If game makers don’t like it, “they could decide not to use it, you know?” Last week, Nvidia’s public reveal of DLSS 5—and its “generative AI” enhanced glow-ups of gaming scenes—drew widespread condemnation from the gaming community. In a podcast published Monday, though, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang tried to…
Full-magazine reloads throw out muscle memory in favor of “higher stakes” decisions. For decades now, Counter-Strike players have gotten used to tapping the reload button whenever they have a spare, safe moment. Yesterday evening, though, Valve announced that it had decided this system needed “higher stakes,” overhauling Counter-Strike 2‘s reload…
Nvidia’s next frame-gen tech goes way beyond upscaling, and not in a good way Since deep-learning super-sampling (DLSS) launch on 2018’s RTX 2080 cards, gamers have been generally bullish on the technology as a way to effectively use machine learning upscaling techniques to increase resolutions or juice frame rates…
Creator apologizes after using Patreon funds for Gemini-powered magazine scan processor. Since Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” just over a year ago, we’ve seen a rapid increase in both the capabilities and popularity of using AI models to throw together quick programming projects with less human time…
Early Access impressions: New characters shine, but it feels like we’ve done this before. Do you remember the joyful satisfaction you felt when you really started to understand Slay the Spire? This isn’t a totally rhetorical question. If you’re reading this piece about Slay the Spire 2—published roughly a…
Advanced Shader Delivery uses precompiled shaders for “console-like load times” across PC hardware. Modern gamers are used to loading up a new game for the first time and being forced to wait multiple minutes while a “compiling shaders” step whirs away, optimizing advanced 3D effects for their specific hardware.…
Steam maker says settling the case would be easier but would set a bad precedent. Last month, the New York Attorney General (NYAG) brought a lawsuit against Valve accusing the company of promoting “illegal gambling” through its randomized in-game loot boxes. On Wednesday, Valve issued its first public comment…
Looking back at Dash Rendar, 3DFX cards, and a pivotal moment for Star Wars. I grew up in a Star Trek household, not a Star Wars one. More to the point, I wasn’t even allowed to watch Star Wars when I was a kid, so I didn’t see the…
Google is more focused on desktop gaming than ever before. Google has been tinkering with porting its Play Games platform to Windows for several years, but it started getting serious about it last year. Now, with the 2026 Game Developer Conference underway, Google has announced a new batch of…
What part of “this year,” exactly, is still anyone’s guess. Valve quickly reconfirmed that it plans to ship the Steam Machine and other recently announced hardware products “this year,” after an official blog post late last week set off some worried speculation about possible delays. While Steam’s 2025 Year…
