Gaming News - Page 1

NVIDIA has announced the latest round of PC games launching with DLSS, Reflex, and other RTX technologies - kicking off with the release of the Alan Wake 2: Night Springs expansion from Remedy. Like the base game, it supports Full Ray Tracing (or Path Tracing) with the benefit of DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction to improve image fidelity.

The visuals in Alan Wake 2 and the new Night Springs expansion are so impressive and cutting edge that you need DLSS Super Resolution, Frame Generation, and Reflex to make it playable. Check out the trailer above, which includes some tasty 4K DLSS 3 footage with Full RT.

Black Myth: Wukong is one of the most anticipated PC games of 2024. The stunning Unreal Engine 5-powered game launches on August 20. There's no new footage of the game with Full Ray Tracing with DLSS 3.5 Reconstruction and Frame Generation this week, but we did get a cool-looking CG Trailer for the game's upcoming launch.

You've probably heard of third-party Steam tools like SteamDB, which can access data from the platform to present stats on games. Well, with similar third-party access provided by Epic Games for the Epic Games Store, a third-party tool called EpicDB (naturally) was able to access and scrape a database to reveal several unannounced games from publishers and developers like Sony, Square Enix, Sega, and Bethesda.

Epic has since updated its third-party tools so they can no longer scrape info from unpublished or unreleased titles from the Epic Games Store catalog, but not in time for PC gamers to go through all of the data and post some of the juiciest findings over on ResetEra.

Many of the unannounced projects and potential games are listed with codenames, but fans and internet sleuths were able to decipher a few. One of the more notable listings comes from Square Enix for a game called Momo, which is presumed to be a Final Fantasy 9 Remake thanks to pre-order bonuses like the Tetra Master Starter Pack giving it away.

Valve is being sued in the UK and accused of using its market dominance with Steam to overcharge 14 million gamers. The claim, filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London, says Valve is shutting out competition in the digital PC gaming market through its business practices.

"Valve is rigging the market and taking advantage of UK gamers," says children's digital rights campaigner Vicki Shotbolt, the person behind the claim with the support of law firm Milberg London LLP. There's even a website up for the suit, steamyouoweus.co.uk, which says that if the claim is successful, UK PC gamers could be eligible to take their share of the £656 million ($840 million USD) suit - around £44 each in compensation (or $56 USD).

Okay, so you're probably aware there's no shortage of digital platforms to buy and play PC games. There's the Epic Games Store, Battle.net, Ubisoft Connect, Xbox and the Microsoft Store, GOG.com, and more. And with that, you might be wondering what the lawsuit is carrying on about. Let's break it down.

Project G-Assist was a surprise announcement from NVIDIA at Computex 2024. It is a new AI-powered digital assistant designed for PC gaming with a GeForce RTX graphics card - or what the company now calls an RTX AI PC. Like DLSS, it's a general LLM or AI model trained on a broad range of titles, and Project G-Assist is ready to be plugged into any existing or upcoming release.

Project G-Assist's capabilities and features blew us away when we got to participate in a live demo of the technology integrated into the popular survival game Ark: Survival Ascended with help from its developer, Studio Wildcard. One of Project G-Assist's key features is that it can analyze and see what's happening on the screen. Plus, it has real-time access to game-specific data.

Ark is a game full of dinosaurs, so a few of the first questions we asked were simple things like, "What's that dinosaur on the left there?" "What's the best weapon to take out that enemy, and where do I find it?" As a general model, Project G-Assist, as seen in this example, has access to up-to-date lore and various Ark knowledgebases and Wikis.

Game tech demos are usually created to showcase new rendering techniques, advanced animation, or stuff like real-time ray tracing. Even though NVIDIA and Inworld AI's Covert Protocol tech demo features an impressive-looking and lavish hotel lobby with detailed environments, ray tracing, and highly detailed character models, the visual fidelity is simply here to showcase a groundbreaking new bit of tech - digital humans that you can interact with.

NVIDIA first showcased Covert Protocol at GTX a few months ago. At Computex 2024 in Taipei, the company presented the same tech demo with AI digital humans powered by NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) technologies running locally on a high-end GeForce RTX 4090 powered rig.

At the show, I had the chance to go hands-on with NVIDIA's impressive RTX AI technologies, and when it came to Covert Protocol, I was quietly blown away by the depth and breadth of its digital humans.

Apple isn't necessarily known for making products that are great at gaming, but with the rise of the company's own in-house chips that dream is becoming more of a reality.

At WWDC Apple showed its intentions to drive deeper into the gaming market, especially considering the popularity of the App Store and all of the games it offers. However, Apple isn't just looking at mobile, as the company explained it wants to expand the possibilities of its Mac product line to gamers that want to experience full AAA titles.

Apple stated during its keynote that its MacOS named Sequoia was going to usher in some considerable upgrades for gamers, such as the inclusion of Personalized Spatial Audio, which will arrive for games that support Game Mode. Additionally, this new audio feature will be launching on iPhone. According to Apple, Personalized Spatial Audio "significantly reduces audio latency with AirPods Pro (2nd generation).

According to NVIDIA and its CEO Jensen Huang, the AI PC era began with GeForce RTX and the 20 Series of desktop GPUs in 2018. For PC gamers, this meant using AI to make real-time ray-tracing a possibility with the arrival of RTX hardware and AI Tensor Cores. DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, is the not-so-secret ingredient.

Fast-forward to 2024, and AI-powered DLSS upscaling and DLSS 3 Frame Generation (which uses AI to generate entire frames) have pushed PC gaming performance to new heights across a wide range of hardware. With games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2, we're now at a point where full Path Traced lighting is a reality.

At Computex 2024, we saw two examples of how NVIDIA plans to empower game developers with new AI technologies. NVIDIA ACE helps create digital humans with whom you can interact. Project G-Assist uses AI and a general model trained by NVIDIA to provide in-game assistance, gameplay guidance, and even performance optimization, all through natural dialogue or text inputs.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard (formerly known as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf) is the long-awaited next entry in the fantasy RPG series from BioWare, and after a tasty reveal trailer during the recent Xbox Games Showcase, we now have close to 20 minutes of gameplay to chew through ahead of the game's 'Fall 2024' release for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.

BioWare has been working on this for several years now, and even though what we see in the extended gameplay video is from the game's introduction, it all looks polished, promising, and authentic to the series (if a little cartoony). Like the original Dragon Age: Origins, you can choose your race (Human, Elf, Dwarf, Qunari), faction, and history (Grey Wardens!), which will play into relationships, conversations, and quests.

In the video, we see a familiar face in the form of Varric and the villain of the game - Solas, a pivotal character from Dragon Age: Inquisition. For fans of the series, there's some additional good news: you can import certain choices and decisions from Inquisition that will impact how the story begins.

Although Microsoft Gaming chief Phil Spencer didn't outright come out and confirm that he and the Xbox team were developing an Xbox Gaming Handheld, he outlined what to expect from a potential portable Xbox device. One that we have to assume is in development.

"The future for us in hardware is pretty awesome," Spencer told IGN during a live interview following the company's big Xbox Game Showcase. "The work that the team is doing around different form factors, different ways to play, I'm incredibly excited about. Today was about the games, but we will have a time to come out and talk more about platform, and we can't wait to bring it to you."

When grilled for more information on what an Xbox "different form factor" handheld might look like, Phil Spencer stated that "being able to play games locally is really important," which means it will be more like the Steam Deck or ROG Ally than Sony's network-based PlayStation Portal.

Microsoft just announced it will be releasing three new Xbox consoles, two in the new Robot White color scheme and one in Galaxy Black.

The new consoles were unveiled by Xbox president Sarah Bond, who showcased the new Xbox Series X "Galaxy Black", which is exactly the same as the standard Xbox Series X performance-wise, but instead comes with a 2TB SSD.

The Galaxy Black console has drawn inspiration from constellations and space, featuring a silver, grey and green celestial effect that is meant to represent "thousands of games and millions of gamers playing on Xbox". The Galaxy Black edition will be a limited release and be priced at $559.99.