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Epic Games' own Unreal Engine 4 graphics engine powers countless games, some of them you're playing are probably powered by UE4 and you might not even know it. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is a UE4-powered game, which is absolutely killing it right now, and so is another Battle Royale game: Fortnite.

Unreal Engine 4 is one of the most, if not the most popular third-party engine on the market with massive games like Paragon, PUBG, and more powered by the engine. Epic Games is now working on optimizations to Unreal Engine 4 for larger maps, the perfect time for UE4 optimization now that Fortnite: Battle Royale is here, and PUBG killing the Steam most-played games chart constantly.

There are some huge changes for the console, with Xbox One and PS4 both receiving massive improvements. Check out what Unreal Engine 4.18 will deliver:

Shortly after announcing the PC spec requirements for its massive new Assassin's Creed: Origins game, Ubisoft confirmed that the ancient Egypt adventure can run at an uncapped FPS on PC--provided you have the hardware to do so.

Assassin's Creed: Origins is the biggest game in the franchise, and Ubisoft spent quite a bit of time plumbing the depths of ancient Egyptian history to recreate it before our eyes. Barring any major glitches or hiccups, PC should be the definitive platform to experience Origins in terms of frame rates...albeit the game does use dynamic resolution rendering on all platforms, including PC. Ubisoft says they were able to decrease the PC spec requirements because of this method, which typically attempts to hit an FPS target at the cost of lower resolution. This makes the game more accessible to gamers with lower-end builds.

The publisher also says that PC gamers can run Assassin's Creed: Origins at uncapped FPS (if their rig is good enough), and that the open world game will have built-in tools to help gauge performance and efficacy of their builds, including a native benchmarking tool and a program that measures and analyzes in-game performance.

Capcom today announced that Street Fighter V hasn't been abandoned: the fighter is getting a free arcade mode in 2018, alongside some other goodies.

Capcom is actually re-releasing the game in the new Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition for $39.99, but all existing owners of the game will get the new content included in the Arcade Mode, Extra Battle Mode, new V-Trigger Moves, and a Gallery for free. Existing owners will also be able to buy both seasons of DLC fighters with in-game Fight Money, or purchase them with premium currency. The new update will be out alongside the SKU on January 26, 2017 for PS4, Xbox One and PC. This announcement confirms early reports that no new Street Fighter V content would come until 2018.

The new Street Fighter V update will add:

Spurred by strong demand, Nintendo has dramatically increased the production of its new Switch handheld-console to 2 million units a month, sources in the upstream supply chain tell Digitimes.

The Nintendo Switch is in extreme demand, and is flying off shelves across the globe--in regions like Japan hundreds of people line up for lottery queues for the chance to buy a console. To solve this age-old "Nintendo Effect" supply problem, the Japanese games-maker reportedly raised its initial production order to 16 million units in March, and according to recent reports, has raised the order once again to 2 million units produced per month. Sources did not reveal the exact running timeline for this order, however Nintendo has only publicly confirmed conservative sales estimates of 10 million units in the fiscal year ending March 2018. Sources did say that the Switch may begin selling in China in 2018, and the production contract will likely further increase to reflect this.

Switch supply has currently been stymied by the current component shortage of key hardware like DRAM chips that are needed to make the console operate. Nintendo has strongly indicated that it has prepared for the shortage by stockpiling units in a massive surplus, and then releasing waves of systems when major first-party Switch games are launched; according to findings from the NPD Group, Switch sales skyrocketed alongside the release of first-party games like ARMS and Splatoon 2.

Global entry! We have teamed up with TUNAI Creative to give away five of their brand new DRUM Bass Enhanced Audiophile earphones to five lucky winners.

We are giving away five DRUM earphones in each of the available colors - orange, green, blue, silver, and black. If you can't wait, you can get involved in their Kickstarter here where some good deals can still be had.

Introducing DRUM by TUNAI Creative, the High-Resolution Bass Enhanced Audiophile Earphone. DRUM is engineered to deliver well-rounded sound throughout the audio spectrum, including clear, high-end, rich mid-range, and powerful bass. It gets you as close to perfect sound as our environment permits. DRUM by TUNAI is all about the sound quality, and the sound experience you've been waiting for.

Assassin's Creed: Origins is nearly here, and Ubisoft has released a finalized list of PC specification requirements so gamers can prepare their rigs.

In order to play AC: Origins in 720p 30FPS at the lowest settings, gamers will need minimum PC specifications including an Intel Core i5-2400 / AMD FX-6350 CPU, an Nvdiia GeForce GTX 660 or AMD R9 270 with at least 2GB of VRAM, and 6GB of RAM. Recommended specs for playing the game in 1080p at high settings include an Intel Core i7-3770 / AMD FX-8350 CPU, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 or AMD R9 280X with 3GB of VRAM, and 8GB of RAM.

"The PC platform overall is really important to us," Assassin's Creed global producer Jose Araiza said in a blog post. "That is why the PC version was developed in parallel with all the other versions by the main team in Montreal, in collaboration with our PC-dedicated team in Ubisoft Kiev. This approach was adopted while the game features were being designed, making PC and mouse-and-keyboard controls a full part of the equation from the get-go."

Monolith Productions has made good on its promise to make Shadow of War's lootboxes 100% optional, but this balancing act throws the progression off-kilter--and the game constantly tries to tempt players with buying lootboxes at every turn.

According to Eurogamer's Shadow of War review, the game showers you with enough loot, exp and content to make buying War Chests pretty much unnecessary. This echos previous words said by game director Bob Roberts just days ago: "In the game you earn resources at a regular pace and the systems are tuned to that so you don't need another option. At the same time, it's there as a player choice," he said.

But there's actually a problem with the game showering you with content left and right: it makes the game too easy, and you can become too powerful too fast. That's why the difficulty slider was put in--yet another balancing act to offset the affect of lootboxes, balances upon balances to ensure the game didn't become overwhelmed by frustrated gamers and get bad press. There's also another problem: although War Chests are totally optional, the game tries to tempt you every time you pause the game. With every pause, a carousel pops up to remind you that yes, you can spend real money on Gold to buy War Chests and further your adventures in the land of Middle-earth.

There isn't much wrong with PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, in fact the game has sold over 10 million copies and broke Dota 2's concurrent players by having over 1.6million concurrent players. Chinese players however do have an issue with PUBG and they have expressed their displeasure in the same vein that Firewatch and Dota 2 received backlash by flooding Steam Reviews with negative feedback.

Chinese players have received in-game advertisement, although they're only featured in loading screens and not in actual game play, it's still enough to upset the Chinese region and with great reason. The in-game ads promote a third-party VPN service that promises better internet connection for Chinese players when connecting to non-Asian servers. Steam Review show that in the past week over 29,000 negative reviews have been received, when compared to a total of 84,000 negative reviews since its release to Early Access in March this year.

Due to the fact that PUBG isn't free-to-play, why is there advertisement? Instead of promoting third-party services, shouldn't Bluehole use their resources to better support their Asian servers?

For all those fans of the Fast and Furious movie series, Rocket League developer Psyonix have announced that they're adding two new battle-cars from the iconic series.

Dom's 1970 Dodge Charger R/T and Brian's 1999 Nissan Skyline GT-R R34 are the featured premium Battle-cars that will transition into the Rocket League arena. Both cars will feature a new set of wheels and 6 new decals.

Available decals for the 1970 Dodge Charger R/T include- Alameda Twin, Flames, Good Graces, Rally, Sinclair, and Wheelman Decals. Meanwhile the 1999 Nissan Skyline GT-R R34 decals include- 2Bold, 2Cool, 2Tuff, Clean Cut, The Clutch, Home Stretch Decals

Intel is hours away from launching its new Core i7-8000 series of processors, with the new Coffee Lake CPU architecture being led by the flagship Core i7-8700K, which has now been officially delidded.

Intel's new Core i7-8700K was delidded by HKEPC, wherer we see that the new Coffee Lake-S processor has a die size of roughly 151mm2, making it longer than the die of the 7700K. This means that for the additional 2 CPU cores on the Core i7-8700K, Intel is using around 29mm2 more die area.

We should expect nearly all Core i7-8700K processors to reach 5GHz with some good cooling, think AIO coolers. If you want to go higher than 5GHz, you're going to want to delid the 8700K, to which we should expect delidding tutorial videos on YouTube any day now.

Tesla has most of the electric vehicle market in its hands, with so much of its marketing hype winning over the world for all the right reasons, and soon it'll be an entirely different industry... the trucking industry.

Tesla will unveil their new electric semi-truck on October 26, with a new photo of the purported truck showing up on the internet today. Someone posted the photo of the Tesla electric semi-truck, which looks absolutely incredible. It looks super thin and contained, versus the beefy front of a normal semi-truck.

Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has teased before that the entire unveiling event for the electric semi-truck is going to be "unreal". The semi-truck will, according to Musk "will deliver a substantial reduction in the cost of cargo transport, while increasing safety and making it really fun to operate".

Samsung has been working closely with Oculus on its GearVR mobile headsets, but now the company has finally unveiled its new Odyssey headset, a premium VR experience for $499.

The new Samsung Odyssey VR headset is part of Microsoft's new mixed reality headsets, with some of the highest-resolution VR and current-gen OLED panels inside offering "one of the more pleasant VR experiences" one of Mashable's editors has ever experienced.

Samsung's new Odyssey headset rocks a 2880 x 1600 display, which is a higher-res unit when you compare it to the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive with 2160 x 1200 resolutions. Samsung is also using OLED technology will is capable of superior colors, vibrancy, blacks, and is shaper than its LCD-based rivals.

Inno3D has finally released their cryptocurrency mining cards, with the limited 3-month warranty cemented in with the P106-based mining cards.

The new P106 mining cards are stripped down GeForce GTX 1060 graphics cards with their display connectors taken away, but without display connectors the mining-specific cards can't be used for gaming, ever.

As for specs, the P106-090 has 768 CUDA cores, which is way less than the 1280 CUDA cores on the proper GP106-400, the GPU that powers the GTX 1060. Anyone that mines knows CUDA cores don't do much for performance, it all comes down to memory bandwidth and speeds.

Obsidian Entertainment's Scott Everts designed the layout and built the worlds for every original Fallout game, including Fallout: New Vegas. So when he says New Vegas would've been a very different game if it hadn't been restricted by PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 hardware, we should believe him--and wonder what could've been.

Fallout: New Vegas is a contentious point for both Bethesda Game Studios and Obsidian Entertainment: the former feels spurned and somewhat jealous that fans regard New Vegas, a game that was made in just 18 months, as the best Fallout game, while the latter at Obsidian likely feel spurned that they didn't get their bonus and promised royalties because the game's Metacritic score was 1 point off (New Vegas scored an 84 on Xbox 360 and PC). While Bethesda typically won't talk about New Vegas, Obsidian will, and world-builder Scott Everts told PCGamesN some interesting things about the game being affected by console limitations.

"New Vegas would have been a lot different if it was PC only," Mr. Everts asserted. "We had a lot of plans early on. Like, 'Here's where the water is stored, here's where the farms are, here's where the government is centralized'. We had it all planned out - it wasn't just a bunch of random stuff." The master world-maker said that content was cut from the game due to these limitations--content is always cut from any game, but moreso when hardware restrictions come into play--and the team had to simplify the content that did make the cut so the engine wasn't overwhelmed.

Cuphead is a nice fit for Nintendo's new Switch handheld-console hybrid, and here's why.

After years of development and two delays, Studio MDHR's Cuphead is finally out in the wild, 1930's cartoon style and all. And it's since become a smash hit. Since Microsoft helped fund the project with its ID@Xbox program the game may not come to the Switch nor the PS4...but it's a perfect fit for the former.

With its enamoring style, Cuphead will instantly attract anyone in the room. I've shown Cuphead to about a dozen non-gamers in my life, and they all liked it--they smiled and asked me what it's from. They all wanted to know more about this delightful-looking visual experience starring two anthropomorphic beverage brothers. This folds neatly into a byproduct of the Switch: engagement.

Sources reportedly close to Capcom tell YouTuber "Gaming History Guy" Liam Robertson that Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite's budget was rather meager, and that the team recycled art assets and animations from previous games in the series.

There's something off about Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite. Gamers knew right away from the trailers, which were near universally panned by fans, but the fighter's actual release confirmed their suspicious--something weird was going on with the game. According to unnamed sources who are reportedly close to the developer (who affirmed their veracity by being right about the upcoming Monster Hunter DLC for MvC: I), this is because Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite had a restricted budget and developers had to make do with what they already had from previous games like MvC 3.

How much did Capcom spend on the fighter? The sources say the "shoestring budgeting approach" amounted to little over half the reserved budget for Street Fighter V's DLC.

Spec Ops: The Line is regarded as one of the best storied shooters on the market, but veterans at Yager who made the game happen aren't up for a sequel.

Spec Ops: The Line's rough five-year development cycle has been chronicled many times in the industry, highlighting the game's unique narrative design and the toll the experience took on the developers. "It was a 5 year process, so that it would be hard to fully encapsulate that in a reply here. In short, it was hard, stressful, occasionally soul-crushing, educational, enlightening, and ultimately very rewarding. When development was over, I think a lot of us were left with our own lingering pain and trauma from the experience. But ultimately, were proud of what we'd made," Mr. Williams said in a recent Ask Me Anything post on Reddit.

But what about a sequel? Even if 2K Games' parent company Take-Two Interactive magically greenlit plans for a sequel, and sought out the original dev team to make it, Mr. Williams says no, it's probably not ever going to happen--he'd rather eat glass than do another Spec Ops game.

343 Industries exec Kiki Wolfkill is very, very passionate about Microsoft's new Mixed Reality platform--so much that we should expect to see more Halo games based in the new medium.

Mixed reality--the mystical combination of virtual and augmented realities--has been lauded by evangelists and challenged critics since its inception, but the Halo developers at 343 Industries are keen on using the fancy technology to tell Halo stories. The studio plans to release Halo: Recruit--a small slice of tech demo that's "not a game, not even part of a game" but a five-minute toe-dipping that represents 343i's very early adoption of mixed reality--this month on Microsoft's new Mixed Reality platform. The ecosystem sees major OEMs like Dell, ASUS, Acer, LG and even Samsung working together to further VR and AR technology while being tethered to the Windows 10 operating system.

I've talked to a few people who tried the Halo: Recruit demo and the consensus is it's pretty bad and meager--it's this weird combination of 2D and 3D tech that actually simulates a theater-like experience that sees players take on the role of a UNSC recruit who shoots enemies on a 2D screen. Halo: Recruit is a glorified target range and really shouldn't have the Halo name attached to it--It's totally not what you'd expect from a Halo Mixed Reality experience, and you're not dropping into Master Chief's shoes to blast enemies who are projected in your home environment, AR-style.

If enough gamers want it, Final Fantasy XIV MMO game director Naoki Yoshida says the game could go free-to-play one day--or at the very least he'll consider it.

Final Fantasy XIV is one of the best MMOs I've ever played because it adds tremendous value to your experience. The amount of effort Square Enix puts into this game is staggering, and you feel that your money is well-spent. The game is one of the last bastions of subscription-based gaming out there, and throughout its triumphant relaunch as A Realm Reborn, the team has opened the experience up with an expansive free trial and some microtransaction additions. But it never lost its high-quality focus for active subscribers. So far lots of gamers agree with my asessment: Final Fantasy XIV broke subscriber milestones this year and saw 10 million cumulative players.

But Yoshida-san is so ardent in his cause to serve the community that if enough Final Fantasy XIV players demanded the game to F2P to make it more accessible, he'd consider the possibility.

Forza 7 has gotten lots of flak recently for its "pay to earn" scheme that sees gamers optionally paying real-world money not to directly buy in-game rewards, but to boost the possible outcome of said rewards. But this isn't a new trend in gaming--far from it.

Pay to earn is actually an old staple of freemium microtransactions, but it's used in new AAA games too. Take Destiny 2, for example. Destiny 2's microtransactions are creatively tied with the base game to essentially whet the appetite of players who become locked into the game's addictive ecosystem--addictive because of the loot grind cycle that's freely available to all players, but mTX offers yet another calculated layer to the addiction. Destiny 2, a paid $60 AAA game, contains a pay-to-earn tick...although it's more indirect than Forza 7. In Destiny 2 players can buy Silver to exchange for Bright Engrams, which contain mods, cosmetics, emblems, and most importantly, shaders. But if you don't like what you get, you can dismantle the loot box gear for Bright Dust, which is used as a second currency to buy other items, including EXP and loot boosts. So essentially you can convert real-world money into loot boosts--or you can simply level up an get Bright Engrams for free.

The second and third examples are free-to-play games. Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm lets you exchange Gems, which are bought with real-world money, for stimpacks, which boost the XP outcome for a period of time. Star Wars: The Old Republic, another free-to-play game, lets players buy Experience Boosts to increase their EXP gain and level up faster. While the trend may not exactly be new, the inclusion of these schemes in full-priced AAA games kind of is.