The Thursday news:

SALES /PLAYER COUNT & DEALS

The Epic Store gives away two titles:

• ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove! : https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/toejam-and-earl-back-in-the-groove
• Darkwood: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/darkwood

Next week, the free games will be Evoland Legendary Edition and Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition.

Steam has two new deals:

• Cat Cafe Manager gets a 30% discount until October 19: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1354830/Cat_Cafe_Manager/
• Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove will be 50% off until the 19th of October: https://store.steampowered.com/app/250760/Shovel_Knight_Treasure_Trove/

There is a new Humble Bundle: the Melee Mayhem Bundle, featuring up to 7 games and 3 coupons during the next 13 days: https://www.humblebundle.com/games/melee-mayhem-bundle.

Fanatical has two new deals and two new bundles:

• The Star Deal is SUPERHOT VR, 67% off during 48 hours: https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/superhot-vr
• Jackbox Games puts its titles up to 67% off during 10 days: https://www.fanatical.com/en/franchises/jackbox-games
• The Jackbox Quintpack, with 5 games and a 50% discount, will also be available during the same 10 days: https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/the-jackbox-quintpack
• The Heroic Bundle features 10 games with a 97% discount: https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/heroic-bundle

SOFTWARE & DRIVERS

-Nothing-

MODS, EMULATORS & FAN PROJECTS

-No mods to day either-

GAMING NEWS

No More Heroes 3 PC appears to be a Nintendo Switch port, does not feature the PS5/Xbox Series X graphical improvements
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/no-more-heroes-3-pc-nintendo-switch-port-ps5-xbox-series-x-graphical-improvements/
XSEED Games has just released No More Heroes 3 on PC and from the looks of it, the PC version is a direct port of the Nintendo Switch version. What this basically means is that the game lacks the graphical improvements that have been made to the current-gen console that is available on PS5 and Xbox Series X.

SCORN will not, after all, support DirectStorage on PC
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/scorn-will-not-after-all-support-directstorage-on-pc/
In September 2022, Ebb Software claimed that SCORN would support DirectStorage on both Xbox Series X and PC. However, it appears that this won’t be the case. In a new tweet, Ebb Software clarified things, stating that DirectStorage will be only available on Xbox Series X.

Gotham Knights Minimum PC System Requirements
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/gotham-knights-minimum-pc-system-requirements/
Warner Bros has revealed the official PC system requirements for Gotham Knights. These minimum PC specs target 1080p with 60fps on the Lowest Settings. Curiously enough, the company did not reveal any recommended requirements (though it claimed that it will share them soon).
PC gamers will at least need an Intel i5-9600k or Ryzen 5 3600 with 8GB RAM and an NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1660 Ti or an AMD Radeon RX 590.

Unreal Engine 4-powered single-player horror action-adventure game, The Chant, gets gameplay overview trailer
https://www.dsogaming.com/videotrailer-news/unreal-engine-4-powered-single-player-horror-action-adventure-game-the-chant-gets-gameplay-overview-trailer/
Prime Matter has released a gameplay overview trailer for its upcoming single-player horror action-adventure game, The Chant. Developed by Brass Token, the game will be using Unreal Engine 4.

Elden Ring may soon receive Ray Tracing, Update 1.07 Release Notes
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/elden-ring-may-soon-receive-ray-tracing-update-1-07-release-notes/
It appears that Elden Ring may soon receive its promised Ray Tracing effects. FromSoftware issued a new update for the game that, among other things, added menu strings related to ray tracing features.

Unreal Engine 5-powered third-person co-op action RPG shooter, The First Descendant, gets a cinematic story trailer
https://www.dsogaming.com/videotrailer-news/unreal-engine-5-powered-third-person-co-op-action-rpg-shooter-the-first-descendant-gets-a-cinematic-story-trailer/
Nexon has released a cinematic story trailer for its Unreal Engine 5-powered third-person co-op action RPG shooter, The First Descendant.

Today there's a second post of news:

The new shooter from the makers of Bulletstorm is delayed to 2023
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-new-shooter-from-the-makers-of-bulletstorm-is-delayed-to-2023/
It's been five years since Polish studio The Astronauts announced Witchfire, a dark fantasy shooter about witches (and worse) in an alt-history medieval world. And it'll be a while yet before the game sees the light of day, as the studio announced today that the release planned for the end of this year has been delayed into early 2023.
>> The aticle includes a video of the game, in case you need to refresh your memory.

Todd Howard reveals Starfield's persuasion system: 'It feels like it's part of the dialog'
https://www.pcgamer.com/todd-howard-reveals-starfields-persuasion-system-it-feels-like-its-part-of-the-dialog/
Bethesda Softworks executive producer Todd Howard shared more about the studio's upcoming outer space epic Starfield in a recent video chat, including a look at the game's persuasion system and whether or not he considers it "hard sci-fi."

CD Projekt is helping Stadia players rescue their Cyberpunk 2077 save files from annihilation
https://www.pcgamer.com/cd-projekt-is-helping-stadia-players-rescue-their-save-files-from-annihilation/
The surprise dissolution of Stadia (which, to be clear, won't actually happen until January) has left users and developers alike scrambling to respond. Google is offering refunds on Stadia hardware and software purchases, which is definitely a good move, but it's not much help for people who own a game on Stadia and want to keep playing it somewhere else.
Ubisoft, IO Interactive, Bungie, and Tequila Works have all said they're looking into other options for their players on the platform, and now CD Projekt has weighed in with instructions on transferring Cyberpunk 2077 saved games from Stadia to other platforms.

'Strange things began to happen'—how a Ukrainian studio lost its game, saw it botted to hell, and saved it
https://www.pcgamer.com/strange-things-began-to-happenhow-a-ukrainian-indie-studio-saved-its-old-game-from-the-kiss-of-death/
(...) Robowars feels like one of those games most players will never hear of. There isn't much exceptional about this old tower defence game (good name though) which is, shall we say, heavily inspired by Plants vs. Zombies and was first released in 2014. There is something unusual about it though: it was seemingly abandoned, then around two years ago it disappeared.
And then, a few days ago, it suddenly reappeared. With a patch fixing all the things players had complained about. What gives? Sounds like the publisher's bank balance did, and maybe more.

Crossplay tensions simmer as Overwatch 2 controller players discover aim assist is disabled against PC
https://www.pcgamer.com/crossplay-tensions-simmer-as-overwatch-2-controller-players-discover-aim-assist-is-disabled-against-pc/
When Overwatch received crossplay last year, Blizzard made a few uncommon decisions about how PC and console players would play together. First, it's not an automatic process: unlike most other crossplay shooters, the only way for PC and console players to meet is when console players join a PC player’s group. Second: when console players do make it into a PC player lobby, aim assist on controllers is switched off.
With a new surge of Overwatch 2 players entering the mix, some console players are just now discovering the absence of aim assist when playing with PC friends (as spotted by Kotaku), and they're not happy about it.

Oh no, Konami's looking for experts to build its 'WEB3 and Metaverse' projects
https://www.pcgamer.com/oh-no-konamis-looking-for-experts-to-build-its-web3-and-metaverse-projects/
Fresh from resurrecting Suikoden 1 and 2 (and earning some amount of public goodwill in the process), Konami has seen fit to remind us that, yes, it's still the company that made over $150,000 off its Castlevania NFT sale back in January. A news release on the company's website states that Konami is on the hunt for people who can help it build the systems and services it needs to "provide new experiences such as WEB3 and Metaverse".

NVIDIA graphics driver quietly adds GeForce RTX 3070 Ti (GA102) and new RTX 3060 series support

https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-graphics-driver-quietly-adds-geforce-rtx-3070-ti-ga102-and-new-rtx-3060-series-support

I wonder if Nvidia's plan is to not just sell the left over stock but to keep producing Ampere as their more budget friendly GPUs. Cause it makes little sense to update all these cards with GDDR6X memory and such.

AMD Navi 31 GPU is rumored to support unannounced DisplayPort 2.1 interface

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-navi-31-gpu-is-rumored-to-support-unannounced-displayport-2-1-interface

Pretty much the biggest disappointment from Lovelace is the fact that the 40 series GPUs are still using the old DP 1.4a. If I had to guess, it's cause they didn't update the damn G-sync module so they didn't bother updating the DP interface either.

NVIDIA is testing “Verified Priority Access” for GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition purchases

https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-is-testing-verified-priority-access-for-geforce-rtx-4090-founders-edition-purchases

Nvidia continuing to take a page out of Evga's books. Considering how good the FE coolers were this gen and how little difference AIB coolers make over FE, it wouldn't surprise me if either next gen or the gen after, Nvidia either makes AIB margins so low that AIBs won't bother or they just tell them to get out.

Don't Undervolt the RTX 4090.

Very interesting. Traditionally, if you undervolt, you would get the same performance but with a lower voltage unless you undervolt aggressively. But he is showing that even if you undervolt a little, while the clock speed stays the same, you get less performance. The reason is that there's 3 different clock speeds, GPU clock, Video Clock and Effective Clock. While on the 3090s and prior, lowering the voltage allowed all 3 to stay the same, on Lovelace, the GPU clock stays the same but Video Clock and Effective Clock goes down.

If you are curious to see just how far ahead Nvidia is in workstation benches compared to the competition, all you need to do is glance at this chart:

You can go through more content creation and professional workloads benchmarks here:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-4090-24GB-Content-Creation-Review-2374/

Suffice to say while the 6900XT lags behind even the 2080 Ti, Nvidia decimates the charts

I'm surprised you missed this bit of bad news for AMD/RDNA3:

AMD Radeon RX 7000 “RDNA 3” Graphics Cards Allegedly Launching In December, Difficult To Compete With NVIDIA’s RTX 40 GPUs
https://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-rx-7000-rdna-3-launch-december-difficult-to-compete-with-nvidia-rtx-40-gpus-rumor/
A new rumor of AMD's next-generation Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards based on the RDNA 3 GPU architecture has been posted by Enthusiast Citizen. The leaker who has been very accurate with his previous leaks states that AMD will introduce two flagship variants in December and also shared a few performance estimates.

According to Enthusiast Citizen, AMD will be officially introducing its RDNA 3 family of graphics cards under the Radeon RX 7000 banner on the 3rd of November. This has already been made official by the red team. The retail launch of these graphics cards will take place in December so we're looking at almost a month late which shouldn't be a surprise considering the same thing happened with AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs which were officially introduced in late August but didn't hit retail launch until the end of September.

The leaker explains that we will be getting two Radeon RX 7000 flagship graphics cards termed as the "first flagship" and "second flagship". It is not known whether this is referring to the Navi 31 and Navi 32 dies or two variants of the Navi 31 GPU. Rest assured, both of these GPUs will come with an MCM design and feature TSMC's 5nm process node.

Enthusiast Citizen further goes on to state the performance of the AMD Radeon RX 70000 with the RDNA 3 graphics architecture. In terms of ray tracing and rasterization performance, the AMD line may have a hard time competing against NVIDIA's recently introduced GeForce RTX 40 series cards and especially the top RTX 4090 which offers anywhere from 50 to 100% improvement in standard rasterized workloads and further pushes the performance envelope in ray tracing and DLSS titles. As such, AMD may not be as confident in terms of pricing with their Radeon lineup as they are with the Ryzen lineup.

That's bad news because we need competition, and we need a strong AM to keep Nvidia in check.

The only positive side of this rumor, if it's true, is that if AMD can't compete with performance, they'll have to do it with price... hopefully.

Good catch but I think it's very unlikely Navi 31 won't catch up to 4090. Doubling the core count with a smarter IF cache and much larger memory bus and more memory bandwidth.

If anything, they won't be able to compete in Ray Tracing. I will say that December is also very late with a November announcement.

You never know, maybe the performance won't scale with the number of cores as well as with Nvidia's architecture. Or maybe it's just that the card will get within 5-10% of the 4090 performance and, while that is close enough for most of us, it's can be seen as a huge gap for others. Different perpestives.

And we already talked abd agreed that we would all be extremely surprised if AMD managed to catch with Nvidia on ray tracing. They're too far behind. The way I see it, if they manage to sit comfortably between Ampere and Ada in terms of RT, that would be great improvement from AMD given that right now it competes with Maxwell.

And yeah, the late launch and the big gap between reveal and launch is strange. Maybe AMD isn't really ready to launch the cards this year but they have to do to please investors.

Yea hopefully AMD can get some wins cause so far, this year looks like a dud for PC gaming in general.

Zen 4 = Barely faster than 5800X3D while requiring expensive platform upgrade.
Raptor Lake = Cheaper than Zen 4 but still barely faster than X3D but on a dead platform
Arc = Great price, shat drivers
4080 12 and 16GB = Clown
4090 = Massive improvements for $1600

If RDNA 3 doesn't do anything interesting, what a shit year

Yeah coming off a poor couple year of PC gaming, its been a barrage of disappointments and tone deaf announcements.

Off topic.. Hardware Unboxed did a analysis of DLSS 3 and included DLSS 2/native rendering comparisons.

The extra input lag when using DLSS 3 and visible artifacts isn't great. Granted at over 100FPS its hard to notice artifacts. Though needing such high frames with added input lag kinda negates the added smoothness by being less responsive overall. They also did tests to get to 60FPS target and its not pretty.

If they manage to get input lag on par with DLSS 2+Reflex that would be worth it. Rn its kinda eh, though with time if they address those issues it could prove to be a real game changer.

May take a while, but here's what the future of VR could look like: