Gaming News - Page 1

CD Projekt RED and NVIDIA announced a new path-tracing powered visual mode for Cyberpunk 2077 called RT: Overdrive during last year's big GeForce RTX 40 Series reveal. With tech like NVIDIA RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI) for all in-game objects ranging from neon lights to car headlights and full-resolution reflections, it was initially showcased alongside NVIDIA's new DLSS 3 rendering with Frame Generation.

Cyberpunk 2077 with RT: Overdrive mode enabled, image credit: NVIDIA, CD Projekt RED

With DLSS 3 now an option in the game, we've got word via the GDC 2023 presentation "Cyberpunk 2077' RT: Overdrive - Bringing Path Tracing into the Night City (Presented by NVIDIA)" that the new RT: Overdrive mode is set to arrive in Night City as part of Update 1.62 coming on April 11.

No doubt the mode, like the fully path-traced Portal with RTX, will be super demanding on even the most powerful GPUs - including the GeForce RTX 4090. Odds are DLSS 3 will be required for a playable frame rate above 60fps at both 1440p and 4K, though it will be interesting to see if the mode is togglable on non-GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs. NVIDIA's Portal with RTX remaster has no restrictions on what hardware you need, even though it is limited to the top end of the GPU spectrum.

Multiple PC users are reporting that their NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti video cards malfunctioned while playing the recent Diablo IV early access beta test.

While Diablo IV's lenient PC spec requirements indicate a well-optimized game, some users share troubling reports of their expensive graphics cards failing during gameplay. There have been multiple reports of NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti GPUs failing while playing the Diablo IV early access beta, with symptoms like GPU fan usage skyrocketing to 100% following an outright hardware shut down.

The amount of posts on Blizzard's Diablo IV forums indicate the problem may be serious. One post entitled Diablo 4 Bricked my GIGABYTE 3080 Ti is the top-viewed forum post. The official Diablo Reddit also has lots of comments lamenting GPUs lost due to this glitch and relating the issue to what happened with EVGA's graphics cards with New World. The bricking issue seems to affect GIGABYTE RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards the most. Users are at odds with a possible cause, but the general consensus seems to be pre-existing issues from faulty hardware.

Valve has officially announced Counter-Strike 2, a sequel to CS:GO built on Source 2.

It's happening! Counter-Strike 2 is set to release Summer 2023 as a free upgrade to Counter-Strike GO, Valve today announced. Counter-Strike 2 will be fully optimized and overhauled in Valve's upgraded Source 2 engine, complete with major updates to lighting, physics, and other effects. A bunch of maps have been rebuilt from the ground up to really make the new engine shine.

In essence, Counter-Strike 2 is more like a big upgrade similar to Overwatch 2, or maybe the new Fortnite that's running on Unreal Engine 5. So much has been changed--UI, lighting, graphical fidelity, smoke grenades got a big adjustment, and even Half-Life Alyx's incredible bottle fluid effects are included.

Remedy's latest sci-fi shooter Control is a big success that has earned a 300% return on investment, new financial reports have revealed.

Control is the biggest game that Remedy Entertainment has ever made. Mostly known for its Max Payne trilogy, Finnish game developer Remedy delivered in 2019 a unique blend of Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and The Twilight Zone in an action-packed third-person shooter. The results speak for themselves. Control radically changed Remedy's business and the success of the game made Control into a fully-fledged franchise with multiple new games in development.

What's also interesting about Control is how much it took to make--or how little. Control had a development budget of €30 million, which is considerably less than most AAA games these days. According to Digital Bros, the parent company of 505 Games who published Control, Remedy's shooter made a total of €92 million in revenues and has sold over 3 million copies.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy today confirmed plans to lay off 9,000 more workers, bringing Amazon's total mass layoff count to 27,000.

Pandemic spending has dried up, replaced in just a few short years by inflation-driven recessing spending. Consumers are tightening their belts to weather higher prices and corporations are fighting rising costs in one of the only ways they know how: job reduction.

Amazon has already displaced the jobs of18,000 people, but now it will also lay off 9,000 more people in the next few weeks. Divisions like Amazon Web Services and Twitch, the popular game streaming service, will be affected. Twitch is going to lose 400 jobs

CD Projekt may have reset development on one of its new Witcher games, a new investor filing indicates.

It appears that CD Projekt has made the decision to reboot development of one of its new Witcher games. The publisher currently has five separate Witcher projects in various stages of development, including Canis Majoris (Witcher 1 remake), the new Witcher mainline trilogy codenamed Project Polaris, and Project Sirius, a new experimental game from The Molasses Flood, a previously independent studio that made The Flame in the Flood.

This lineup may not be going according to plan. A new investor report confirms that CD Projekt has created an impairment allowance for Project Sirius, which indicates the game has been scrapped in its current statement. CD Projekt intends to charge the current amount of Project Sirius' development costs of 42.9 million PLN (about $9.7 million) to its 2022 and 2023 impairment allowance. CD Projekt will recognize these charges as a loss and write them off.

After 16 years of streaming innovation, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear is leaving the company.

In a shocking announcement, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear confirmed he will be leaving the company and will no longer lead the billion-dollar streaming service into the future. The CEO, who started working at Twitch in 2006, says the he'd like to spend more time with his family: "Twitch is ready to move out of the house and venture alone."

Current Twitch President Dan Clancy will now take over for Shear as Twitch's new CEO, and Shear will stay on as an advisor for the company.

Square Enix is bringing its latest Final Fantasy game to Steam in an effort to sell more PC copies.

Square Enix's exclusivity contract with the Epic Games Store is now up, and Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin is coming to Steam next month. The Team Ninja-developed action RPG had been a one-year exclusive to the Epic Games Store on PC and will soon jump over to Steam, where it can sell many more copies.

The Japanese publisher has also lowered the base price of Stranger of Paradise to $39.99 on all platforms. The current-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of the game also have the same price.

Real-time ray-tracing has been one of the most talked about advances in PC gaming in recent years, and one of the most impressive games to feature the technology is CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077. A game that makes use of ray tracing for reflections, lighting, and other effects to add considerable depth and cinematic visuals to the game's futuristic Night City setting.

When NVIDIA lifted the lid on its new flagship GeForce RTX 4090 and GeForce RTX 4080 GPUs last year, it presented a look at a new ray-tracing mode coming to Cyberpunk 2077 called RT: Overdrive. The RT update is still in development and will make full use of DLSS 3 technologies and will be showcased by NVIDIA at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) next week in a presentation called Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive - Bringing Path Tracing into the Night City.

This is interesting for several reasons, but mainly because when we hear about path tracing in games, it uses ray-tracing for all in-game lighting, ala NVIDIA's Portal with RTX and Quake II RTX mods. Seeing this in one of the most technically demanding games in recent years is surprising and impressive.

Square Enix reveals new details on its complicated NFT game Symbiogenesis.

Square Enix isn't messing around. The publisher is going all-in on blockchain and NFTs, and has created an eye-opening roadmap for its new NFT game Symbiogenesis. The game now has a website with a dearth of information.

The website presents an RPG that's been misshapen to fit into a strange new experimental mold. These's a lot of creative ideas here but most of them probably will not catch on to any meaningful degree. The information is indeed confusing and not intuitive whatsoever, prioritizing layered mechanics and engagement-driven systems like forcing an odd co-op element to get players to work together to unlock the final mission.