This is all prototype hardware for now, but Asus has shown off an Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics card running without the need for any power cables. Instead, the card uses a custom slot on the motherboard to gain access to up to 600W of power.

Of course, that means you’ll not only need custom graphics card supporting the new power delivery interface, but also a special motherboard. It’s unclear whether Asus intends this to be a new industry-wide standard or remain something proprietary to its own products.

If this new tech is Asus-only, that obviously limits its appeal. After all, you’d be locked into Asus motherboards and graphics cards. But Asus says that motherboards supporting the new power delivery solution remain compatible with conventional graphics cards, which helps.

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“When life happens,” runs the copy for Armored Core 6’s new ad, “Mechless Mutual Insurance covers everything* to give you peace of mind.” The asterisk will turn out to be quite important. In scenes no Armored Core fan ever thought they’d see, the new game is being marketed with a skit starring Rainn Wilson, the American actor best-known for his role as Dwight Schrute in the Office.

It’s that role being channelled here, as Wilson plays a harassed insurance clerk at Mechless Mutual, whose job mainly involves telling the owners of mechs that no, they don’t cover that. As the queries and footage keep on coming in, so does Wilson’s facade begin to crack, until he’s weeping on the floor and praying for a good old-fashioned fender bender: something, anything, that doesn’t involve mechs.<…

Grand Theft Auto 6, the latest open-world crime simulator from Table Tennis studio Rockstar Games, got its first trailer yesterday. Perhaps you heard. So far as I can make out, the reaction so far has been a kind of obsessive euphoria, as literally millions of people around the world pore over 90 seconds of footage to pick out details, theorycraft, and plan literal crimes against humanity. 

So, yes, people are very excited. Type the letters GTA into a social media search bar or glance at any of the series’ myriad subreddits and you’ll find a sea of fans in ecstasy over Rockstar’s long-anticipated reveal. “What the fuck are those in-game graphics,” reads a relatively measured and highly rated comment from Reddit user aweh_sassy, “it looks real.” 

Other user…

All of us in the PC Gamer office love great OLED displays for gaming, thanks to their super fast response times, wonderfully rich colours, and superior HDR performance. What we’re not so keen on is the fact that none of them are very bright and there’s always the issue of how long they’ll last before burn-in ruins them. Well, LG has announced a new OLED display for laptops that aims to solve those two problems in one…by using two OLED panels.

The tech has the simple name of tandem OLED and if you think that you’ve heard of this before, then you’ll be right—Apple has implemented the system in its recently updated iPad Pro range. Whether those tablets are using LG’s panels isn’t clear as Apple is known to use Samsung for display screens, as well as LG, but I sh…

Some Hogwarts Legacy early access players are having trouble getting the game to run smoothly on PC, even with hardware that meets its minimum system requirements.

The open world game will be available for everyone tomorrow with a day one patch, though it’s already playable for those who purchased the $70 deluxe edition. The Friday patch will include fixes for game crashing, stuttering, lag, and other performance improvements, according to Warner Bros. But right now, the game appears to struggle on a variety of hardware configurations.

The most common issue seems to be stuttering, a sadly common problem for many games (not all!) that run on the Unreal Engine. I’ve seen it myself in the opening section of the game: the in-game scene starts and everything chugs as if your PC c…

Just because Black Friday isn’t quite here yet, it doesn’t mean that retailers can’t get in on the action early. For instance, Newegg is offering an impressive discount on a 27-inch, 1440p TUF Gaming monitor priced at just $200. 

The Asus TUF Gaming VG27AQA1A was already competitively priced at $250, so an extra $70 off is a nice incentive. It also makes it very close to the same price as some of the best 1080p Black Friday gaming monitor deals we’ve highlighted so far. And cheaper than some of the other 1440p displays on sale now.

This 27-inch WQHD (2560 x 1440) monitor boasts an overclockable refresh rate, peaking at 170Hz (144Hz standard). Additionally, it features a 1ms response time and supports both HDR10 and FreeSync, though it is also G-Sync compatible.

I’…

Released in 2017, Lawbreakers was the first game from the now-defunct Boss Key Productions, a studio founded by Cliff Bleszinski following his departure from Epic Games. It was a high-speed, high-skill FPS that slotted neatly into the Unreal Tournament lineage but, despite being really rather good, lasted barely a year before going offline forever.

Or so it seemed. Bleszinski is an outspoken sort and, ever since Boss Key went down, has at various points teased the possibility of a Lawbreakers comeback: even saying last year that his “LA lawyer” was on the case. Sadly even LA lawyers find it difficult to get around the fact that Nexon owns the rights to the game, and there’s been no official revival of the title.

But unofficially, a group of devote…

The Mortal Kombat character Johnny Cage is very heavily inspired by real-world action star Jean-Claude Van Damme, to the extent that Cage’s original appearance is basically a direct lift from the seminal JCVD flick Bloodsport. It took more than 30 years, but now the Mortal Kombat universe finally has the real deal: The Muscles from Brussels will be available as an optional skin for Johnny Cage in the upcoming Mortal Kombat 1.

Van Damme’s appearance in Mortal Kombat 1 was revealed—of course—in a wildly violent trailer that concludes with a gratuitously brutal fatality that sees Johnny Cage go for a ride in one of JCVD’s expensive European sports cars. (Most of him, anyway.) It’s fairly typical Mortal Kombat fare, and almost restrained compared to some of the finishers w…

As initially reported by The New York Times and confirmed by The Hollywood Reporter, Jon Stewart’s Apple TV+ series The Problem with Jon Stewart was canceled just weeks before filming of the third season was scheduled to start. According to one of the NYT’s sources, “Mr. Stewart told members of his staff on Thursday that potential show topics related to China and artificial intelligence were causing concern among Apple executives”. According to THR’s sources, executives told Stewart he had to be “aligned” with them regarding the show’s topics, and that led to him deciding to leave.

Apple is reportedly working on its own AI large-language model, and has banned its employees from using other AI tools, such as ChatGPT. AI tools are also used by the iPhone’s photography and search sof…

When you think about it, it’s not all that weird that there’s a grim, Bloodborne-esque action RPG based on the story of Pinnochio. 

If you’ve ever read the original The Adventures of Pinocchio (not the Disneyfied version) you know the fable is plenty dark already. When Pinnochio first meets Jiminy Cricket he immediately kills the talking bug with a hammer. Pinnochio’s friend, a little boy named Candlewick, gets turned into a donkey and is forced to work on a farm until he dies of exhaustion. It’s dark stuff!

So the life of Pinocchio makes fertile ground for Lies of P, Neowiz’s action ARPG set in 1800s steampunk London. IGN got firsties on the new gameplay trailer you can see above, though I gotta say in the two-minute running time there’s maybe ab…

It is of course a made-up accolade, but there’s a strong argument for Wudijo being the best Diablo 4 player out there: or at the very least the most hardcore. The German scourge of Hell is a veteran Diablo 3 streamer and became the first player to reach level 100 solo in Diablo 4’s hardcore mode (as well as the first to solo world boss Ashava), while making a ton of videos advising players on how to get the most out of their chosen class. Demons: after this guy’s done a day’s work, there’s a lot fewer around.

Wudijo’s been omnipresent in the Diablo 4 community pre- and post-launch, and recently answered a whole load of questions on the Diablo 4 subreddit (including his preferred breakfast choice of “nutella on bread”, which suggests my daughter may grow up to …

YouTube megastar James ‘MrBeast’ Donaldson has filed a lawsuit against the company he partnered with to launch MrBeast Burger, a business venture that began selling fast food in December 2020 using the influencer’s brand. The MrBeast Burger concept operates using so-called ghost kitchens, which is where a company sells the menu item online but then the order is fulfilled by a partner restaurant supplied with the branded accoutrements of packaging etcetera: or so the theory goes.

MrBeast’s suit alleges that Virtual Dining Concepts, the Florida company he partnered with for MrBeast Burger, has been delivering food of terrible quality, so bad it’s often “raw” and “inedible”, and has been unwilling to engage with or act upon his complaints (thanks, Bloomberg). It says th…

As we inch toward Baldur’s Gate 3’s 1.0 release at the end of August, Larian has been sharing more looks of the game beyond its first act. Baldur’s Gate 3’s latest trailer at the Summer Game Fest finally showed us Larian’s interpretation of Baldur’s Gate itself, one of the iconic RPG cities, and the sight of some of my beloved old haunts in full 3D has me giddy.

I’ll get to beloved star of stage and screen Jason Isaacs in a second, but first: Sorcerous Sundries. One of my biggest questions about Larian’s follow up to BioWare’s classics was how the Studio would bring the city to life, and the shot of this magic emporium’s stained glass dome dappled in the morning light and doing justice to BioWare’s original pre-rendered background art had me grinning. Earlier in …

A feature of online life for anyone who’s ever expressed the vaguest of interest in videogames is weird adverts for shovelware games. You know the type, my lord: little vignettes where someone’s building a house, or saving a damsel from a burning pyre, or mixing gloop in an oddly satisfying way.

Well now someone’s made a minigame collection on Steam with perhaps one of the most outstanding titles I’ve ever seen. I am going to give this name its own paragraph and allow it to retain caps lock for the full effect:

YEAH! YOU WANT “THOSE GAMES,” RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET’S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM!

Or YYWTGRSHYGNLSYCT for short. Mostly I just admire the over-enthusiastic “YEAH!” at the start of what boils down to a stickman minigame collection. It seems inspired by a…

Battlebit Remastered released on Steam two weeks ago and the $15, 254-player FPS has been a top seller on the platform ever since, outperforming several big-hitters and even Starfield pre-orders. Why? There’s no catch, as PCG’s Morgan Park put it, this is just a lot of (very good) game for the money. In an age where it feels like every game’s trying to nickel-and-dime you with season passes and cosmetics, that counts.

Now developer SgtOkiDoki has announced that, in the two weeks since launch, Battlebit Remastered has sold 1,800,000 copies. That sure looks like an overnight success but it had a long road here: Battlebit was first announced on Steam Greenlight in December 2016, and was the first project for a collective of experienced modders.

In a new intervi…