Gaming News - Page 1

Although it's an update aimed at game developers, 3D artists, and other creators who use Unreal Engine, the latest Unreal Engine 5.4 update is chock full of good news for gamers across PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, especially for games that will fully utilize Unreal Engine 5's ray tracing and Nanite rendering capabilities.

Many of the updates and improvements are based on developers targeting 60 FPS, and this performance level is becoming the new norm for gamers. "With many developers targeting 60 Hz experiences, we've invested significant effort into improving rendering performance in UE 5.4," Epic writes.

This includes software variable rate shading (VRS) via Nanite, which will bring "substantial performance gains" to rendering while improving hardware ray-tracing (GPU instance culling has been added) and path-tracing performance. The update notes that ray tracing performance is sometimes improved by a factor of 2X.

Gray Zone Warfare is a new Unreal Engine 5-powered realistic tactical FPS set on a mysterious island in Southeast Asia that is coming soon to PC (via Early Access on Steam). Described as "a vast MMO open world with PvEvP and PvE gameplay, it's currently one of the most wish-listed games on Steam.

As part of its weekly DLSS update, NVIDIA has confirmed that the game will launch with DLSS 3 Frame Generation, Super Resolution, and NVIDIA Reflex support. This will be useful because the game features real-time ray tracing via Unreal Engine 5's Lumen lighting system.

The other game getting DLSS 3 support this week is the DLC for the popular co-op looter shooter Remnant II. The launch of the Remnant II: The Forgotten Kingdom DLC/expansion supports DLSS 3 and Frame Generation, boosting performance by up to 3.5X.

Halo Infinite fans aren't happy with the new free operation pass.

Halo Infinite's new Operation: Banished Honor battle pass rolls out on April 30, bringing a new 20-tier track of digital goods for gamers to unlock. Only...the tiers are a bit lackluster compared to previous passes. There's a big reason for that: 343 Industries wants to make sure you have enough UNSC space bucks to spend on bonus trinkets.

The devs just announced that Spartan Points are coming to Halo Infinite. That's not a premium currency--Infinite already has credits, which are sold for real money. Instead, Spartan Points are a "soft" currency that can be earned by playing the game. SP will roll out alongside the new Banished Honor pass, but there's just one issue: Spartan Points--which are free--apparently make up a big proportion of the free operation pass.

Spartan Points are coming to Halo Infinite, but thankfully they're still free.

343 Industries today announced some changes coming to Halo Infinite's cosmetic rewards. The developer will be introducing Spartan Points to Halo Infinite as part of the Operation: Banished Honor event on April 30, a new type of "soft" currency that isn't sold for real money. Halo Infinite will soon have Credits as the premium currency, and Spartan Points as the soft currency.

Spartan Points were originally introduced to the Halo Master Chief Collection in 2022, and back then, 343i had originally wanted to charge money for the points and sell them as premium currency. Massive backlash forced the studio to abandon these plans. The system is similar to the cR economy found in Halo Reach.

New PlayStation exclusive Stellar Blade appears to get a sales lift from positive reviews.

Reviews for Shift Up's new femme fatale action game are in, and the dust has settled on a strong 82 out of 100 on Metacritic. It looks like these positive reviews may have boosted Stellar Blade's game sales in the United States.

Stellar Blade has enjoyed a boosted position on the PlayStation Store's top 25 best-selling games. The Korean hack-and-slash is now in the #12 spot, beating out Overwatch 2 and Fallout 76 while brushing up against the mighty Roblox. At #12, Stellar Blade is higher today than it has been since I started tracking sales data a week ago. Just yesterday, Stellar Blade was at #17 - on April 17, Steller Blade was #21.

NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR aren't the only upscaling techs in town, lest you forget that Intel has its XeSS rival too - and Team Blue is continuing to push support for it.

To that end, VideoCardz picked up on the fact that Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora just had XeSS upscaling added with a new patch. This is update 3.2 which weighs in at a 3GB download on PC - and a similar size on consoles, where it adds something else: support for a 40 FPS mode.

Horizon Forbidden West also just received a new patch v1.3 via Steam and the Epic Games Store, and this improves XeSS, delivering support for the newest version.

Digital Foundry has done another discussion on what to expect from Sony's PlayStation 5 Pro, which recently had its specifications leak online, revealing what is under the hood of the coming console.

According to the leaks Sony's PS5 Pro will come with a range of performance improvements, with one being a 45% increase in GPU performance compared to the standard PS5. Digital Foundry explains the PS5 Pro will come with PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), Sony's new upscaling technology, and Ultra Boost mode, which is designed to help games using Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) achieve a higher framerate.

The YouTube channel says that games using AMD FSR 2 will likely benefit quite a lot from the PS5 Pro hardware, which would be titles such as Star Wars Jedi Survivor, Avatar Frontiers of Pandora, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Final Fantasy XVI. Digital Foundry says all of the aforementioned titles, and any other title that specifically uses a VRR mode will benefit greatly with the PS5 Pro, likely clearing up issues of dynamic resolution scaling being overused resulting in image quality degrading at random times throughout the game.

Ubisoft's long-standing series is expected to get Cillian Murphy to play its next villain in Far Cry 7, according to a known Assassin's Creed leaker.

Oscar-winning actor Cillian Murphy was recently decorated for his portrayal of Robert J. Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan's film "Oppenheimer". Now, rumors are circulating that he's taking his actor prowess to the video game industry, specifically Ubisoft's Far Cry 7. If true, it's likely Murphy will take on the role of the game's main villain, similar to how Giancarlo Esposito played Antón Castillo in Fary Cry 6.

Leaker' xj0nathan' said that an announcement for Far Cry 7 is due to happen extremely soon. Far Cry 7 leaks date back to as early as last year, with those leaks suggesting Ubisoft's next instalment in the series will make some major mechanical changes, such as adding a 72-hour that's similar to Dead Rising.

If you're familiar with Peter Jackson's incredible The Lord of Rings trilogy of films, then you're probably aware that it helped create one of the best practical effects, design, and collectibles companies in the world called Weta Workshop.

Today, we've got a very cool announcement - the company is teaming up with publisher Private Division to create a brand-new game set in J.R.R Tolkein's iconic universe. The game is called Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game, and it's set to launch in the second half of 2024 on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (via Steam).

As for what style of game it is, well, it sounds a little bit like The Hobbit meets Nintendo's Animal Crossing in that there's no real action or orcs or armies of Sauron to contend with - instead, you'll live out the idyllic life of a Hobbit living in the Shire.

Capcom has let us know that there's a big patch coming for Dragon's Dogma 2, but it has disappointed a good number of players who were hoping that the well-publicized performance issues affecting the game might be addressed.

Sadly, smoothing over the wrinkles regarding performance hitches - and serious slowdowns in some areas of the game - is not part of the plan for the update coming later this month.

Instead, there are various gameplay tweaks and fixes, the headline one of which is an adjustment for the infection frequency of dragonsplague, reining that in somewhat - and making it more obvious when a pawn is infected (their glowing eyes, for example, will stand out more).