Take advantage of Cyber Monday with this 17-inch RTX 4070 Asus gaming laptop for $400 off-
Gaming on a laptop can feel like a lesser experience when everything has to be squished down to a smaller screen than what you might use for a desktop PC. The Asus TUF Gaming A17 stands somewhere in the middle, giving you a nice screen size for non-gaming use without being wildly unrealistic as a portable machine. And right now, it’s $400 off on Newegg.
For $1,399.99, you can pick up this big screen gaming laptop with a beefy CPU tucked inside. The Ryzen 9 7940HS is a surprisingly powerful little chip with eight cores and a 4.0GHz clock speed. You can even save some battery life and play on its integrated 780M graphics. Gaming laptops don’t often come with that much power when they’re under $1,500.
The RTX 4070 graphics card in this laptop isn’t the best out there but it’s p…
Read moreToday I learned F1 cars can have their engines disabled wirelessly via IP connection-
We PC gamers often like to flirt with F1 driving, from sim racing to straight-up brand sponsorship and partnership. We tend to be a techy bunch, too. So I was a little angry at myself for not already knowing that, as Ex-F1 Senior Systems Engineer Dan “EngineMode11” explains, “An F1 car has an IP address.”
I mean, duh, of course F1 cars have IP addresses. Right? We’re talking about some of the most sophisticated automobiles on the planet, designed to chop sharp turns at well over 100 mph and quickly climb back up to 200+ mph, all without spattering person across the asphalt.
If everyday dawdler vehicles are now packed to the brim with electronics, including wireless tech (and they are), you can bet that F1 cars are, too. And we already know that F1 teams like Alpine painstaki…
Read moreThe only racing game series I’ve ever cared about has hit the 5 million player milestone, now bring on the dubstep-
A mere three months after it finally hit Steam and (probably more importantly, I admit) nine days after it hit consoles, Ubisoft’s live-service Trackmania has hit the 5 million player milestone. Ubisoft celebrated hitting the number in a tweet posted to the company’s account yesterday.
Ubisoft didn’t say explicitly that it’s managed to acquire those players thanks to Trackmania’s new presence on consoles and Steam, but it’s not exactly a dastardly riddle to figure out. The game originally released as a Ubisoft and Epic Games Store exclusive back in 2020, before sneaking onto Steam last February. Finally, it hit consoles on May 15 (it was meant to hit Stadia too, but, well, we all know how that turned out)
Trackmania is a rare and special thing: It has no licensed cars and re…
Read moreHelldivers 2 sales curve is ‘rare and amazing,’ says gobsmacked industry analyst- ‘I feel like Steve Irwin sighting a rare bird’-
We all know by now that Helldivers 2 is really good and really popular, but Circana industry analyst Mat Piscatella says the game’s sales success in its first few weeks of launch is almost unprecedented—and he’s pretty excited about it.
“Feel like Steve Irwin sighting a rare bird or something,” Piscatella said in a recent tweet thread. “Rare and amazing, in an Australian accent even.”
The thrill is driven by what Piscatella said is “an honest-to-goodness inverse decay curve,” which he explained is a phenomenon that occurs when a game flips the usual course of sales, which go hardest at release and then tail off at varying rates.
“It’s rare, particularly for bigger games. Just saying ‘growth’ doesn’t explain the nature—as ‘growth’ could be temporary, i…
Read moreTurns out Ratchet and Clank- Rift Apart CAN run on a hard drive… thanks to DirectStorage 1.2 on PC-
In a recently taken down blog post on Steam (via Wccftech), Nixxes, the developer behind the PC port of Rachet and Clank: Rift Apart, wrote that because of the recent DirectStorage update, you can play the former PS5 exclusive on a hard drive, albeit at its minimum settings.
When Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart was initially announced, Insomniac’s creative director, Marcus Smith, said that the game’s dimensional rift gameplay “would not have been possible without the solid-state drive of the PlayStation 5.”
However, it turns out that it is indeed possible.
The blog post also confirmed that this would be the first game to utilize DirectStorage with GPU compression.
“DirectStorage is designed to leverage the speed of fast PCIe NVMe SSDs, but the technology is also co…
Read moreOverwatch 2’s new space girl healer takes the throne as one of the most strategically satisfying heroes in the game-
Not since Kiriko has a new Overwatch hero single-handedly tanked the queue times in Quick Play. I only managed to get a handful of games in and I’m certain the wait times are only going to get worse as the trial for Juno, the game’s latest support hero, continues into the weekend. Not only are people clamoring to play her, she might actually be one of the best-designed heroes since Overwatch 2’s release.
Juno is a purple-haired, giggly astronaut who many people are comparing to other healers like Ana, Lucio, and Baptiste. On paper, that’s basically true: Her gun can heal and deal damage and she can move around the map pretty quickly with a double jump and a Hyper Ring ability that slingshots her team into battle. But she doesn’t feel like any of those heroes at all when you play h…
Read moreTwitch employees are worried the service could become a ‘zombie brand’, as a potential third round of layoffs looms, but luckily CEO Dan Clancy only eats ‘medium-sized dinners’ during international trips to meet streamers-
Twitch employees are concerned that the streaming platform risks becoming a “zombie brand”, and that further layoffs may lie ahead after nearly 1,000 jobs were cut from the company within the last 12 months.
A new report by The Wall Street Journal (via Eurogamer) reveals that Amazon paid $1 billion to acquire Twitch Interactive in 2014, but has received “little financial return” from the service in the ensuing decade. In brief, the report says that Twitch has always struggled to be profitable, even after significant growth following the launch of Fortnite in 2018 and again during the Covid-19 pandemic.
While Amazon doesn’t provide official revenue figures for Twitch, internal documents viewed by the WSJ state the livestreaming service generated approximately $667 million in …
Read moreWelcome to the strange world of custom RTX 4060 GPUs-
The world of custom RTX 4060 graphics cards is a strange one for sure. From adorable, single-fan Mini-ITX GPUs, to unnecessary three-fan models, there’s a 4060 for everyone it seems. And with the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB having launched today to little enthusiasm, I thought it was a good time to go over just how experimental and strange some of the third-party designs for Nvidia’s recently released RTX 4060 are, and why this card in particular affords such wild design variations.
Add-in boards like Lenovo’s Mini-ITX GeForce RTX 4060, currently limited to the company’s own prebuilt PCs, could one day hit retailers and give mini-PC enthusiasts all the benefits of a 40-series card in a small form factor. We’re also seeing somewhat unnecessary experimentation, such as that of Gigabyte’s tripl…
Read moreUbisoft says a Star Wars Outlaws planet is the size of ‘2 or 3’ Assassin’s Creed Odyssey map zones put together, which takes about 5 minutes ‘nonstop’ on a speeder to cross-
It’s not the size of the open world that counts, it’s what’s inside it—but I’ll admit I’ve been curious to see how Ubisoft plans to tackle the open world maps for multiple Star Wars planets. This is a notoriously tough nut for space exploration games to crack. BioWare tried to make Mass Effect 1’s barren planets more interesting in Andromeda, only to fill them with generic, cookie cutter quests that went over about as well as the facial animations. Bethesda justified Starfield’s largely dull procedurally generated planets as realistic. What should we expect from Ubisoft, which has made some truly massive open world maps, bringing that scale to the whole galaxy?
Well, for one thing, we know Outlaws won’t be going down the endless procedural planets route—Ubisoft has rev…
Read moreNewegg announces a hassle-free GPU trade-in program-
If you’re based in the US and you’re in the market for a new GPU, Newegg has a GPU trade-in program that might be of interest to you. It’s a way to grab yourself a credit towards a new card, with the additional benefit of reducing electronic waste. Well, on paper anyway. It’s not like your ‘old’ RTX 30-series graphics card can really be considered e-waste.
The idea looks good initially. After you add a new card to your cart, you’ll get an option to enter the make of your old GPU and its condition. Only RTX 20-series and RX 5000-series cards and newer are accepted. You’ll be asked to pay the full price for the new card, and after buying it, Newegg will cover the cost of shipping the old card with a prepaid UPS shipping label. After it receives the card, checks it and approves, Newe…
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