Guess what, there's another free game at Steam:

Four Kings One War, still in Early Access, is a strategy game based on chess and will be free to keep until May 19: https://store.steampowered.com/app/883680/Four_Kings_One_War/

Well, this is a gaming forum, can you expect more? xP

Just waiting for higher speed NVMe and Ampere and I'm set for next gen.

Seems to happen around the cusp of a new gen every time, so you're not wrong on that one.

I still remember the times when there was talk of 4k gaming on current gen, back in 2013/14, and you also told everyone about it being a thing on PC for years, but it "didn't matter", because it wasn't on X product back then. Now look at the tech that's finally caught up and only now does it somehow matter. 

So there was an interview with Epic China regarding various things including the demo. Looks like as far as the demo is concerned, SSDs like the 970 Evo will do just fine if this is to be believed:

"UE5 tech demo on a RTX 2080 & 970 EVO Plus notebook is 1440p40

Epic China engineers’ interview, if you know Chinese you can confirm it by yourself.

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1kK411W7fK

53:00, he said his notebook could run at 1440p 40fps+, optimization target is 60fps for next-gen.

2:08:00, SSD bandwidth (for the flying part) isn’t as that high as ppl said, not need a stricted spec SSD (decent SSD is ok).

Someone at TGFCer forum said, the engineer just confirmed to him: RTX 2080 GPU notebook but forgot the exact SSD model, maybe 970 EVO Plus. (http://club.tgfcer.com/thread-8307013-7-1.html 94th post)"

https://www.reddit.com/r/XboxSeriesX/comments/gkskus/ue5_tech_demo_on_a_rtx_2080_970_evo_plus_notebook/

If not posted already, On Epic Games Store - $10/£10 off every game over $15

Anyone who has EGS be sure to add GTA V for free for the money off coupon. I'm gonna save mine for Cyberpunk.

^Yeah, there's a sale at the Epic Store.

I forgot to post it, and there was no article about the sale to remind me about it either. That, but mostly the GTAV giveaway, are the reasons the store collapsed.

I just realized something today regarding ""SSD optimized" games on PC. Console people were trying to shame PC because it doesn't have those and the new consoles will. The thing is that's kind of the consoles' fault to begin with. One reason why new consoles are so close to the PC space is that PCs are held back the whole time, which enables consoles to catch up easily and even bring new features that weren't previously possible on multiplatform games, because they had to work with terrible consoles. Gonna use that as a talking point next time someone wants to claim console superiority.

Not sure about the adoption rate of SSDs in PCs but I have to assume that the majority already have them and no new gaming PC will be built without one.

Since my vacation is canceled, I'm going to Greece in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.

€9.99 for the Standard Edition or €22.99 for the Gold Edition (including Season Pass + AC III Remastered) seems okay for me.

Yeah, it is funny how proud they are in advance, since no one of them has these fast loading times yet on console. And for years they ignored or talked down the much shorter loading times of the PC versions of multiplatform games.

Even HDD speeds on PC can now be multiple times of the standard HDDs of the PS4/Pro and Xbox One/X and come closer to the SATA III and USB 3.0 limitations. Some HDDs on PC can even provide shorter loading times than SSDs in the current consoles, since CPU and RAM limitations cripple the performance.

My new external HDD (My Book Duo) reaches 400 MB/s in sequential read (f.e. loading huge levels/files) and comes close to my SATA-limitated SSDs:

Don't wonder about the results of the upper left SSD-test (4.6 - 6.5 GBytes/s) , the drive is still SATA-limited and not that fast. The good results are probably because of Samsung's "Rapid mode" (DRAM caching). With bigger test files (8 GiB or 32 GiB instead of 1 GiB) the results get more in line.

Both the Origins and Odyssey Discovery Tours are free to download from UPlay. You don't have to buy the game to travel to Greece .

There, I saved you some money .