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Latest 30 Comments

News - Mesa RADV driver on Linux looks set for a big ray tracing performance boost
By rustynail, 7 Jan 2026 at 6:45 pm UTC

Quoting: JarmerNice! Gotta love these huge improvements for same hardware.

Although: that said, I'm not sure I notice/care that much about raytracing just in general. It makes things look SLIGHTLY just a tiny bit better at a huge frame cost? But maybe with this the frame cost will be minimal so that slightly better look will be okay?
Apparently some developers are mostly using ray tracing not to improve the visuals but as a crutch that allows them to not bother implementing lighting at all as they normally should, like iirc the latest Doom game doesn't work without ray tracing at all, although when you set it to low the performance is not as horrible as you may expect from ray tracing (but still pretty horrible)

News - Mesa RADV driver on Linux looks set for a big ray tracing performance boost
By SlayerTheChikken, 7 Jan 2026 at 6:37 pm UTC

I like raytraced reflections, the rest I don't really care about personally. Most of the time it's not implemented correctly and it has lots of noise so I don't use it, but for example Cyberpunk is good enough that I would, even though it has light bleed.

News - After a poor relaunch, SPLITGATE: Arena Reloaded devs release a statement
By Cley_Faye, 7 Jan 2026 at 6:22 pm UTC

Kernel level anti-cheat? Well, that's a way to push me away. Knee-jerk reaction aside, of course.

Although according to protondb this does run. I'm curious on how these works with proton/wine. Or maybe the store page is outdated.

News - Mesa RADV driver on Linux looks set for a big ray tracing performance boost
By lejimster, 7 Jan 2026 at 6:17 pm UTC

I was wondering this when watching some Windows 11 vs Linux benchmarks recently. It seemed like RT wasn't as performant on Linux.. Idk why but I always get a kick out of seeing performance gains on Linux, even if I'm not directly benefiting.

News - After a poor relaunch, SPLITGATE: Arena Reloaded devs release a statement
By Liam Dawe, 7 Jan 2026 at 5:43 pm UTC

Quoting: NumerfoltAnd of course, there's no alt text anywhere to be found. But it's probably never been aimed at vision impaired people anyway?
I added alt text to the image when the article was originally published, it is there.

Edit: or do you mean specifically in the article (I've additionally added that now)? As the image alt text was always there.

News - After a poor relaunch, SPLITGATE: Arena Reloaded devs release a statement
By Numerfolt, 7 Jan 2026 at 5:38 pm UTC

And of course, there's no alt text anywhere to be found. But it's probably never been aimed at vision impaired people anyway?

News - After a poor relaunch, SPLITGATE: Arena Reloaded devs release a statement
By dpanter, 7 Jan 2026 at 5:01 pm UTC

Devs should read the hundreds of negative Steam reviews from the last month or so.
This soulless statement almost comes off as condescending, which I suppose fits their general style of... lets be generous and call it 'communication'.

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By such, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:55 pm UTC

Quoting: Kimyrielle
They may have hoped for that 50xx refresh that ended up getting postponed for at least a year.
Well, typically you don't design games for hardware that's not even out yet. You go for stuff that has been out for 3-4 years, so there is an installed basis. Even IF the upgraded 50XX GPUs become a thing (there are rumors that they might get canceled), the game will likely launch before any of these has reached a customer.
You'd think that... When was the last time you tried cranking up a game to max settings? A 5080, arguably the top consumer card right now, straight up crashes if you try that at 1440p in Indiana Jones, a game from 2024, one released prior to the paper release of this generation of GPUs. And that's after a year of patching and some optimisation. Not enough VRAM. 007 was supposed to release roughly at a point where nVidia typically released (or would've been close to releasing) their refreshes. 12GB VRAM for 1080p60 sends a clear message here, from my point of view.

I mean, just a peek at raster performance a notch above 1080p (a reminder that nVidia was advertising Turing GPUs as 8k-capable) tells you where the current ceiling is, and it's not at 16GB VRAM where the top consumer cards card are, which is also well past what's reasonable to spend on graphics.

007 will function on 8GB, I don't doubt that, but if you need a current xx90 GPU to play a current game possibly on max settings that game isn't designed with current-gen hardware in mind on the high-end. What used to be GPUs intended basically for professionals is now needed for silly games to not even run that well at resolutions that match the current TV standards?

Basically, looking at those requirements I don't see how IOI wasn't counting on the industry to finally move on from 8GB to 12GB, and consequently from 16GB to whatever nVidia would deem us consumer peasants worthy of...

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By Brisse, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:54 pm UTC

I remember seeing similar reactions towards Indiana Jones and the Great Circle before that released, and once it actually released it turned out to be better optimized than people first expected. It scaled quite well towards modest hardware and still looked quite good even on lower settings. IOI's recent Hitman games were also running quite well in my opinion so I won't judge this one solely on these requirements, rather I will wait and see.

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By Kimyrielle, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:23 pm UTC

Quoting: Liam Daweou go by averages. [...] Going by the Steam survey, over 50% have 16GB or less RAM.
Well, if 50% have 32GB, that's pretty much your median user. I fully agree (and said so above) that it's silly to design for hardware without an installed basis, but the 32GB RAM I'd give a pass, personally. In the end you don't design games around the slowest PC out there either, and people shouldn't reasonably expect to be able to run the newest visual wonders on a 10 year old potato.

12GB VRAM is still way out there, when only a handful of GPU models have more than 8. In the end, your point still stands. It's pretty ridiculous.

News - Humble Choice for January 2026 has a great overall selection of games
By Liam Dawe, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:19 pm UTC

I know price rises suck, but look outside the box for a moment. The problem is really a question of viability.

Sure, they have a certain level of purchase mass due to the amount of users, but you split that across each individual game and then Humble as a business need their own cut to remain a viable business too. Add taxes into that and it gets reduced even further. Even the current £11.49 really is not a lot when split across 8 games.

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By Liam Dawe, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:14 pm UTC

Quoting: KimyrielleTo be fair, 32GB RAM have been sort of standard for gaming PCs for a while now. Also, these decisions were very likely made before the RAM prices went out of control, which started only a few months ago.
Not as long as you might think, and you don't design games for the top-end. You go by averages. Part of the point of PC gaming is having settings to bring things down to more acceptable levels is it not? Going by the Steam survey, over 50% have 16GB or less RAM. It's absolutely mad to make 1080p at 60FPS need a minimum of 32GB lol, locking away over half your potential sales for what people expect from a game.

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By Kimyrielle, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:06 pm UTC

They may have hoped for that 50xx refresh that ended up getting postponed for at least a year.
Well, typically you don't design games for hardware that's not even out yet. You go for stuff that has been out for 3-4 years, so there is an installed basis. Even IF the upgraded 50XX GPUs become a thing (there are rumors that they might get canceled), the game will likely launch before any of these has reached a customer.

News - Humble Choice for January 2026 has a great overall selection of games
By g000h, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:03 pm UTC

Wasn't long ago that Choice was £8 for a month (i.e. A 44% inflationary increase). Also, the bundles used to be much better value propositions, for instance only paying £1 for the lowest tier and getting 3 titles. This cash grab followed their change of ownership.

News - SteamOS 3.7.19 arrives with a bunch of essential bug fixes
By Doktor-Mandrake, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:03 pm UTC

Is anyone else having issues with source engine games on steam deck lcd?

Unless with HL2 I have shader detail set to 'low' it will just crash

L4D2 crashes if effects aren't set to 'low'

And Portal crashes if shadow detail isn't set to 'low'

Anything higher then low on these specific settings seems to make them crash, also l4d2 still crashed when set to proton (tried various versions)

News - KDE Plasma 6.6 will finally stop the system sleeping when gaming with a controller
By mr-victory, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:00 pm UTC

Quoting: BrokattIt may be something unique for Steam Controller? I will post a pic when I get home. It's similar to the one @mr-victory linked to.
When looking for a post with a pic, I did come across a post about the warning appearing with a Steam controller.

News - See the new trailer for Antivirus Survivors 2003 Professional taking survivor-likes to an infested family computer
By ShabbyX, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:00 pm UTC

I have this idea of making a game about fighting computer viruses, and the difficulty settings are Linux and Windows, and then the Linux difficulty doesn't have any enemies 😁

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By such, 7 Jan 2026 at 3:57 pm UTC

Quoting: KimyrielleTo be fair, 32GB RAM have been sort of standard for gaming PCs for a while now. Also, these decisions were very likely made before the RAM prices went out of control, which started only a few months ago.

What I don't get is the 12GB VRAM. Even in the 50xx series, NVidia stubbornly refuses to put more than 8GB in most GPUs, so what's the target audience here?
GPU chop shop customers?

https://www.techpowerup.com/340880/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-gets-a-48-gb-mod-and-step-by-step-tutorial

They may have hoped for that 50xx refresh that ended up getting postponed for at least a year.

News - Mesa RADV driver on Linux looks set for a big ray tracing performance boost
By Jarmer, 7 Jan 2026 at 3:53 pm UTC

Nice! Gotta love these huge improvements for same hardware.

Although: that said, I'm not sure I notice/care that much about raytracing just in general. It makes things look SLIGHTLY just a tiny bit better at a huge frame cost? But maybe with this the frame cost will be minimal so that slightly better look will be okay?

News - Mesa RADV driver on Linux looks set for a big ray tracing performance boost
By Purple Library Guy, 7 Jan 2026 at 3:53 pm UTC

Surely no one would ever do that, especially not one of the most ubiquitous high-fidelity game engines out there in their widely-adopted ray-traced global illumination solution...
That's some great snark there.

News - See the new trailer for Antivirus Survivors 2003 Professional taking survivor-likes to an infested family computer
By Tethys84, 7 Jan 2026 at 3:52 pm UTC

Ooh! Looks great! I just got a similar game during the Steam Winter Sale called Desktop Survivors 98, and it's been pretty fun.
[Desktop Survivors 98 (Steam)](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3339780/Desktop_Survivors_98/)

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By Kimyrielle, 7 Jan 2026 at 3:41 pm UTC

To be fair, 32GB RAM have been sort of standard for gaming PCs for a while now. Also, these decisions were very likely made before the RAM prices went out of control, which started only a few months ago.

What I don't get is the 12GB VRAM. Even in the 50xx series, NVidia stubbornly refuses to put more than 8GB in most GPUs, so what's the target audience here?

News - KDE Plasma 6.6 will finally stop the system sleeping when gaming with a controller
By M@GOid, 7 Jan 2026 at 3:22 pm UTC

Well, my systems (I use KDE exclusively) are configured to never go to sleep when plugged in. Screen will turn off after 1 hour without activity. But I have never had it doing so while playing a game or watching something.

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By M@GOid, 7 Jan 2026 at 3:14 pm UTC

GoldenEye for N64 run like crap, but it was a revolutionary game on a limited platform. What this game have of so special to need so much RAM?

I will not be surprised if the answer is DRM related.

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By Seegras, 7 Jan 2026 at 3:08 pm UTC

Yeahyeah, it also says you need Microsoft Windows to play this; nobody needs Microsoft Windows to play games anymore in 2026. 😆

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By Jarmer, 7 Jan 2026 at 3:02 pm UTC

Requirements for 1440 / 4k: Cray Supercomputer? Easily accessible I'm sure right.

News - Valve amended the Steam survey for December 2025 - Linux actually hit another all-time high
By LoudTechie, 7 Jan 2026 at 2:52 pm UTC

Quoting: Phlebiac
Quoting: CatKillerIn case you'd like a graph
Thanks for making that, it illustrates two perhaps surprising points:

1) Steam Deck usage has stayed relatively flat - or more accurately, has scaled at the same rate as total Steam usage.

2) macOS usage declined for years, but in recent times it has scaled at nearly the same rate as desktop Linux. I wonder what factors are involved with that; I don't think Valve has done anything major on that front, and to my knowledge Apple hasn't done anything to improve things for gaming (they are actively hostile to it in some ways).
1) yeah, Valve went into it pretty cautiously the Steam Deck is a pretty niche product as you expressed before.
2) That's part Microsoft, part Valve and part Apple. Most consumers consider the choice Apple(expensive, but less espionage) and Windows(espionage, but cheap and capable). Microsoft has been behaving pretty shitty lately including becoming more expensive(Win10 EOL). Apple finally started nearly caring for gaming(Game porting toolkit). Also Valve has been sponsoring Apple gaming, since around the same moment they started sponsoring Linux gaming(MoltenVK), modifying open source is just easier.

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By such, 7 Jan 2026 at 2:34 pm UTC

These are about as confusing as buying Hitman if you inspect a bit closer.

Min. VRAM = 8GB. Makes sense in 2026. Recommended nVidia card: GTX 1660. Which is a 6GB card.

Recommended VRAM: 12GB. 1080p aside... sure, let's roll with it. Recommended nVidia card: 3060Ti. Which is an 8GB card.

Maybe it's about the features, maybe they tried to account for the bandwidth, maybe they rounded up, who knows. GTX 1660 does not make sense to me as an example even then, though.

If they're as specific as this they should've gone further, because right now I have no idea what runs the game and how. IOI might have benchmarked 3060 vs 3060Ti, but few consumers have the luxury, so it'd be helpful to have a comment on the VRAM situation there given that's the example they went with (I realise it's probably driven by the Steam survey. It's still not helpful to me).