Author: Jacob Ridley
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Playseat’s pro sim racing cockpit makes it look like I mean business and is $100 off for Black Friday
Sim racing can swiftly become a black hole for spending money if you let it. It starts off with a wheel, then some nicer pedals, then a load-cell brake, then a sim racing cockpit, then maybe you just go out and buy a track day race experience, and eventually a hypercar. Okay, that last bit…
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The Steam Deck’s budget price tag is the reason I still rate it nearly two years on
Jacob Ridley, Steam Deck enjoyer (Image credit: Future) This month I’ve been playing: Alan Wake 2. Good lord this game is pretty. A proper glimpse at the future of videogame visuals, though you need some beefy Nvidia hardware to get it looking its best. Not only that, it’s an absolute blast to play. This week…
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Best handheld gaming PC in 2023
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A dream shared by PC gamers everywhere has been to take our entire gaming PCs on-the-go. From LAN parties to powerful gaming laptops, we’ve gotten close to portable gaming nirvana, yet no solution quite as simple as pulling out one of the latest generation of PC gaming handhelds and gaming from near enough anywhere. We’ve…
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Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023) review
The Asus ROG Zephyrus is one of the nicest laptops I’ve tested in recent memory, almost ruined by an unnecessary RTX 4090. Let me explain—because the Zephyrus G14 does some things very well. Starting with the chassis; this laptop comes with a milled magnesium-aluminium lid and the finish is excellent. There’s no faulting the subdued…
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Alan Wake 2 is a stunning example of what the future of PC gaming looks like—but only on Nvidia
At the launch of the RTX 20-series, Nvidia promised “Graphics Reinvented”. That was five years ago, and you could point to various graphical options in games since that were simply not possible before ray tracing acceleration and upscaling came to be. Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty springs to mind. Yet Alan Wake 2 feels a much…
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You can run Alan Wake 2 on a 10-series or older graphics card, but you definitely shouldn’t
Alan Wake 2 is a beautiful videogame, but that comes with some hang-ups for anything but the very latest graphics cards. One big one is that this game demands a graphics card capable of running mesh shaders. If your card doesn’t support them, you’re out of luck. Mesh shaders were first introduced with Nvidia’s Turing…
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For such a gorgeous game Alan Wake 2 runs surprisingly well on budget graphics cards
Between the exclusive RTX 40-series features required to run path tracing, and the mesh shaders snub for older graphics cards, you might be thinking that Alan Wake 2 isn’t a very well-optimised game. That’s not true, actually. This rather stunning videogame runs rather well on entry-level graphics cards. It’s true that Alan Wake 2 is…
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After a month in beta Valve has released SteamVR 2.0 for the headset-wearing masses
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Valve has released SteamVR 2.0 after a month in beta. The virtual reality software is finally heading to headsets with some big changes to the store, keyboard, library, and more. I don’t know if you’ve used SteamVR recently but prior to this release it’s not been a piece of software that inspired feelings of ‘next-gen’…
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Intel Core i5 14600K review
The K-series Core i5 are usually the easiest recommendation from any new Intel generation. I’m less sure of the Core i5 14600K. On the one hand, this new chip is a couple of frames faster than the Core i5 13600K it replaces and remains extremely competitive versus AMD’s mid-range. On the other, it’s a touch…
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Intel Core i9 14900K review
For the fastest chip ever to grace a gaming PC the Intel Core i9 14900K is about as boring a CPU refresh as one could be. We’ve seen it all before. The massive core count, the architecture, the 6GHz clock speed; the 14900K might do some things better than the 13th Gen but it rarely…