Author: Alex Battaglia
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Ghost of Tsushima on PC delivers impressive upgrades over PS5
Four years after its initial PS4 release, Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima arrives on PC, ported by Nixxes Software. Initial impressions of the port were favourable, but having now spent around a week with the game we’re able to give you a much more nuanced appraisal of the conversion, suggest some optimised settings and…
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Unreal Engine 5.4: Epic’s latest revision delivers big performance and feature wins
Unreal Engine 5 has reached a new milestone release, version 5.4. Alongside technology that sets the groundwork for future iterations of the engine, developer Epic Games is promising substantial performance improvements with better CPU utilisation, potentially solving a common bugbear we’ve seen on PC and consoles this generation. Of course, the new release also includes…
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Dragon’s Dogma 2 has a hidden path-traced renderer – and modders have found it
Path tracing? In Dragon’s Dogma 2? The game shipped with ray-traced global illumination but a path tracer sits within Capcom’s code – exposed thanks to a new mod for the PC version of the game. Graphics Suite Alpha, made by developer EXXXCellent, is available on Nexus Mods and includes path-traced lighting, shadows and reflections, all…
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PC image quality enhanced: the new DLSS and XeSS tested
Machine learning-based image reconstruction has evolved into a genuinely game-changing technology – and what sets this apart from other PC features is that users can effectively mod improved versions of Nvidia DLSS and Intel XeSS into games with existing support, simply by swapping a .DLL file in the install directories. With that in mind,…
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Horizon Forbidden West: the best PC settings look a lot like Guerrilla’s choices for PlayStation 5
Now that Horizon Forbidden West is out on PC and we have had a good deal of time with the final shipping game, we can tie up some loose ends that were left hanging after last week’s first look. What do optimised settings look like? What about Steam Deck? And are any lingering issues that…
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The big Horizon Forbidden West PC tech interview with Nixxes and Guerrilla Games
2022’s Horizon Forbidden West is one of the most technically accomplished games produced for PS5, and today it gets a full release on PC with the Complete Edition that aims to add in new features and scale gracefully across a wide range of CPU and GPU hardware. Porting specialists Nixxes created this new edition of…
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Horizon Forbidden West: hands-on with the eagerly anticipated PC port
One of the most technologically-advanced games on PlayStation 5 is coming imminently to PC. Horizon Forbidden West is acclaimed for its beautiful rendering and smooth performance on PS5, and we were fascinated to see how porting specialists Nixxes have adapted it to PC – and to see how accurate its (entirely reasonable) recommended specs are…
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Upcoming Alan Wake 2 patch drastically improves GTX 10-series performance
Alan Wake 2 was one of the most visually stunning games of 2023 – but also one of the most demanding for older hardware. Owing to its use of DX12 Ultimate mesh shaders, the game could run on older hardware but often delivered an unplayable experience, especially on Nvidia’s GTX 10-series GPUs built on…
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Skull and Bones: the good, the bad, the ugly – and the utterly bizarre
Some say that Skull and Bones has spent over a decade in development, so just how good is the final release? Well, Ubisoft says it’s a game of quadruple-A quality no less, but in our opinion it’s very much a mixed bag. There are elements to commend it from a technical point of view,…
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RTX HDR: Nvidia’s AI video enhancement tool works for games too – and it beats AutoHDR
Nvidia recently released a driver enabling RTX Video HDR – a driver side tool that automatically converts SDR video into HDR, with the help of real-time machine learning on an RTX GPU. Enable it and YouTube videos in SDR present convincingly as HDR, breathing new life into them. However, modder ’emoose’ discovered something more…