Which games have DLSS splash screens while booting up?

Yeah we've seen them doing in the past with Geforce Partner Program like someone said before. Some really unsavory things going behind the scenes. Its almost as bad as video game publishers buying out content from developers and blocking them.

Think you may be right as in Arc is already quite strong as far as Raytracing goes and if there is marked an improvement with Battlemage, plus them putting on a bigger die.. it could be quite competitive with current gen higher end cards. And we've seen how agressive they are willing to go as pricing goes. They just need to sort out drivers, because though they have improved its still a little unstable - from what I've seen online. But yeah they've come a long way since launch.

And maybe part of why (if true), Nvidia is taking proactive steps to make it harder for upstarters like Intel in the DGPU space to get a foot in the market. I'd like a third player like Intel to break up the duopoly that Nvidia and AMD hold and especially Nvidia. But yeah, going to be a very steep hill to climb for Intel tbh. But I'm still rooting for them as more competition means less shennagigans from both AMD and Nvidia. Which hopefully leads more innovation and ofc better prices.

So as many of you know, I have been planning to buy a family pc that will do network based storage and stream videos along with general stuff and light gaming. But the other day, we had some people over with kids and I realized that as this will be an exposed PC, the external hard drives and such could get unplugged or pushed over and etc.

So I think I'll be buying a very cheap secondary PC who's purpose is only to be a network based storage and allow me to stream videos from it over wifi and such over the network. Now there's two sets of software that can do it that is fairly widely known. One is called Plex and the other is called Jellyfin. Now I was planning to buy and AMD based PC as their iGPUs are great but sadly, neither of those software support hardware accelerated trans-coding on Radeon hardware. Well Jellyfin technically does but according to their website, it doesn't look very good compared to QuickSync from Intel on their iGPUs or Nvidia but that would be too expensive in this case.

So I am thinking to get either

$440 CAD MINISFORUM Mini PC NAB5 Windows 11 Pro Intel Core i5-12450H Processor up to 4.4GHz 16GB RAM DDR4 512GB PCIe4.0 SSD Dual LAN Mini Desktop Computer,2 x HDMI,3 x USB Type-C,4 x USB Type A,WiFi 6,BT5.2

$610 CAD MINISFORUM Venus Series NAB6 Mini PC, 12th Gen Core i7-12650H Small Compter, 32G DDR4+512G PCIe4.0 SSD, 2X HDMI+2X USB-C 4K

Output, 2X 2.5G RJ45 Port, 4X USB3.2 Windows 11 Pro Small Form Factor

So which one should I get or if anyone else has any suggests?

did you know corps cant be trusted man, thats why you should play battlebit

Steam promotion : I have bought Sword and Fairy 7 for 12€.

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I really like Gears 5. And I don't like the Gears of War saga at all! I wasn't interested in playing with men who have three hundred kilos of muscle with no neck. But in this opus, they've had the good idea of making the gorgeous Kait Diaz the main character. With lots of co-op modes and plenty to do and unlock, for €9.99 it's a very good deal.

Very interesting video

AMD Starfield bundle starts on July 11th, will include Ryzen 7000 CPUs and Radeon RX 6600+ GPUs.

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-starfield-bundle-starts-on-july-11th-will-include-ryzen-7000-cpus-and-radeon-rx-6600-gpus

Considering how cheap some of those CPUs/GPUs have gotten, should be one heck of a bundle

Intel 14th Gen Core “Raptor Lake Refresh” reportedly launches between October 17 to 23

https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-14th-gen-core-raptor-lake-refresh-reportedly-launches-between-october-17-to-23

I will do a new run of FFXIII-2. When I did it in the past, it became my favorite Final Fantasy with the VIII. Can't to see it in a better way.

XIII-2 was amazing.

I liked the story and music.

Also the combat was great and I always went for Chocobos as my 3rd party member.

The Monday news:

SALES /PLAYER COUNT & DEALS

GOG has three new Deals of the Day and a new sale:

• These are the DotD, available until Wednesday:
  • The first one is Dawn of the Monsters, 50% off: https://www.gog.com/en/game/dawn_of_the_monsters
  • Space Haven, still in development, also gets a 50% discount: https://www.gog.com/en/game/space_haven
  • The last DotD is Democracy 4, 57% off: https://www.gog.com/en/game/democracy_4
• And the new Weekly Sale features up to 90% discounts during 7 days: https://www.gog.com/en/promo/20230710_weekly_sale https://www.gog.com/en/promo/20230710_weekly_sale

Fanatical has a new Star Deal and new bundles:

• The Star Deal is Persona 5 Royal, 48% off. It started yesterday and will run for another 24 hours, or until it runs out of keys (50% left): https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/persona-5-royal
• These are the new bundles that will last 3 days:
  • Rimworld with all expansions will be 12% off: https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/rimworld-with-all-expansions
  • Miraculous Rise of the Sphinx Ultimate Edition gets a 75% discount: https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/miraculous-rise-of-the-sphinx-ultimate-edition
  • And S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Complete Bundle is going to be 82% off: https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/stalker-complete-bundle
• By the way, the Red Hot Sale has entered the Encore stage, which means that it wll end soon. If you haven't done it yet, you should check it out now

SOFTWARE & DRIVERS

Denuvo plans to offer independent benchmarks in an attempt to prove its DRM doesn't cause performance problems
https://www.pcgamer.com/denuvo-plans-to-offer-independent-benchmarks-in-an-attempt-to-prove-its-drm-doesnt-cause-performance-problems/
It's still common for big-budget games to launch with Denuvo's Anti-Tamper anti-piracy software, and it's also common for those games' performance problems to be blamed on said DRM. Irdeto, the digital security company that bought Denuvo in 2018 (and previously tried to force Overwatch porn offline), has denied its software is responsible for those issues, most recently in an interview with Ars Technica.
Steve Huin, chief operating officer of videogames at Irdeto, claimed that comparisons using cracked versions of games that load faster and run more smoothly are inaccurate, because they're rarely based on the exact same version of a game. "There might be over the lifetime of the game a protected and unprotected version," Huin said, "but these are not comparable because these are different builds over six months, many bug fixes, etc., which could make it better or worse."
Huin is aware that simply saying this won't prove anything to the legion of players who blame Denuvo for every framerate drop they experience. "Our voice is unfortunately not sufficient to convince people because we're not trusted in their mind as a starting point in that debate," he said.
Irdeto has a plan, however: a program that will offer media outlets two versions of games to benchmark independently, with and without Denuvo Anti-Tamper, which he believes will prove "the performance is comparable, identical" between both. Apparently they hope to begin it within the next few months.

MODS, EMULATORS & FAN PROJECTS

Fallout: Nuevo Mexico, DLC-sized expansion for Fallout: New Vegas, gets first gameplay trailer
https://www.dsogaming.com/videotrailer-news/fallout-nuevo-mexico-dlc-sized-expansion-for-fallout-new-vegas-gets-first-gameplay-trailer/
The modding team behind Fallout: Nuevo Mexico, a DLC-sized expansion for Fallout: New Vegas, has released the first gameplay trailer for it.
This gameplay trailer will give you a glimpse at what you can expect from this upcoming fan expansion. Since this is a mod for Fallout: New Vegas, though, you should keep your expectations in check. In other words, don’t expect it to look better than Fallout 4.
>> The video is close to 20 minutes long.

You can't polish a turd, but you can comprehensively upscale its textures in Red Dead Redemption 2
https://www.pcgamer.com/you-cant-polish-a-turd-but-you-can-comprehensively-upscale-its-textures-in-red-dead-redemption-2/
Nexus Mods user garbageman42069—you read that right—uploaded a mod titled "Comprehensive Sh-t Upscale" today, which is something that at least 42 people in the world want according to the downloads statistics at the time of writing.
"Ever ride through Valentine and wish it was MORE IMMERSIVE??" garbageman42069 writes in big, bold letters. "I PAINSTAKINGLY upscaled SEVERAL SHIT textures for the benefit of the whole RDR2 community."
The page itself has several wonderfully arranged advertisement images, promising a "comprehensive overhaul", which makes Red Dead Redemption 2s dung "shinier than ever". "Even wolf poop!" it boasts. Comprehensive indeed.

Lore-friendly Skyrim mod fixes its most glaring realism error: The pheasants
https://www.pcgamer.com/lore-friendly-skyrim-mod-fixes-its-most-glaring-realism-error-the-pheasants/
Skyrim has plenty of oddities. There's the goldfish memory of your enemies, the way you can get good enough at pickpocketing to literally steal the shirt off someone's back, and how it's possible for NPCs to attain a level of narrative importance sufficient to ward off death . But those are nothings. Trifles. Mere bagatelles compared to the game's most major inconsistency: The pheasants.
Think about it. Pheasants are all over the place in Skyrim, but only ever as corpses. They hang in kitchens and linger in food halls, but you can count the number of living ones you see on no hands at all. Are we to believe that the denizens of Skyrim, like the hunters of the Dodo, reduced the region's pheasant population to a set of cold bodies and warm memories? How long have they been gone? Are those corpses you can take giblets from decaying by the time the game takes place?
Put these unpleasant thoughts from your mind, because Skyrim modders are here—once again—to preserve logic and save the day. A mod called Ring-necked Pheasants - Mihail Monsters and Animals returns the humble pheasant to its natural home: Skyrim's wilderness, not its pantries.
>> There's a comparison picture... between an in-game dead and living pheasant.

Here's a mod that makes your Skyrim forests all dense and lovely
https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-a-mod-that-makes-your-skyrim-forests-all-dense-and-lovely/
In videogames sometimes "forests" have like two or three dozen trees. That's too few trees. Or they have lots of trees, but the trees are really widely spaced out. Twenty or thirty feet apart. Obviously, all of these forests are nonsense. We won't even begin to address the forests where the trees are too dense to travel through except on the main path the developers want you to follow.
For all its strengths, Skyrim is a game without good forests. Too few trees, and they're too small. No more! Building on work done in earlier mods, Fabled Forests for Skyrim Special Edition gives you "tall, dense, FPS-friendly forests to get lost in."
Modder Kojilama offers up two versions: One is just nice, dense, lush woodlands with tall trees. Not so tall that you can't have sunlight through the trees, however. Fabled forests also tweaks the sizes of the trees a bit, randomly, so that there's diversity in how they show up.
The other, Fabled Forests of Mythic Proportions, uses huge trees akin to those giants that populate the west coast of North America, turning your woodlands into "a dark and inescapable labyrinth." These are forest so dense, with trees so huge, that they're maze-like and dark at the roots. It transforms the area around Riverbend to be nearly unrecognizable.
>> There's one screenshot.

GAMING NEWS

To the surprise of no one, NBA 2K24 is still old-gen on PC
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/to-the-surprise-of-no-one-nba-2k24-is-still-old-gen-on-pc/
A few hours ago, we informed you about the new crossplay feature that NBA 2K24 will support. As its leaked trailer suggested, crossplay will be only available on the Next-Gen version of NBA 2K24. And, according to the game’s official FAQ, NBA 2K24 PC will be once again based on the old-gen version.
As the game’s official FAQ confirmed, only the PS5 and the Xbox Series S|X versions will support crossplay. What this ultimately means is that the PC version will be once again based on the old-gen version of NBA 2K24. I mean, you don’t have to be Albert Einstein to put two and two together.

Monday news, part two:

Rainbow Six Siege cheater who swatted Ubisoft Montreal with a fake hostage call gets a three-year community sentence
https://www.pcgamer.com/rainbow-six-siege-cheater-who-swatted-ubisoft-montreal-with-a-fake-hostage-call-gets-a-three-year-community-sentence/
A Montreal Gazette report says 22-year-old Yanni "Y4nnOXX" Ouahioune, the man responsible for a 2020 swatting that forced the evacuation of Ubisoft Montreal, has been given a three-year community sentence—a non-custodial sentence that allows people convicted of some non-violent crimes to serve their time outside of prison—by a court in France.

Baldur's Gate 3 will have an in-game newspaper that will react to your choices⁠—but you can also break into the office and control the press
https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-will-have-an-in-game-newspaper-that-will-react-to-your-choicesbut-you-can-also-break-into-the-office-and-control-the-press/
There were a lot of things in Larian's final "Panel From Hell" preview of Baldur's Gate 3 that have me more excited than ever for the upcoming RPG, but the top spot may very well go to the funny papers: Baldur's Gate 3 will have an in-game newspaper, "Baldur's Mouth," that will change based on the decisions you make.
>> And the hardest difficulty setting will test you.

Baldur's Gate 3 will let you respec your characters: 'We want the players to really experiment with what is possible'
https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-will-let-you-respec-your-characters-we-want-the-players-to-really-experiment-with-what-is-possible/
Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot going on, and that applies to character classes and subclasses as much as anything else. That kind of choice can be intimidating, especially when the unknowable consequences of a poor decision has the potential to leave you unhappy (or straight-up screwed) 40 hours in. The good news for anyone worried about being hung up by a bad call is that developer Larian Studios has confirmed that players will be able to respec their characters if they want to.
>> And it will give you many options for romance.

Fans of Forager and Satisfactory should probably check out Nova Lands
https://www.pcgamer.com/fans-of-forager-and-satisfactory-should-probably-check-out-nova-lands/
A surprise release from last month really is quite fun: Nova Lands is a casual base-building and exploration game that blends the automation satisfaction of something like Satisfactory with the delightfully unserious vibes and "but wait, there's more!" energy of incremental crafting in Forager to create a nice little sci-fi adventure that's easy to spend hours on.

Jagged Alliance 3 will have mod support and co-op, thank goodness
https://www.pcgamer.com/jagged-alliance-3-will-have-mod-support-and-co-op/
The latest dev diary for upcoming turn-based merc-manager Jagged Alliance 3 outlines a couple of interesting features. The first is mod support, which is particularly relevant given the way modders kept Jagged Alliance 2 alive. Here's our own Evan Lahti singing the praises of the 1.13 mod, which "enhances what's there, upping the maximum resolution, adding hundreds of new weapons—including gratifying super-items like Ghillie suits and depleted-uranium bullets—reorganizing hotkeys and altering the AI so that enemies flank better, take cover more often, climb onto roofs, and utilize suppressive fire."
Jagged Alliance 3 will receive mod support as part of a post-launch update, the dev diary explains: "Modders will have access to the tools we use internally to create content such as mercs, weapons, items, quests, voice responses, and can even add support for new languages."

Adam Jensen's voice actor says he's not working on a new Deus Ex
https://www.pcgamer.com/adam-jensens-voice-actor-says-hes-not-working-on-a-new-deus-ex/
Actor Elias Toufexis has been busy in recent years, showing up as space spy Kenzo in The Expanse, delightful rubber forehead alien L'ak in Star Trek: Discovery, and The Penguin in Gotham Knights, among other roles. According to the actor though, he hasn't heard anything about reprising the role most gamers know him for: Deus Ex prequel series protagonist Adam Jensen.

The lead dev of inXile's steampunk RPG says it's a 'love child' of two of the best RPGs ever made⁠—and he should know, he helped make them
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-lead-dev-of-inxiles-steampunk-rpg-says-its-a-love-child-of-two-of-the-best-rpgs-ever-madeand-he-should-know-he-helped-make-them/
"Our game is like if Dark Souls had a baby with God of War," The marketing guy insists to you. "It is as though The Sims had sex with Neverwinter Nights," He raves, fingers digging into your arm. His eyes dilate, "Our game is reminiscent of a theoretical scenario where Twisted Metal was the illicit court paramour of Barbie Horse Adventures, and they produced a royal bastard capable of upending this kingdom's fragile politics."
I've heard this shtick before, is what I'm saying, but it's definitely way more believable when the guy saying it actually helped make both of the copulating games in question. "With deep world building, compelling narrative, crunchy RPG systems, engaging gameplay, and massive reactivity," Wrote Chad Moore, project director on inXile's Clockwork Revolution, "I’ve always described [Clockwork Revolution] as the love child of [Arcanum] and [Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines]"

Retro-RTS Dying Breed comes complete with campy FMV cutscenes
https://www.pcgamer.com/retro-rts-dying-breed-comes-complete-with-campy-fmv-cutscenes/
In the golden age of the RTS we thought that FMV cutscenes were really cool and fun. Then, later on, we decided they were very bad and made us cringe. Now we have come full circle and realize that they are good, actually.
Thus we receive as a gift from old-school strategy publisher MicroProse a fresh and beautiful new single-player retro-RTS by developer Sarnayer, complete with cornball live action FMV cutscenes that I can already tell are going to be terrible but in a good way.

Following the success of Final Fantasy's Pixel Remasters, Square Enix is considering more old games
https://www.pcgamer.com/following-the-success-of-final-fantasys-pixel-remasters-square-enix-is-considering-more-old-games/
During the Q&A portion of Square Enix's recent 43rd Annual Shareholders' Meeting, one shareholder asked the question everyone's been thinking about. (Apart from "Can you just confirm a release date for Final Fantasy 16 on PC already?") As spotted by VGC, the shareholder asked, "Final Fantasy I-VI Pixel Remaster has been well received. Are there plans to remaster other past titles? Personally, I would like to play Xenogears."
"We will refrain from sharing information about new titles," one of Square Enix's board members replied, "but we are considering various ideas within the company and hope that you will look forward to forthcoming announcements."

The king of military sims finally goes to WW2 with Arma 3's Spearhead 1944
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-king-of-military-sims-finally-goes-to-ww2-with-arma-3s-spearhead-1944/
Just when I figured I was done with Arma 3, resigning myself to stepping away from the military simulation genre for a while to wait for the inevitable Arma 4, they find a way to drag me back in. That way is, of course, turning over the guttural Curtiss-Wright R-975 Whirlwind radial engine of a M4A1 Sherman tank to go blow up Nazis.
How can I resist this pitch? "Spearhead 1944 places you in the boots of the soldiers fighting to break out from a tenuous foothold in the hellish maze of the bocage to liberate occupied Normandy" and then also "Explore 150 km² of unique terrain, based on real locations and topography of North-West France." There have been WW2 mods in Arma 3 for years, but nothing like this.

Diablo 4 developers gently suggest players should 'take a break', as the brutal grind continues to wear them down
https://www.pcgamer.com/diablo-4-developers-gently-suggest-players-should-take-a-break-as-the-brutal-grind-continues-to-wear-them-down/
As reported by Gamesradar+, a developer livestream last week featured an offhanded remark by associate game director Joseph Piepiora while they were discussing Diablo 4's seasonal structure.
"When you’ve reached all the goals and done the things you think are important, take a break, that's fine [...] we do the same thing," he then goes on to add "when a new season [arrives] and there's new things for you to come check out, that's a great time to come back [...] that's exactly when you should come back and check out Diablo 4 fresh."