Items tagged with PC gaming
If you're thinking it's finally time to retire the trusty old Haswell workhorse, or perhaps you're frustrated with the performance of your Ryzen 5 1600AF in Cyberpunk 2077, whatever the case may be, if you want some new PC parts, now is a great time.
We've picked out an absolutely astonishing gaming PC for you...
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It's one of the arguments of the age: like Coke vs. Pepsi, Apple vs. Samsung, or Nike vs. Adidas, the choice of Xbox or PlayStation is a highly contentious one. There are a lot of factors that fans take into account, but arguably the biggest one is simply your choice of controller layout; where Xbox pads have the left...
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Most of your writers up here at HotHardware are old farts, so we can scarcely imagine a Steam account without the original Half-Life. Back in the day, most of us owned boxed copies of the game, and you could put your CD-key into Steam to register it to your profile. If your existence on Steam is newer than that, don't...
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You hear it said all the time: one of the best reasons to own a Steam Deck is for emulating classic games. The Steam Deck is fundamentally a PC, but despite this, you'll rarely hear anyone talk about playing classic PC games on it. The reason is simple: the Steam Deck's primary controls are gamepad-based, and enjoying...
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Today's PC-based gaming handhelds are incredibly powerful. Systems like the OneXFly offer eight Zen 4 CPU cores and up to 64GB of fast LPDDR5X memory—more than enough horsepower for even tasks like video editing. After all, we used to do that stuff on old Core 2 Duo systems. However, making use of the full potential...
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It's almost impossible to imagine it now, but city builders were once PC gaming royalty with Maxis' SimCity 2000 moving over 4 million copies. These days, the mantle of SimCity has almost entirely been handed off to Colossal Order's Cities: Skylines. That game just got a sequel, but unfortunately instead of the wide...
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The PC is considered one of the best platforms for playing your favorite games, and for good reason. Flexible hardware choice, filled with individual input on the part of the gamer. Want to fine tune your settings for better performance? You got it! You can increase your visual eye candy until you're satisfied, if...
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Are you a Skyrim fiend? Do you have thousands of hours in Bethesda's fantasy magnum opus, and long for more to do in the land of the Nords? Well, good news. Now you can conquer Skyrim in Age of Empires 2, thanks to an expansive custom map by creator /u/Grouchy_Bluejay4511.
If you're not an AoE2 player, then you...
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Remedy Entertainment's Control was one of the first games to really showcase the potential of real-time ray-tracing with its gorgeous reflections and excellent ray-traced shadows. The company's next game, a sequel to 2010's Alan Wake simply titled Alan Wake II, promises to up the ante in terms of graphics technology...
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It's been a month since the release of the franchise-rebooting Mortal Kombat 1, and the reviews are in. Generally speaking, people are pretty fond of the game, citing its gorgeous Unreal Engine-powered graphics, new assist character mechanics, and improved accessibility features as high points for the...
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Let's talk display technology. Almost all TVs and computer displays these days are based on LED-backlit LCDs. The only other common display technology anymore is OLED, and despite the similar name, those have nothing to do with this post, so let's set them aside for now—even though they're arguably a superior...
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Have you been enjoying Counter-Strike 2, PC gamers? Despite the fact that the game has become Valve's lowest-rated release ever (largely due to complaints from players who are no longer able to play it), it's still been an enormously-successful launch for the company, with nearly a million players online and playing...
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Do play Counter-Strike? If you read this website regularly, there is a very good chance that, even if you don't play CS anymore now, you probably did at some point. However, there's a pretty low chance that you frequently played Counter-Strike in any of its incarnations on a Mac.
That's the ultimate reason that CS2...
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A lot of truly awesome PC games have come out over the last two years. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, Baldur's Gate 3, Lies of P, the System Shock remake, Hogwarts Legacy, Atomic Heart, Ghostwire: Tokyo, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, the Dead Space remake, Elden Ring, Remnant 2, Street Fighter 6...
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If you're clueless at that headline, let us break it down for you. Assassin's Creed Mirage is the latest game in the long-running Assassin's Creed franchise, and it was highly-anticipated by longtime fans as it is at least an attempt to return to the series' roots: no RPG elements, no crazy mini-games or alternate...
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Any way you slice it, Starfield has been a big success for Bethesda. The company has announced that it reached over ten million players, the biggest-ever launch for a Bethesda game, and it peaked at just over one million concurrent players on Steam and Xbox around its launch. Even if as many as half of those players...
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However you feel about NVIDIA's frame generation technology, you have to admit that the idea sounds good on paper. Tick a toggle in a game's settings menu and increase your frame rate by 50% or more? A framerate increase that isn't bound by CPU limitations, allowing you to hit higher frames in CPU-limited games? It...
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When we reviewed the ASUS ROG Ally, we talked at length about how the SoC inside the machine was crying out for a higher power limit and better cooling than the handheld PC could offer. Engaging Turbo mode and then plugging in the charger nets you a peak 30W power limit, yet the Ryzen Z1 Extreme inside the unit we...
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That's right: the game came out yesterday, and it's already getting major patches. Of course, while Counter-Strike 2 officially launched yesterday, replacing CS:GO on Steam, it has been in active development and semi-open beta for some months. The big patch yesterday for the release made an incredible number of...
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Shortly before the launch of Starfield, Bethesda and AMD announced a strategic partnership that caused concern among the GeForce-owning PC gaming community. That's because it coincided with an independent report that remarked on the trend of AMD-sponsored PC games skipping support for NVIDIA's DLSS technology. Come...
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Earlier this week, Unity announced a change to its business model, which has caused some game developers to drop f-bombs all over social media in response, and others to speak out with less abrasive language. The company tweeted that the upcoming changes would include new additions to its subscription plans and...
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Alright, PC gamers—raise your hand if you whined about Intel supposedly holding everyone back at 4 cores for most of a decade, and then after you got more cores, you immediately proceeded to crying for years about games not properly utilizing the extra CPUs. Well, now's your chance to play a game that will actually...
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