Just really, really didn’t like New World? These deals, entirely from non-Amazon retailers, are the ones for you.
]]>It's the second and final day of Prime Day 2024, and while there are still plenty of PC gaming deals to be basketed, let's state the obvious: once they're gone, they're gone. Come midnight, these hardware savings will disappear faster than the free pastries at an RPS staff meetup, so now's the time if one of them takes your fancy. The deals, not our pastries. Steady on.
]]>Besides giving The First Descendant the ol’ benchy marks on desktop, I was curious to see how this gleaming looter shooter would run on the less flexing hardware of the Steam Deck. The answer: it didn’t, at first. Luckily, a semi-quick fix was enough to get me in, where I found a game that for all its ray tracing inclinations, is comfortable with life on the Deck. Reasonably. Most of the time.
]]>I don’t dislike The First Descendant. It has a good grasp of the numbers-go-up-yay appeal behind looter shooters. Sometimes you get to grapple onto a vast robot crab. The first evil alien overlord you fight is named Greg. Not bad, not bad. It’s also, wholeheartedly and unapologetically, a big graphical show-off, complete with multiple ray tracing modes and shinier power armour than if you fed the entire cast of Warframe through an industrial car wash.
Happily, this doesn’t necessarily translate into chugging performance on low-end PCs, or even handhelds like the Steam Deck. But judging from its final preview version, which has just closed prior to the July 2nd release date, feasting on The First Descendant’s finest visuals will definitely tax your rig – and it has its share of technical quirks on the side.
]]>Update: Whelp, spoke too soon. Apparently some Steam Deck players are seeing an "Innapropriate activity detected" message upon launching Elden Ring, blocking them from playing online. I haven't had this myself, and some have reported the issue fixing itself after they installed the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, but hopefully there's a proper patch in the works.
Elden Ring on the Steam Deck has long enjoyed a smoothness that desktop play has lacked. Not so much in simple framerate terms – the handheld spends far more time around the 30fps mark than it does bumping into Elden Ring’s 60fps cap – but thanks to a Proton compatibility update back in 2022, it’s drastically less prone to the flow-breaking stutter that still plagues the RPG in 2024. That now goes for Shadow Of The Erdtree as well, judging from my portable time in the new expansion.
]]>I realised recently that a juicy subject for another Should You Bother With has been staring me in the face – or rather, I’ve been staring at it. Ultrawide gaming monitors have clearly avoided non-starter status, given they’ve been around for years, seemingly being exchanged for currency – and yet they’re nowhere near what you might consider the 'default' option when making a display upgrade. Regular widescreen monitors, with regular 16:9 aspect ratios, remain the go-to. So why switch?
]]>Update: There's now a separate Project Killswitch for the ROG Ally X as well, which kinds of spoils my headline but WHATEVER. Original article continues below:
]]>Taipei’s annual Computex event is always a big, circled, triple-underlined mark in the PC gaming hardware calendar. Whereas CES splits its focus across tech, cars, and the occasional overdesigned white good, Computex is all computing, all the time, making it a prime source of reveals and showcases for the hardware bits that make games happen.
Sadly, Computex 2024 is unlikely to go down as a classic, largely because this year’s show has been mesmerised by AI and the most tedious applications thereof: search, but different somehow! Run art-stealing generation tools faster! Oh, Computex, what have they done to you, and why do you have seven fingers on one hand?
Granted, AI is a broad field, and not everything about it is necessarily gross or creatively bankrupting. But it also doesn’t deserve to overshadow all the other useful, unexpected, and curiosity-piquing gaming tech that Computex has to offer, from new Steam Deck alternatives to resurrected CPU lineups and promising graphics card updates. Here are those highlights of the show so far...
]]>The Asus ROG Ally X, a sort of semi-sequel to last year’s ROG Ally handheld PC, has had its specs spilled over at Videocardz. I’m usually a lot more suspicious of hardware leaks, which are often just out-of-date or otherwise inaccurate info, but I’ve also sat through enough mic-muted prebriefings to know an official slideshow when I see one, and that appears to be exactly what Videocardz got its hands on. Besides, these specs include a gigantic 80Whr battery upgrade (doubling the ROG Ally’s 40Whr capacity), so we can at least file this under "News James wants to be true."
]]>While I’ve always thought the race towards graphical hyperrealism isn’t as pervasive as it's often perceived, Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 is definitely one of those games. The kind that probably has twelve artists dedicated to the recreation of visible pores, that sort of thing. It’s so focused on looking pretty that it hasn’t even noticed the title and subtitle got mixed up.
Sure enough, Hellblade 2 is a harsh test for older hardware, with a heavy reliance on DLSS or FSR upscaling to keep performance sweet. That said, it’s no Dragons Dogma 2-style technical horrorshow either. A happy balance of visuals and smoothness is attainable on plush PCs and low-end laptops alike, while DLSS 3 frame generation can deliver an effective kick in the framerate pants on RTX 40 series GPUs.
]]>Sometimes you gotta know when to fold, and trying to get new hotness RPG Wuthering Waves to play nice with the Steam Deck has got me creasing like an origami crane. While its Epic Games Store release can be worked around, and Proton GE will get the game’s own launcher running, no combination of software, compatibility tools, or installation folder deep-diving seems capable of actually booting the game proper.
As such, I’m accepting defeat. Obviously with apologies to any studious Steam Deck Academy readers.
]]>Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut is now out and about on PC, sadly with the requirement of signing into a PlayStation Network (PSN) account in order to play the samurai action-adventure’s Legends co-op mode. The same requirement, you might recall, that Helldivers 2 players recently lobbied Sony into abandoning. No such luck here, and as previously warned, the need for said PSN sign-in to happen over Windows means that Ghost of Tsushima is essentially missing a chunk of itself on the Steam Deck.
]]>Nic reckons Homeworld 3, the long-awaited spacefaring RTS, is mostly pretty good. Qualified hoorays for that, as well as for the fact that it doesn’t make especially mad demands of your hardware: besides netting a Steam Deck Playable badge from Valve, its minimum PC specs only list the likes of the Intel Core i5-6600 and Nvidia’s GTX 1060. Easily doable, for most aspiring galactic admirals.
Once a battle gets underway, however, Homeworld 3’s performance can start tanking, turning an initially smooth engagement into a more stutter-prone light show. The good news? You can more than double your framerates with a relatively small handful of graphics setting changes, even if some these (including the DLSS and FSR 2 upscalers) can be a tad inconsistent in their own right.
]]>Hardcore tactical FPS Gray Zone Warfare is proving to be yet another of 2024’s unexpected successes, shifting over half a million copies when it launched into early access last week. Unfortunately, in its attempt to eat Escape from Tarkov’s lunch – a timely one, given that game’s self-inflicted DLC misery – it’s currently choking on the wishbone of some truly dire performance issues. Even players with tip-top graphics cards are seeing heavy stuttering while out in the field, and none of the updates released thus far, including today’s Hotfix #3, have done much to soothe it.
Said hotfix does include some fixes for other widespread problems, including a second attempt at preventing players from becoming headless when rejoining a server (an amusing though resilient glitch, given a previous hotfix had also tried to nix it). But having played a bit of this third patch on a usually reliable RTX 4060, there’s clearly an awful lot of work left to do before Gray Zone Warfare performs acceptably.
]]>Here’s the thing: I’ll gladly show you how to install an SSD in a Steam Deck, but be warned that it’s by far the trickier of your two storage upgrade options. Whereas adding a microSD card is as easy as pushing it into the dedicated slot, swapping out the Deck’s internal drive involves fiddling with some seriously sensitive components. It’s not for the faint of heart nor the shaky of hand, and unlike the majority cool things you can do with Valve’s handheld PC – be it adding fun plugins with Decky Loader or unleashing its versatile Desktop Mode – swapping the SSD does require a fair few tools.
]]>Welcome to another edition of Should You Bother With, where the useless and the utilitarian of PC gaming hardware are sorted into two satisfyingly neat piles. And after the hard science demanded by SYBW’s previous look at Hall effect keyboards, I’m pleased to say that the concept behind this week’s focus can be summed in with as few words as "faster Internet." It’s Wi-Fi 7 – or 802.11be, to its friends.
]]>Razer, makers of various pretty good gaming peripherals and one deeply questionable face mask, have been slapped with a $1.1 million fine by US regulators after said mask was determined to have misled buyers over the amount of protection it afforded. Kotaku reports that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took issue with Razer’s claim that the Zephyr, an RGB monstrosity released during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, could act as a medical-grade N95 respirator – it could not – and will allocate $1 million of that fine towards refunds for fooled, if colourfully illuminated, buyers.
]]>Welcome back to Should You Bother With, the RPS hardware column that combs away the fluff surrounding PC gaming gear to reveal a smooth, hairless core of pure consumer advice. This time: Hall effect keyboards, a relatively fresh flavour of desktop peripheral that’s been gaining traction with manufacturers for the switch design’s supposed durability and reliability benefits. These represent perhaps the first major challenge to mechanical keyboard hegemony, but you may be wondering: who’s Hall? What’s their effect? And does it actually make for a better gaming keyboard? Time to found out.
]]>No Rest for the Wicked launched into early access as a bit of a fixer-upper, even by the standards of its 'buy now, play finished game later' model. The good news is that the grim action-RPG’s wonky performance is already being straightened out, with two of its three hotfixes thus far delivering a noticeable improvements, even on older graphics cards.
]]>Lured like an unsatisfied sailor by the siren song of alleged performance woes, I’ve been giving No Rest for the Wicked a cursory benchmarkin’, and yes! The isometric ARPG does suffer from all the early access wonkiness you’ve likely heard about already today.
]]>Six months is a long time. In that half-year you could fully grow a patch of delicious strawberries, plant the seeds, then grow another. Or you could squirm through three and a half successive Liz Truss premierships. Or, as Cities: Skylines 2 developers Colossal Order have done, you could take the technical mess of your long-awaited citybuilding game and reconstruct it into something that performs... okay, not well, but better.
]]>I remain the least qualified person alive to appraise Manor Lords an actual strategy game – my village stewardship is proving inept, even by medieval posho standards – but I have delayed economic and social ruin long enough to know it runs well on the Steam Deck. Just as it’s smooth low-end performer on desktops, Manor Lords can easily keep its head above 30fps in handheld mode, and that’s usually more like 40-45fps with the right visual settings.
Still, there’s scope for it to become a much more Deck-friendly game, if not by its April 26th release date then hopefully at least during its early access phase. Faster performance would be nice, sure, but what this citybuilder-meets-RTS-battler really needs for optimal portability is a more refined set of controls.
]]>My most recent experiences with performance-testing strategy games have been defined by miserable sluggishness and dental drama, so it’s been a relief to find that citybuilding/RTS hybrid Manor Lords is set to launch in a relatively fine state. As an early access game, no less.
Having dug into the latest build’s GPU performance and graphics settings, I have found a few loose strands of technical flax that Manor Lords could do with snipping away. Yet it’s generally in good shape, both for early access and a solo developer project, successfully balancing strong visuals with relatively light hardware demands that should help it run on older PCs (or handhelds like the Steam Deck). Several hours in, the ugliest things I’ve seen are my road layouts.
]]>Even if connecting your Steam Deck to a TV takes the "portable" out of “portable PC,” big-screen play is yet another of the handheld’s many talents. As far as lounge-based gaming goes, it’s certainly preferable to hauling several kilos of desktop from your desk to your telly and hooking that up instead.
As for the particulars of marrying Deck and TV, Steam Remote Play veterans may immediately turn their thoughts to the Steam Link. This can indeed enable wireless beaming of your handheld-installed games onto the living room screen, but sadly, the Steam Link itself has been discontinued for years, and while it lived on as a smart TV app, this isn’t widely available either - especially after Samsung cut support for it in 2023. Nowadays, your best bet is to connect your Steam Deck to your TV using physical hardware, and this here guide will show you how.
]]>If you’re of the handheld PC persuasion and have thought "Psh, I don’t need one of the best Steam Deck docks", then I know what you mean – I’ve had a Deck since launch and didn’t bother with any kind of proper docking station for months afterwards. I'll tell you, though, this was a mistake. Even if they’re not essential for the Steam Deck’s intended portable exploits, in the same way that a good microSD card or carrying case is, docks make it drastically easier to poke around Desktop Mode – and by extension, to unlock all of the device’s coolest secrets.
]]>You could say that the best Steam Deck case is the one you get for free, and to be sure, I have no qualms with Valve’s bundled carrier. Especially not the one you get with the 1TB Steam Deck OLED, which adds a neat mini-case in the form of a removable liner. Still! As you’ll see here, you do have a choice of worthwhile upgrade options, ranging from conventional hard cases with extra accessory storage to clever protective sleeves that combine impact resistance with improved handheld grip. The best way to avoid Steam Deck damage is to not drop it in the first place, as Sun Tzu probably said.
]]>With a desktop version of the RTX 4050 looking less likely with every turn o’ the Earth, the true entry-level GPU among Nvidia’s current generation solely remains in the realm of gaming laptops. It’s also, I’ll admit, overdue some consideration on RPS. Between the lack of cheap graphics cards among the desktop RTX 40 series, the year-and-a-bit that DLSS 3 has had to grow its compatible games library, and the Steam Deck reminding everyone that portable, low-end gaming can still be pleasurable, now seems like the RTX 4050’s time to shine. Or, at the very least, gently twinkle.
]]>I have spent most of my working life looking at efforts to breach the FPS event horizon, and going 'OMG who cares, they literally all look the same?'. People like our hardware editor James then point and laugh at me, as an objectively wrong person. But according to a small study highlighted by the Guardian, I might have been right too! Turns out there's evidence that we might all see life at different FPS. That player might not be cheating, he might just experience Fortnite at a speed you don't.
]]>Not every March-released, fantastical action-RPG will fall to bits on the Steam Deck. Horizon Forbidden West: Complete Edition succeeds where Dragon’s Dogma 2 spluttered, quietly yet capably adapting to handheld hardware. Keeping performance up requires a fair bit of fine-tuning the graphics settings, and a girthsome install size might trouble the internal drives of smaller models, but otherwise, Forbidden West is just as portable-friendly as Horizon Zero Dawn. And that’s still one of the best Steam Deck games around.
]]>While the PC release of Horizon Forbidden West: Complete Edition has effectively made my PS5 ownership pointless, I can’t stay mad at it. Besides being a sumptuous, endlessly satisfying sci-fi romp with one of the prettiest open worlds in gaming, it’s also a very respectable porting job, with stable performance that scales well on aged PC hardware all the way up to glistening 4K rigs.
There are some imperfections, but generally, this shouldn’t be a repeat of Horizon Zero Dawn’s need for a post-launch patch regimen. On all the hardware I’ve tested, Forbidden West looks good to go, especially when choosing the right settings can smooth out performance even more.
]]>Dragon's Dogma 2 is, as a game per se, very good! It’s creative and intelligent and lets you fill other players’ worlds with recruitable humanoid versions of your pet cats. Still, a technical masterclass it is not. In my performance analysis, I touched on DD2 being particularly unplayable on the Steam Deck, suffering from sub-10fps framerates and a bunch of broken settings. Since that was based on pre-release code, I had quietly hoped that Capcom could pull something – anything – out of the bag to salvage handheld PC play in time for launch day, but now the time has come, I’ve checked again, and nope. This RPG adventure simply doesn’t work on the Steam Deck, and probably never will.
]]>Dragon's Dogma 2 is an RPG of many admirable qualities. I’m especially attached to my Arisen’s current pair of Pawns, one of whom speaks with the wonderfully stretched intonations of a pitch-shifted Matt Berry. Sadly, none of its achievements pertain to technical fidelity. While decent-looking, Dragon’s Dogma 2 takes some serious hardware to maintain consistently smooth performance, with lowered quality settings lending only the most limp-wristed of helping hands.
]]>Welcome to Should You Bother With, a new, hopefully somewhat regular RPS column where I’ll investigate the quirkier niches that PC gaming hardware has to offer. Through trial and testing, together we’ll find out which of these products and features are technological red herrings – and which are the genuine innovations that deserve your attention.
First up on the lab table: AMD Fluid Motion Frames!
]]>Installing Decky Loader on your Steam Deck is one of the biggest free upgrades you can make to it. With a few clicks (or touchscreen taps), you can open up a library of feature-adding plugins that are as versatile as they are easy to use. Want better management of your Steam Deck screenshots, or a simple way of recording your screen, or more information about battery usage, or interface tweaks to SteamOS itself? All in one place, with one-tap downloads, and accessible from the Steam Deck’s existing quick access menu? Install Decky Loader.
]]>Considering it’s one of the most gawwwwjuss games you can get one o’ them PS5 machines, Horizon Forbidden West’s upcoming PC version has some pretty fair-looking system requirements. The newly released specs, which you can find below, suggest that pushing the open world, robosaur-slaying sequel to its most extreme settings will take a burly graphics card – but likewise, lower settings and resolutions can get by with much creakier hardware.
]]>Once you know how to enable Desktop Mode on the Steam Deck, you basically get the keys to its handheld gaming kingdom. From playing Game Pass games on your Steam Deck to installing Lutris and other non-Steam launchers, many of the device’s best hidden functions are enabled through Desktop Mode – not to mention its entire usability as a proper desktop PC.
]]>I still don’t fully understand the rancor with which the RTX 4070 Ti is often regarded. Where some see an overpriced, memory-deprived albatross of a graphics card, I’ve only ever seen a fast and feature-rich GPU whose 12GB of VRAM is demonstrably fine for 99.95% of games at 4K. A better deal than the RTX 4080 for that resolution, in any case.
Now, though, we can all agree: nobody should buy an RTX 4070 Ti. Not when the RTX 4070 Ti Super is here, doing a better, hopefully less contentious job of smooth 4K without demanding RTX 4080 (or, indeed, RTX 4080 Super) levels of investment.
]]>Since I’m apparently on survival game duty for the rest of my days, and we’ve just had a firm reminder of how wobbly an early access launch can be, it seems like a good time to check in on that there Sons Of The Forest 1.0 release and see whether it’s felt the effects of its own early access polishing process.
]]>Nightingale’s dapper cast of cross-dimensional pathfinders are right about one thing: realmwalking is dangerous business. Attempt to tele-portal between realities on the Steam Deck, for instance, and you may find yourself trapped in the Stygian void, naught but a frozen loading screen tip for company and suspended hopelessly for all eternity. Or until you hold down the power button.
This crashing tendency alone means that while Nightingale can technically run on the Steam Deck, even without resorting to rock-bottom graphics settings, the current early access build isn’t yet ready for regular handheld play. That’s nothing developers Inflexion Games won’t tell you themselves – they’re "not considering [the Deck] officially supported at launch," after all – but if you were thinking of giving this gaslamp fantasy survival sim a portable whirl, you might want to let that call to adventure go unanswered.
]]>Credit to Nightingale, I’ve been enjoying the early access form of Inflexion’s gaslamp fantasy survival crafter a fair bit more than I did its older stress test build. The UI is cleaner and tighter, and I’ve had more space to explore (and enjoy) the mysterious nooks of its magic 'n' moustaches world. There’s potential here, but it’s very much the raw kind, especially when performance needs as much work as it does.
Besides relying on upscalers like DLSS for truly smooth running, Nightingale currently has a serious stuttering problem, and bumping into an ugly graphical artefact or even a hard crash is worryingly common. I’ve pulled together an optimised settings guide (down below) so that you don’t need to drop the visual quality lower than is strictly necessary, but do keep in mind that this is early access with emphasis on the early.
]]>The PS VR2, Sony’s currently PS5-exclusive VR gaming headset, looks like it’ll be latching onto the faces of PC owners as well. Tucked away in a PlayStation blog post about upcoming PS VR2 games, Sony Interactive content communications manager Gillen McAllister confirmed that Sony are "currently testing the ability for PS VR2 players to access additional games on PC" and that the plan is have this extra support ready within 2024.
]]>Welcome to Steam Deck Academy, where we take the microfibre cloth of understanding and wipe away the smudgy touchscreen fingerprints of handheld gaming ignorance. Here, eager students – that’s you, I’m assuming – can feast their minds on all the Steam Deck guides, explainers, and investigations that we’ve produced, as well as further instructive pieces to come.
]]>Helldivers 2 is turning out to be an absolute laugh riot of a co-op shooter; it may even have the potential to rival Deep Rock Galactic on good vibes and teammate deaths as accidental comedy masterstrokes. Even ongoing server connectivity issues haven’t done much to spoil the sense of fun, which incidentally, can also be shared on the Steam Deck.
Indeed, following a quick Proton update on Valve’s part, its previously SteamOS-incompatible anti-cheat will no longer put the kibosh on you dropping into Helldivers 2 via your Deck. I’ve been testing on both an original 512GB model and the newer Steam Deck OLED, and as long as you don’t mind dropping the quality settings, it can usually run tidily above 30fps.
]]>Because it’s somehow my job to worry about the technical fidelity of electronic toys, I’ve been eyeing the long-overdue arrival of Skull and Bones with some nervousness. After nearly a decade of delays, you’d probably just want to get it out the door, right? Skip straight to the open-world pirate adventuring, none of that 'making it work on a range of graphics cards' nonsense.
]]>People who read my articles have exceptionally good taste, which is why I will assume you are already intimately familiar with Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. For those who are not and somehow got here by mistake, it will save me a lot of time if you go away and read them all. Oh fine, I will explain Hex. And also, if I have time, a real life man with ants in his computer.
]]>As a monster-collecting, knowingly cynical, base-building survival game, Palworld is officially Not My Thing in at least three different ways. But I do like the Steam Deck, as well as feeling a sense of being vaguely useful. Thus, instead of moaning about holding down a button for 20 seconds to plant some berry seeds, I’ve tested how Palworld adapts to life on Valve’s handheld – and worked out which are the best settings to use with the Deck’s modest hardware.
]]>If the RTX 4070 Super was all about addressing its predecessor’s so-so performance gains, the RTX 4080 Super’s course correction is more deeply rooted in issues of cold, hard coinage. For better and worse, it turns out – while this Super-fied GPU knocks hundreds off the RTX 4080’s starting price, any excitement for a potential new 4K champion is quickly muted by it barely moving the dial on straight FPS output. If, indeed, it’s not somehow running slower.
]]>Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth isn’t exactly spawned from the most hardware-bothering of game series. Most previous LADs, be they Kiryu’s Adventures in Punching or the more turn-based reboot have all been technically gentle affairs, and Infinite Wealth is ultimately another one. At the same time, it shares with Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name a newfound interest in PC-specific tricks. That means a full selection of DLSS, FSR and XeSS upscalers, plus DLSS 3 frame generation. Real yakuza might use a gamepad, but it seems real fuzz-haired RPG fantasists use graphics cards.
Let’s take a closer look, then, at how RGG’s latest crime caper performs on PC. We’ll also work out its best settings, to keep it running smoother than a legally distinct Segway.
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