Nvidia’s $299 RTX 4060 means we’re finally getting a next-gen GPU that costs less than the graphics card it’s replacing-
You already know most of this, to be fair, but it’s all official now: the RTX 4060 Ti is going to be on shelf on May 24 with a retail price of $399. Yes, it’s taken five iterations of the new Ada architecture to finally get down to a new GPU priced at the same level as the graphics card it’s replacing.
And then the sixth tier card, the RTX 4060, is going to be on sale for less than the RTX 3060 launched at. Ah, graphics cards in 2023. They’re a treasure, aren’t they?
The RTX 3060 Ti launched at the same $399 sticker price back in 2020, and next week will see the launch of the RTX 4060 Ti with roughly 17% higher gaming performance. That’s the straight raster performance boost the Ada architecture is delivering in this new generation of mid-range GPU, though there is the extra speed bump you get from the Ada-only magic of Frame Generation.
In games that support it you’re then looking at a 70% performance boost and that’s a lot more tantalising an upgrade tha…
Original Fallout co-creator finally explains what made him leave the sequel- ‘I made an IP from scratch that nobody believed in except the team, and my reward for that was more crunch’-
Update 5/27/23: Tim Cain has followed up his prior two videos with a third further elaborating on his experience, asking viewers to approach his stories “with nuance,” and stating that “things aren’t as black and white in these stories as you make them out to be.
“These are real people trying to make decisions in the moment, sometimes they make good ones, sometimes they make bad ones.”
Cain stresses that he does not want viewers to demonize Interplay founder Brian Fargo on the basis of his recollections. “Yes, I think Brian Fargo acted badly sometimes, but he also acted really nicely sometimes.” Cain points to Fargo’s love and support of the original Fallout toward the end of its development cycle, and even reveals that the CEO never requested the “Brian Fargo presents” credit at the beginning of Fallout 1—Cain states that one of his collaborators, Leonard Boyarsky or Jason Anderson, came up with the idea as a way of thanking Fargo for his investme…
Here’s a Baldur’s Gate 3 mod that lets your party scrabble around on 4 legs like a plague of sleep paralysis demons, if you’re into that sort of thing-
Baldur’s Gate 3 has a smorgasbord of mods to choose from—adding quality-of-life features like introducing voice lines you otherwise wouldn’t hear, letting your companions chip in during conversations, or making Withers hot. I don’t like thinking about that one.
Good news! There are more horrors to repress. This latest terror from the twisted imaginations of the game’s fanbase comes scrabbling out of the deep like your most tenacious sleep paralysis demon—quite literally, I regret to say. Run On All Fours booked it onto Nexus Mods last week, and I have not been able to get the mental image out of my head since.
“Today I woke up and chose violence,” writes the mod’s author, FluffySpider, on the mod’s description page—well, they actually used strikethrough on the “choose violence” part, but I felt it only right to leave it in untouched—”[and] swapped the running animations for humans. Why? I have no idea lol.”
Despite the auteur’s insistence th…
If the Fallout TV series gets a second season it’ll have deathclaws, more than justifying its existence-
It’s surprising that season 1 of the Fallout TV series doesn’t have a deathclaw. They’re the most terrifying foe in the Fallout bestiary; when I think of Fallout I think of Vault Boy and I think of deathclaws. But television producers must practise restraint. They can’t just toss all the series iconography into eight episodes to please nerds, much to the chagrin of Redditors and me.
But season two of the Fallout TV series—if it happens, which it likely will—will almost certainly feature a deathclaw. In an interview with The Wrap, co-showrunner Graham Wagner explains that deathclaws aren’t in the first season due to a fairly fundamental tenet of storytelling: you can’t just front load all the good stuff.
“We wanted to get deathclaws, but we didn’t want to just throw it away. It’s such a monumental piece,” Wagner said, “we want to save something for season 2 to be able to do it properly, not just added onto the m…
Surprise! Minecraft’s brand new mob has rolled out months before the update we expected it would be in-
Minecraft launched some new creatures this week in the form of armadillos and eight new types of wolf. If you thought: “Hold on, aren’t armadillos the new mob coming in the Minecraft 1.21 update later this year?” Yup, that’s what I’d assumed too. They’d been in snapshots already, but now they’ve actually rolled out not as an experimental feature, but as part of a regular old game update this week (version 1.20.8 for Bedrock and 1.20.5 for Java edition). Surprise!
The new armadillos will spawn in the savannah and badlands biomes as we’d been told to expect. The 1.20.8 patch notes also reveal that they can be lured towards players with spider eyes—that seems like a niche snack choice—can be put on leashes, and will roll up into a protective ball when they sense danger like players sprinting nearby, undead enemies, or players riding by on mounts. Importantly, you also don’t need to kill them to get their scaley “scute” skins. They’ll drop those periodica…
Unprecedented ‘inside look’ at Call of Duty matchmaking debunks fan theories on SBMM and confirms our assumptions- ‘Skill is not the dominant variable’-
Call of Duty’s matchmaking is no longer a mystery.
Last year, Activision promised fans that it’d finally open up about how matchmaking works in Call of Duty. Today, it delivered: The unprecedented blog post dives deep into exactly which factors Call of Duty is looking for when grouping you with other players, and where its priorities lie. The post does not cover Warzone matchmaking or ranked modes.
It’s a longer list than you might assume. For instance: whether or not you have voice chat enabled affects matchmaking, as does what maps you’ve played recently. The blog also reaffirms comments from Activision studios over the years that Call of Duty values low matchmaking times and ping above all else. Yes, player skill is a factor too, but Activision says it’s not “the dominant variable.” Perhaps in this case, “skill-based matchmaking” is a misnomer.
Here’s how Call of Duty matchmaking works in order of importance, according to Activision:
1. CONNEC…
Diablo 4 season 3’s most powerful new items all drop off of its least popular boss-
Out of all the bosses added in Diablo 4 season 2, The Beast in the Ice was the most annoying one to kill. Not only did he have a lot of attacks you had to dodge out of before you could get a hit on him, he was also a pain to reach in the first place. If you wanted a chance at some of the most powerful items in the game, you had to collect nine frustratingly rare items every time you wanted to summon him.
In season 3, which starts tomorrow, The Beast in the Ice will get five new Unique items added to his loot table. Each of them are powerful enough to build your character around, like a new pair of gloves that increases the damage of your most basic skills by 200%. Instead of having to cross your fingers and wait for them to randomly drop, you can seek out The Beast in The Ice and hope you get them after a handful of runs.
It’ll still require the same amount of Distilled Fear to fight The Beast in the Ice, but Blizzard has increased the drop rate of Distilled Fear in Nigh…
These are our favorite Prime Day PC deals under $100- from monitors to SSDs to RGB lights-
Prime Day (Two) is ongoing and so far it’s been… a lot. Sales left, right and center, while wonderful, can also be a little overwhelming. And no small number of these deals still run triple- or even quadruple-digit price tags.
- We’re curating the best Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.
Not all deals are thus, though. We’ve seen our fair share of sub-$100 corkers, and many of these are still on offer with big discounts. From capacious and snappy SSDs to clackety keyboards and colorful RGB lighting, there’s plenty still on offer for under $100. Who said that PC gaming had to break the bank?
There are, of course, more peripherals than internal components in the sub-$100 category. You’re simply unlikely to get a great modern CPU or graphics card for under $100. There are a couple of less-for-function, more-for-aesthetic deals worth checking out, too. Without further ado, here are our favorite Prime Day d…
US to introduce ‘guardrails’ to ensure that companies benefitting from CHIPS Act funding spend it where they should be-
The US government is soon to begin awarding up to $52 billion in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. The funding is a part of the CHIPS and Science Act that President Joe Biden signed into law in August 2022. But before the funds are given, the US Commerce Department is introducing rules to ensure beneficiaries of the funding don’t spend it elsewhere, and it particularly doesn’t want it feeding back to China.
According to a report by Reuters, the proposal seeks to prevent recipients of funding from funneling money into ‘countries of concern’ such as Russia and China. A company with a global reach could theoretically engage in research or development of sensitive semiconductors in countries the US does not want to be sharing with.
The measures seek to restrict sensitive technologies from falling into the wrong hands. This includes quantum computing and AI technology, radiation hardened chips and communications equipment that could be used for things like m…
Tractor makers are scrambling to get their gear into Farming Simulator-
Where once it had to ask politely to put high-profile farming machine brands in Farming Simulator, Giants Software now has too many requests to be in the wildly popular simulator series, a new profile of the game in The Guardian says.
“In the beginning, we had to ask manufacturers to be included in the game,” said Wolfgang Ebert, Giants’ marketing manager, to The Guardian. “Today, we have to consider who we can integrate and what benefit there is to the game—we have many, many brands waiting to be included.”
It’s a fascinating look at how a once-niche game has taken pride of place as prestige advertising in the highly specialized world of farm equipment manufacturing. Giants can only include some 500 pieces of equipment in a Farming Simulator release, and how much money changes hands certainly has an affect on what goes in the game—though Giants is clear that its primary business is game development.
It’s definitely part of the appeal to manufactu…