It seems like every other day there’s a new development in the tech cold war between China and the US. Following on from last week’s request from the US government for ASML to stop servicing the systems the firm sold to China, and the recent banning of the use of Intel and AMD chips—and Microsoft Windows—from use in government computers, comes a new Chinese response.

The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (via The Register and the Wall Street Journal) has ordered state-owned telcos to phase out foreign chips by 2027 in favor of domestically developed chips.

The move is sure to affect the revenues of Intel and AMD, as China remains a major consumer of western-sourced chips. The Chinese market overall reportedly accounts for 27 percent and 15 p…

Aside from whatever patches Larian has in mind, Baldur’s Gate 3 is donezo, and the news has more than a few people looking for someone to blame. For many, the answer is obvious: Dungeons and Dragons licence-holder Wizards of the Coast (WOTC). Speculation abounds that WOTC did something to scupper its relationship with Larian, dooming our hopes of more BG3 forever.

But Larian CEO Swen Vincke has now come out to say that’s not the case. In a post on Twitter, Vincke said he’s been “Reading the Reddit threads,” and felt obliged to clarify the situation, at least a little. “WOTC is not responsible for us taking a different direction,” wrote Vincke, “On the contrary, they really did their best and have been a great licensor for us, letting us do our thing.” Rather than a dramatic fallin…

It’s been a gala week for Bungie announcing major quality-of-life improvements coming to Destiny 2. Only yesterday we got a massive breakdown of the overhaul to buildcrafting that is arriving with the Lightfall expansion on February 28, and today we learn that one of the biggest annoyances in the game is being dealt with: Blue Engrams.

These are rare quality loot drops which, in practice, are anything but rare. In fact, once you’ve hit the soft power cap for a season, the blues provide no effective purpose and simply serve to clog up your character’s inventory and postbox as they rain down like it’s monsoon season for underpowered shotguns. 

Bungie had already removed blue gear as loot drops from some activities in a previous update, but is now going a step further. In …

Microsoft’s Surface line of laptops is getting updated in the coming months and aside from the addition of OLED display tech, the big news is optional Arm variants of the new portable PCs. Windows Central reports that both the Surface Pro 10 tablet and the Surface Laptop will be updated later this month with Intel’s Meteor Lake CPUs. The Surface Pro 10 will also get an OLED screen.

However, the really radical revision comes in June when both products will be offered with  Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite Arm CPU. It will be the first time that the Surface Laptop has been offered with an Arm chip.

As we’ve highlighted previously, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is being pitched as the first truly high-performance Arm CPU for Windows PCs. Apple has proved that Arm-based CPUs…

Elden Ring’s upcoming Shadow of the Erdtree DLC is, I think it’s fair to say, one of the most hotly anticipated expansions of 2024, what with the immense success of the base game back in 2022. For those of you preparing to have the durability of your controllers tested when the DLC unlocks on June 20, at the very least it looks like it won’t stress out your system any more than the original.

The Steam store page minimum requirements are identical to Elden Ring, and while it was regarded as somewhat demanding back at release, many moons have passed since then.

As something of a refresher course, that means the minimum CPU is given as an Intel Core i5 8400 or AMD Ryzen 3 3300X, with a minimum GPU requirement of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 3 GB or AMD Radeon RX 580.

Those …

If you ever use OBS to record footage or stream to Twitch, odds are you’re using H.264, a video codec that’s been in use for most of the last two decades. H.264 is everywhere. If you’re streaming a show from Netflix or another service, it’s probably H.264, too. It’s basically the JPEG of video: there are now far more efficient and better quality compression methods available, but it’s hard to dislodge a format that’s so entrenched. Streaming video is starting to do just that, though, with an open source codec called AV1. Netflix has been dabbling with it for a couple years, and now OBS Studio version 29.0 has jumped in with native support for AV1 encoding on AMD and Intel GPUs.

It’s an exciting step, though not one that we’re all going to be able to take advantage of right away. T…

First reported by GamesRadar, an Old School RuneScape player with the handle NC State (presumably not an official representative of the Raleigh-based university) finally sought his reward for grinding an infamous minigame, the Brimhaven obstacle course, for eight years. As outlined by a friend, user h0dgep0dge on Reddit, NC State finally brought his journey home, turning in all of his banked rewards at once and gaining 178 million XP in RuneScape’s suboptimal Agility skill in less than a minute. This was such a rapid influx that the game’s built-in experience per hour tracker couldn’t keep up: it tapped out at 2.147 billion even though NC State was progressing at a rate of 10.8 billion per hour.

Agility in RuneScape is not exactly the long-running MMO’s sexiest s…

Multi-monitor support for RTX HDR is coming. And that, in a nutshell, is it, folks. Toodles.

Oh, wait, you want more? Well, RTX HDR, is of course a new image enhancement filter from Nvidia that converts SDR games into HDR games on the fly. It comes as part of the new Nvidia Appand, predictably, claims to use AI to generate HDR information out of SDR image data.

Currently, it does not support multi-monitor setups. But according to Jacob Freeman, “GeForce Evangelist” at NVIDIA, that functionality will be added in an upcoming driver update.

That’s obviously handy for anyone who has more than one screen hooked up to their PC. 

But why should you care about RTX HDR at all? Over to Jacob, who explained all this the other day:

“Games look better with High Dyn…

Advertising seems to be everywhere. A necessary evil, perhaps, as our free time is gradually monetised in an effort to make those delicious bucks, pounds and Australian dollary-doos, and companies expect to, shock horror, make some cash from their users. However, if you thought you were safe from overt advertising while watching an ad-free streaming service or playing a game, Roku has different ideas. The company has filed a patent that would allow its TVs to detect when you’re paused while using an HDMI connected device, and show you a lovely targeted advert.

The patent details several different methods of potentially detecting a “pause event” through an HDMI connected device, including using an onboard processor to identify a silent audio signal in combination with identical vid…

As both a life sim enjoyer and MMO sufferer, I’ve been quite invested in Palia’s current early access period. Playing it right ahead of launch gave me high hopes for cozy MMOs in general, but I was still yearning for more MMO components on top of its crafting, gathering, and decorating chores. Palia launched its first seasonal event last night, a night market at the outskirts of town, adding exactly the kind of public event I had hoped for.

The event is the Maji Market, which is open each night in game, once per hour in real time. The market is its own new map area on the south end of town where you can follow a short questline solving mishaps around the market and buy special foods and decor items.

Crucially though, there’s a nightly minigame where a ton of its small furry …

Of all the Starfield stories so far, one hit me right in the feels: the bucket trick no longer works. This classic scam was discovered one day after Skyrim launched and, amazingly enough, survived all the patches and re-release: you simply put a bucket on an NPC’s head, blocking their line of sight, and then start stealing stuff.

However there are ways and means to use bins and buckets. Starfield allows you to pick up and hold items in front of your character, which retain their physics properties, and this can be used to knock objects off shelves and other surfaces.

Once they’re on the ground, it’s simply a matter of slowly shuffling your pile of illicit goods out of the sight of any nearby NPCs who might object, though most prove surprisingly accommodating wh…

Nick Offerman made a huge splash as Bill in the third episode of HBO’s The Last of Us, but it turns out that he doesn’t actually play videogames himself. In a recent appearance on the Jimmy Kimmel Show, Offerman said he tried his hand at it once, long ago, but decided to give up after just a couple of weeks.

“About 25 years ago, I played my last videogame,” Offerman said. “And I’m very indulgent. I lost a couple weeks to a videogame called Banjo Kazooie. Two weeks went by, and I mean, I was like, oh my God, the slow dopamine is so delicious, then it’s over, and you’re like, yes, I won! And immediately I’m like, what have I done with my life?

“So I decided I’m never going to do that again. And so thankfully, because games have gotten so good, like The Last of Us, that I think…