In a certifiably not-great week for gaming CPUs, AMD have announced that the new Ryzen 9000 series is being delayed for a few days. That’s thanks to initial production units not being up to standards, an AMD executive admitted, and comes shortly after rivals Intel copped to a potentially chip-killing fault in their latest Core processors. Ah well, there’s always – oh, wait. No. Those are the only two.

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Enabling the performance overlay on your Steam Deck takes but a moment, yet can deliver oodles of information on how your games are running. That makes it useful whether you simply want to know how much battery life to expect, or if you’re going full tweak mode on the Steam Deck’s hardware settings and need to scarf down as much performance data as possible.

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Intel have identified the fault behind reported stability issues with their 13th and 14th Gen Core CPUs, many of which have been failing after feeding themselves excessive voltages. The blame, Intel told PCG, lies with the same kind of pernicious force that fills your Twitter feed with pillocks, has turned Google into an AI-sodden shell of its former self, and keeps making Spotify suggest I listen to ninety different electroswing arrangements of Everybody Wants to Be a Cat. That's right: an algorithm.

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Learning how to play Game Pass games on your Steam Deck will both demonstrate the handheld’s compatibility limits, and show you how flexible it can be in bending them. See, while it’s not actually possible to install PC Game Pass games onto your Steam Deck’s SSD, Xbox Cloud Gaming – a streaming service included with Game Pass Ultimate subscriptions – can be unlocked on the Deck, making the all-you-can-eat library available to play. Here, we’ll show you how.

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As someone who hasn’t been able to aim with thumbsticks since about 2008, the ability to calibrate, customise, and ultimately deploy gyro controls on the Steam Deck has me considering the internal gyroscope as one of the Deck’s hidden gems. Not every game will support motion input, but in those that do, it can be a more comfortable alternative to the sticks and trackpads; you are, after all, harnessing the precision of using both hands in tandem, rather than a single crooked thumb.

That said, the whole system ain't worth a jot if the gyroscope isn’t calibrated correctly. Below, you can see step-by-step how to calibrate the Steam Deck’s gyro controls – as well as how to adjust them (or, if you’re left unconvinced, disable them entirely) on a per-game basis. There's no need to switch into Desktop Mode for this, and in fact, these settings are freely tweakable while you're already in-game.

It's probably worth mentioning, though, that calibration requires the Deck be laid down on a flat, stable, completely level surface, and within just four seconds of activating the process. In other words, don’t try this on the bus. Make sure you have a desk, table, or convenient catwalk runway to hand before you begin, lest you end up scrambling for a patch of clear space while that (admittedly, rather stingy) timer ticks down.

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Knowing how to format a microSD card on the Steam Deck is as essential as the card itself. While the Deck is compatible with any microSD card that meets at least the UHD-I specification – loads, in other words – it doesn’t format them automatically, leaving one final DIY step before your expanded storage card can actually serve as expanded storage. It’s easily done, though, as the shortness of this guide attests.

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Edwin’s been appreciating the acrobatic twist that Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn puts on the Soulslite formula, but not everybody’s magical zip-zooping has been going as smoothly. Following the Steam and PC Game Pass releases yesterday, there are widespread reports of heavy stuttering spoiling the fun; I’ve given both versions a test, and indeed, Flintlock does have a serious case of the framerate stammers. Especially the Game Pass build, which is significantly worse for it.

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Installing Zenless Zone Zero on a Steam Deck is pretty straightforward, especially compared to the nightmare that was getting fellow anime-styled RPG Wuthering Waves to behave on the handheld. Despite ZZZ’s lack of native Linux/SteamOS support, the Deck has more than enough compatibility-boosting tools available to make it launchable – and enough graphical power to run it smoothly on Medium settings.

In fact, there are a few different ways of installing Zenless Zone Zero on your Steam Deck. One of the more popular methods I’ve seen involves configuring the Heroic Games Launcher to run the Epic Games Launcher, which in turn can run the Zenless Zone Zero (Games?) launcher. However, I’ve discovered a much simpler and easier technique, based around Lutris; it’s this method that I’ll walk you through below.

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Gaming hardware makers have often walked the line between enabling a player’s true skills, and simply delivering them an unfair advantage. Sometimes, honest accessibility aids are falsely accused of being cheating tools; other times, a monitor will straight-up play League of Legends for you. This week, developments in gaming keyboards have sparked a new debate on what does and doesn’t fall within the scope of fair play, with mechanical keeb specialists Wooting declaring in no uncertain terms that "Rappy Snappy is not the same as Snap Tap." Cool, glad that’s cleared up.

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Read enough of our hardware articles and you’ll eventually come across someone, probably me or Katharine (RPS in peace), banging on about the Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless. After half a decade on shelves, it’s still the best low-profile mechanical gaming keyboard going, and quite possibly the best wireless keyboard to boot – while the tenkeyless version, the G915 TKL Lightspeed, is just as lovely to use.

Between their nimble performance, crisp mech switches, and impeccable build quality, the only way in which the G915 duo underwhelms is their high pricing – very much the kind you’d want to wait for a Prime Day or Black Friday to dull the pain of. Now, though, there’s an alternative: the new Logitech G515 Lightspeed TKL. I’ve been using it. It’s good!

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Steam’s Game Recording feature has launched in beta, and it’s a surprisingly rich set of tools for what could have been a mere tacked-on gimmick. It comes with tooltips to give you some pointers, but they’re light on detail, so read on for a more comprehensive guide on how to record game clips with Steam – and how to share your clips around.

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Wuthering Waves, that recent gacha RPG of anime styling and impenetrable jargonblasting, just didn’t work on the Steam Deck when it launched in May. It also doesn’t work right now. But for one brief, debatably glorious day on June 29th, it did. And thus, Deck owners who’d persevered through a slightly fiddly installation process (explained here by YouTubesmith Deck Wizard) could finally take their first joyous steps into Wuthering Waves like a David Hasselhoff-buoyed East German in 1989.

Unlike the Hoff, it wouldn’t last. Within hours, Steam Deck players were being booted back out of the game by a hitherto-unseen anti-cheat failure. What gives? Or gave?

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While Prime Day 2024 enters its final hours, we’re still rounding up the best Anti-Prime Day deals on PC gaming hardware. Don’t have a Prime membership? Boycotting Amazon? Just really, really didn’t like New World? These deals, entirely from non-Amazon retailers, are the ones for you.

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It's the second and final day of Prime Day 2024, and while there are still plenty of PC gaming deals to be basketed, let's state the obvious: once they're gone, they're gone. Come midnight, these hardware savings will disappear faster than the free pastries at an RPS staff meetup, so now's the time if one of them takes your fancy. The deals, not our pastries. Steady on.

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Besides giving The First Descendant the ol’ benchy marks on desktop, I was curious to see how this gleaming looter shooter would run on the less flexing hardware of the Steam Deck. The answer: it didn’t, at first. Luckily, a semi-quick fix was enough to get me in, where I found a game that for all its ray tracing inclinations, is comfortable with life on the Deck. Reasonably. Most of the time.

With any luck, my issue could be purged completely by the time The First Descendant releases on July 2nd. Partly because I was using a technically non-final preview build, and partly because the problem itself was a silly one: launching was blocked by a case of missing Visual C++, something that the Steam Deck’s Proton compatibility witchcraft usually takes care of. Come on, Proton lad, you’re kinda dropping the ball here.

If this ever happens to you, in The First Descendant or any other game, I heartily recommend YouTuber JD Ros’ video tutorial on fixing it. The method boils down to installing the latest C++ versions via the Steam Deck’s Desktop Mode, then adding their executables to the game’s launch options. This worked a treat for me, and I didn’t suffer any further compatibility headaches from there on out.

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I don’t dislike The First Descendant. It has a good grasp of the numbers-go-up-yay appeal behind looter shooters. Sometimes you get to grapple onto a vast robot crab. The first evil alien overlord you fight is named Greg. Not bad, not bad. It’s also, wholeheartedly and unapologetically, a big graphical show-off, complete with multiple ray tracing modes and shinier power armour than if you fed the entire cast of Warframe through an industrial car wash.

Happily, this doesn’t necessarily translate into chugging performance on low-end PCs, or even handhelds like the Steam Deck. But judging from its final preview version, which has just closed prior to the July 2nd release date, feasting on The First Descendant’s finest visuals will definitely tax your rig – and it has its share of technical quirks on the side.

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Update: Whelp, spoke too soon. Apparently some Steam Deck players are seeing an "Innapropriate activity detected" message upon launching Elden Ring, blocking them from playing online. I haven't had this myself, and some have reported the issue fixing itself after they installed the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, but hopefully there's a proper patch in the works.

Elden Ring on the Steam Deck has long enjoyed a smoothness that desktop play has lacked. Not so much in simple framerate terms – the handheld spends far more time around the 30fps mark than it does bumping into Elden Ring’s 60fps cap – but thanks to a Proton compatibility update back in 2022, it’s drastically less prone to the flow-breaking stutter that still plagues the RPG in 2024. That now goes for Shadow Of The Erdtree as well, judging from my portable time in the new expansion.

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I realised recently that a juicy subject for another Should You Bother With has been staring me in the face – or rather, I’ve been staring at it. Ultrawide gaming monitors have clearly avoided non-starter status, given they’ve been around for years, seemingly being exchanged for currency – and yet they’re nowhere near what you might consider the 'default' option when making a display upgrade. Regular widescreen monitors, with regular 16:9 aspect ratios, remain the go-to. So why switch?

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One of my absolute most favouritest Steam Deck cases, besides the one you get for free with the Steam Deck OLED, is the Dbrand Project Killswitch. It’s not so much a carrying vessel as a hardened second skin, providing protection without all the bag-hogging bulk of a traditional case – while throwing in handy bonuses like a clip-on kickstand and grippy thumbstick covers. For owners of the Asus ROG Ally, the recent launch of a Project Killswitch for their own handheld PC should therefore represent glad tidings with extra gladness, even if it won’t also fit the upcoming ROG Ally X.

Thank the new device’s bigger battery, wider SSD and reworked connection layout for that particular lack of forwards compatibility, as the ROG Ally X’s thicker dimensions will make it just slightly too beefy to slip into the Killswitch’s skintight silicone. A shame, but at least it makes a quality addition to the original Ally right this second. I’ve been manhandling one for a week now, and it’s just as practical and protective as the Steam Deck version.

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Taipei’s annual Computex event is always a big, circled, triple-underlined mark in the PC gaming hardware calendar. Whereas CES splits its focus across tech, cars, and the occasional overdesigned white good, Computex is all computing, all the time, making it a prime source of reveals and showcases for the hardware bits that make games happen.

Sadly, Computex 2024 is unlikely to go down as a classic, largely because this year’s show has been mesmerised by AI and the most tedious applications thereof: search, but different somehow! Run art-stealing generation tools faster! Oh, Computex, what have they done to you, and why do you have seven fingers on one hand?

Granted, AI is a broad field, and not everything about it is necessarily gross or creatively bankrupting. But it also doesn’t deserve to overshadow all the other useful, unexpected, and curiosity-piquing gaming tech that Computex has to offer, from new Steam Deck alternatives to resurrected CPU lineups and promising graphics card updates. Here are those highlights of the show so far...

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The Asus ROG Ally X, a sort of semi-sequel to last year’s ROG Ally handheld PC, has had its specs spilled over at Videocardz. I’m usually a lot more suspicious of hardware leaks, which are often just out-of-date or otherwise inaccurate info, but I’ve also sat through enough mic-muted prebriefings to know an official slideshow when I see one, and that appears to be exactly what Videocardz got its hands on. Besides, these specs include a gigantic 80Whr battery upgrade (doubling the ROG Ally’s 40Whr capacity), so we can at least file this under "News James wants to be true."

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While I’ve always thought the race towards graphical hyperrealism isn’t as pervasive as it's often perceived, Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 is definitely one of those games. The kind that probably has twelve artists dedicated to the recreation of visible pores, that sort of thing. It’s so focused on looking pretty that it hasn’t even noticed the title and subtitle got mixed up.

Sure enough, Hellblade 2 is a harsh test for older hardware, with a heavy reliance on DLSS or FSR upscaling to keep performance sweet. That said, it’s no Dragons Dogma 2-style technical horrorshow either. A happy balance of visuals and smoothness is attainable on plush PCs and low-end laptops alike, while DLSS 3 frame generation can deliver an effective kick in the framerate pants on RTX 40 series GPUs.

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Sometimes you gotta know when to fold, and trying to get new hotness RPG Wuthering Waves to play nice with the Steam Deck has got me creasing like an origami crane. While its Epic Games Store release can be worked around, and Proton GE will get the game’s own launcher running, no combination of software, compatibility tools, or installation folder deep-diving seems capable of actually booting the game proper.

As such, I’m accepting defeat. Obviously with apologies to any studious Steam Deck Academy readers.

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Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut is now out and about on PC, sadly with the requirement of signing into a PlayStation Network (PSN) account in order to play the samurai action-adventure’s Legends co-op mode. The same requirement, you might recall, that Helldivers 2 players recently lobbied Sony into abandoning. No such luck here, and as previously warned, the need for said PSN sign-in to happen over Windows means that Ghost of Tsushima is essentially missing a chunk of itself on the Steam Deck.

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Nic reckons Homeworld 3, the long-awaited spacefaring RTS, is mostly pretty good. Qualified hoorays for that, as well as for the fact that it doesn’t make especially mad demands of your hardware: besides netting a Steam Deck Playable badge from Valve, its minimum PC specs only list the likes of the Intel Core i5-6600 and Nvidia’s GTX 1060. Easily doable, for most aspiring galactic admirals.

Once a battle gets underway, however, Homeworld 3’s performance can start tanking, turning an initially smooth engagement into a more stutter-prone light show. The good news? You can more than double your framerates with a relatively small handful of graphics setting changes, even if some these (including the DLSS and FSR 2 upscalers) can be a tad inconsistent in their own right.

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Hardcore tactical FPS Gray Zone Warfare is proving to be yet another of 2024’s unexpected successes, shifting over half a million copies when it launched into early access last week. Unfortunately, in its attempt to eat Escape from Tarkov’s lunch – a timely one, given that game’s self-inflicted DLC misery – it’s currently choking on the wishbone of some truly dire performance issues. Even players with tip-top graphics cards are seeing heavy stuttering while out in the field, and none of the updates released thus far, including today’s Hotfix #3, have done much to soothe it.

Said hotfix does include some fixes for other widespread problems, including a second attempt at preventing players from becoming headless when rejoining a server (an amusing though resilient glitch, given a previous hotfix had also tried to nix it). But having played a bit of this third patch on a usually reliable RTX 4060, there’s clearly an awful lot of work left to do before Gray Zone Warfare performs acceptably.

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Here’s the thing: I’ll gladly show you how to install an SSD in a Steam Deck, but be warned that it’s by far the trickier of your two storage upgrade options. Whereas adding a microSD card is as easy as pushing it into the dedicated slot, swapping out the Deck’s internal drive involves fiddling with some seriously sensitive components. It’s not for the faint of heart nor the shaky of hand, and unlike the majority cool things you can do with Valve’s handheld PC – be it adding fun plugins with Decky Loader or unleashing its versatile Desktop Mode – swapping the SSD does require a fair few tools.

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Welcome to another edition of Should You Bother With, where the useless and the utilitarian of PC gaming hardware are sorted into two satisfyingly neat piles. And after the hard science demanded by SYBW’s previous look at Hall effect keyboards, I’m pleased to say that the concept behind this week’s focus can be summed in with as few words as "faster Internet." It’s Wi-Fi 7 – or 802.11be, to its friends.

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Razer, makers of various pretty good gaming peripherals and one deeply questionable face mask, have been slapped with a $1.1 million fine by US regulators after said mask was determined to have misled buyers over the amount of protection it afforded. Kotaku reports that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took issue with Razer’s claim that the Zephyr, an RGB monstrosity released during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, could act as a medical-grade N95 respirator – it could not – and will allocate $1 million of that fine towards refunds for fooled, if colourfully illuminated, buyers.

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Welcome back to Should You Bother With, the RPS hardware column that combs away the fluff surrounding PC gaming gear to reveal a smooth, hairless core of pure consumer advice. This time: Hall effect keyboards, a relatively fresh flavour of desktop peripheral that’s been gaining traction with manufacturers for the switch design’s supposed durability and reliability benefits. These represent perhaps the first major challenge to mechanical keyboard hegemony, but you may be wondering: who’s Hall? What’s their effect? And does it actually make for a better gaming keyboard? Time to found out.

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No Rest for the Wicked launched into early access as a bit of a fixer-upper, even by the standards of its 'buy now, play finished game later' model. The good news is that the grim action-RPG’s wonky performance is already being straightened out, with two of its three hotfixes thus far delivering a noticeable improvements, even on older graphics cards.

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Lured like an unsatisfied sailor by the siren song of alleged performance woes, I’ve been giving No Rest for the Wicked a cursory benchmarkin’, and yes! The isometric ARPG does suffer from all the early access wonkiness you’ve likely heard about already today.

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Six months is a long time. In that half-year you could fully grow a patch of delicious strawberries, plant the seeds, then grow another. Or you could squirm through three and a half successive Liz Truss premierships. Or, as Cities: Skylines 2 developers Colossal Order have done, you could take the technical mess of your long-awaited citybuilding game and reconstruct it into something that performs... okay, not well, but better.

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I remain the least qualified person alive to appraise Manor Lords an actual strategy game – my village stewardship is proving inept, even by medieval posho standards – but I have delayed economic and social ruin long enough to know it runs well on the Steam Deck. Just as it’s smooth low-end performer on desktops, Manor Lords can easily keep its head above 30fps in handheld mode, and that’s usually more like 40-45fps with the right visual settings.

Still, there’s scope for it to become a much more Deck-friendly game, if not by its April 26th release date then hopefully at least during its early access phase. Faster performance would be nice, sure, but what this citybuilder-meets-RTS-battler really needs for optimal portability is a more refined set of controls.

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My most recent experiences with performance-testing strategy games have been defined by miserable sluggishness and dental drama, so it’s been a relief to find that citybuilding/RTS hybrid Manor Lords is set to launch in a relatively fine state. As an early access game, no less.

Having dug into the latest build’s GPU performance and graphics settings, I have found a few loose strands of technical flax that Manor Lords could do with snipping away. Yet it’s generally in good shape, both for early access and a solo developer project, successfully balancing strong visuals with relatively light hardware demands that should help it run on older PCs (or handhelds like the Steam Deck). Several hours in, the ugliest things I’ve seen are my road layouts.

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Even if connecting your Steam Deck to a TV takes the "portable" out of “portable PC,” big-screen play is yet another of the handheld’s many talents. As far as lounge-based gaming goes, it’s certainly preferable to hauling several kilos of desktop from your desk to your telly and hooking that up instead.

As for the particulars of marrying Deck and TV, Steam Remote Play veterans may immediately turn their thoughts to the Steam Link. This can indeed enable wireless beaming of your handheld-installed games onto the living room screen, but sadly, the Steam Link itself has been discontinued for years, and while it lived on as a smart TV app, this isn’t widely available either - especially after Samsung cut support for it in 2023. Nowadays, your best bet is to connect your Steam Deck to your TV using physical hardware, and this here guide will show you how.

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For a handheld PC, the Steam Deck benefits an awful lot from having a mouse and keyboard plugged into it, and nothing enables this marriage of portable and peripheral like one of the best Steam Deck docks. And it’s not just USB connectivity that gets a boost – external displays, rock-solid Ethernet connections for game downloads, and power delivery all make dock usage a preferable alternative to simply hooking up Bluetooth accessories. Along with a microSD card (and possibly a better case), these stand/hub combos are definitely among the tools that any regular Steam Deck wielder should have.

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You could say that the best Steam Deck case is the one you get for free, and to be sure, I have no qualms with Valve’s bundled carrier. Especially not the one you get with the 1TB Steam Deck OLED, which adds a neat mini-case in the form of a removable liner. Still! As you’ll see here, you do have a choice of worthwhile upgrade options, ranging from conventional hard cases with extra accessory storage to clever protective sleeves that combine impact resistance with improved handheld grip. The best way to avoid Steam Deck damage is to not drop it in the first place, as Sun Tzu probably said.

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With a desktop version of the RTX 4050 looking less likely with every turn o’ the Earth, the true entry-level GPU among Nvidia’s current generation solely remains in the realm of gaming laptops. It’s also, I’ll admit, overdue some consideration on RPS. Between the lack of cheap graphics cards among the desktop RTX 40 series, the year-and-a-bit that DLSS 3 has had to grow its compatible games library, and the Steam Deck reminding everyone that portable, low-end gaming can still be pleasurable, now seems like the RTX 4050’s time to shine. Or, at the very least, gently twinkle.

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I have spent most of my working life looking at efforts to breach the FPS event horizon, and going 'OMG who cares, they literally all look the same?'. People like our hardware editor James then point and laugh at me, as an objectively wrong person. But according to a small study highlighted by the Guardian, I might have been right too! Turns out there's evidence that we might all see life at different FPS. That player might not be cheating, he might just experience Fortnite at a speed you don't.

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Not every March-released, fantastical action-RPG will fall to bits on the Steam Deck. Horizon Forbidden West: Complete Edition succeeds where Dragon’s Dogma 2 spluttered, quietly yet capably adapting to handheld hardware. Keeping performance up requires a fair bit of fine-tuning the graphics settings, and a girthsome install size might trouble the internal drives of smaller models, but otherwise, Forbidden West is just as portable-friendly as Horizon Zero Dawn. And that’s still one of the best Steam Deck games around.

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While the PC release of Horizon Forbidden West: Complete Edition has effectively made my PS5 ownership pointless, I can’t stay mad at it. Besides being a sumptuous, endlessly satisfying sci-fi romp with one of the prettiest open worlds in gaming, it’s also a very respectable porting job, with stable performance that scales well on aged PC hardware all the way up to glistening 4K rigs.

There are some imperfections, but generally, this shouldn’t be a repeat of Horizon Zero Dawn’s need for a post-launch patch regimen. On all the hardware I’ve tested, Forbidden West looks good to go, especially when choosing the right settings can smooth out performance even more.

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Dragon's Dogma 2 is, as a game per se, very good! It’s creative and intelligent and lets you fill other players’ worlds with recruitable humanoid versions of your pet cats. Still, a technical masterclass it is not. In my performance analysis, I touched on DD2 being particularly unplayable on the Steam Deck, suffering from sub-10fps framerates and a bunch of broken settings. Since that was based on pre-release code, I had quietly hoped that Capcom could pull something – anything – out of the bag to salvage handheld PC play in time for launch day, but now the time has come, I’ve checked again, and nope. This RPG adventure simply doesn’t work on the Steam Deck, and probably never will.

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Dragon's Dogma 2 is an RPG of many admirable qualities. I’m especially attached to my Arisen’s current pair of Pawns, one of whom speaks with the wonderfully stretched intonations of a pitch-shifted Matt Berry. Sadly, none of its achievements pertain to technical fidelity. While decent-looking, Dragon’s Dogma 2 takes some serious hardware to maintain consistently smooth performance, with lowered quality settings lending only the most limp-wristed of helping hands.

DLSS and FSR 3 upscaling are more effective, but this is one game where powering through the worst of its stuttering and framerate drops will take more than a musclebound graphics card. Not for the first time with an RE Engine game, Dragon’s Dogma 2 appears severely CPU-limited, so it really does demand a fully-upgraded rig to ward off sluggishness – especially at higher resolutions.

Improving performance isn’t a completely hopeless endeavour, but besides the FPS wobbles, there are some settings oddities that need navigating as well. I’ll cover all that and more in this guide; even if we can’t fix Dragon’s Dogma 2 ourselves, at least we can better understand its strangeness.

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Welcome to Should You Bother With, a new, hopefully somewhat regular RPS column where I’ll investigate the quirkier niches that PC gaming hardware has to offer. Through trial and testing, together we’ll find out which of these products and features are technological red herrings – and which are the genuine innovations that deserve your attention.

First up on the lab table: AMD Fluid Motion Frames!

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Installing Decky Loader on your Steam Deck is one of the biggest free upgrades you can make to it. With a few clicks (or touchscreen taps), you can open up a library of feature-adding plugins that are as versatile as they are easy to use. Want better management of your Steam Deck screenshots, or a simple way of recording your screen, or more information about battery usage, or interface tweaks to SteamOS itself? All in one place, with one-tap downloads, and accessible from the Steam Deck’s existing quick access menu? Install Decky Loader.

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Considering it’s one of the most gawwwwjuss games you can get one o’ them PS5 machines, Horizon Forbidden West’s upcoming PC version has some pretty fair-looking system requirements. The newly released specs, which you can find below, suggest that pushing the open world, robosaur-slaying sequel to its most extreme settings will take a burly graphics card – but likewise, lower settings and resolutions can get by with much creakier hardware.

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Once you know how to enable Desktop Mode on the Steam Deck, you basically get the keys to its handheld gaming kingdom. From playing Game Pass games on your Steam Deck to installing Lutris and other non-Steam launchers, many of the device’s best hidden functions are enabled through Desktop Mode – not to mention its entire usability as a proper desktop PC.

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I still don’t fully understand the rancor with which the RTX 4070 Ti is often regarded. Where some see an overpriced, memory-deprived albatross of a graphics card, I’ve only ever seen a fast and feature-rich GPU whose 12GB of VRAM is demonstrably fine for 99.95% of games at 4K. A better deal than the RTX 4080 for that resolution, in any case.

Now, though, we can all agree: nobody should buy an RTX 4070 Ti. Not when the RTX 4070 Ti Super is here, doing a better, hopefully less contentious job of smooth 4K without demanding RTX 4080 (or, indeed, RTX 4080 Super) levels of investment.

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Since I’m apparently on survival game duty for the rest of my days, and we’ve just had a firm reminder of how wobbly an early access launch can be, it seems like a good time to check in on that there Sons Of The Forest 1.0 release and see whether it’s felt the effects of its own early access polishing process.

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Nightingale’s dapper cast of cross-dimensional pathfinders are right about one thing: realmwalking is dangerous business. Attempt to tele-portal between realities on the Steam Deck, for instance, and you may find yourself trapped in the Stygian void, naught but a frozen loading screen tip for company and suspended hopelessly for all eternity. Or until you hold down the power button.

This crashing tendency alone means that while Nightingale can technically run on the Steam Deck, even without resorting to rock-bottom graphics settings, the current early access build isn’t yet ready for regular handheld play. That’s nothing developers Inflexion Games won’t tell you themselves – they’re "not considering [the Deck] officially supported at launch," after all – but if you were thinking of giving this gaslamp fantasy survival sim a portable whirl, you might want to let that call to adventure go unanswered.

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Credit to Nightingale, I’ve been enjoying the early access form of Inflexion’s gaslamp fantasy survival crafter a fair bit more than I did its older stress test build. The UI is cleaner and tighter, and I’ve had more space to explore (and enjoy) the mysterious nooks of its magic 'n' moustaches world. There’s potential here, but it’s very much the raw kind, especially when performance needs as much work as it does.

Besides relying on upscalers like DLSS for truly smooth running, Nightingale currently has a serious stuttering problem, and bumping into an ugly graphical artefact or even a hard crash is worryingly common. I’ve pulled together an optimised settings guide (down below) so that you don’t need to drop the visual quality lower than is strictly necessary, but do keep in mind that this is early access with emphasis on the early.

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The PS VR2, Sony’s currently PS5-exclusive VR gaming headset, looks like it’ll be latching onto the faces of PC owners as well. Tucked away in a PlayStation blog post about upcoming PS VR2 games, Sony Interactive content communications manager Gillen McAllister confirmed that Sony are "currently testing the ability for PS VR2 players to access additional games on PC" and that the plan is have this extra support ready within 2024.

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Welcome to Steam Deck Academy, where we take the microfibre cloth of understanding and wipe away the smudgy touchscreen fingerprints of handheld gaming ignorance. Here, eager students – that’s you, I’m assuming – can feast their minds on all the Steam Deck guides, explainers, and investigations that we’ve produced, as well as further instructive pieces to come.

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Helldivers 2 is turning out to be an absolute laugh riot of a co-op shooter; it may even have the potential to rival Deep Rock Galactic on good vibes and teammate deaths as accidental comedy masterstrokes. Even ongoing server connectivity issues haven’t done much to spoil the sense of fun, which incidentally, can also be shared on the Steam Deck.

Indeed, following a quick Proton update on Valve’s part, its previously SteamOS-incompatible anti-cheat will no longer put the kibosh on you dropping into Helldivers 2 via your Deck. I’ve been testing on both an original 512GB model and the newer Steam Deck OLED, and as long as you don’t mind dropping the quality settings, it can usually run tidily above 30fps.

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Because it’s somehow my job to worry about the technical fidelity of electronic toys, I’ve been eyeing the long-overdue arrival of Skull and Bones with some nervousness. After nearly a decade of delays, you’d probably just want to get it out the door, right? Skip straight to the open-world pirate adventuring, none of that 'making it work on a range of graphics cards' nonsense.

But nope. For all its other shortcomings, Skull and Bones performs alright on PC, very often more smoothly than its system requirements suggest. Though I’d still recommend abiding by its SSD storage requirement – following the rules might not be very piratey, but installing on a hard drive will curse you to some pretty tedious load screen waits. Geoffrey Rush would hate it, honestly.

While Edwin sequesters himself in the starting area, let’s head below deck for a closer look at Skull and Bones’ PC particulars. That includes a full rundown of its graphics options – which include ray tracing and DLSS – and a quick guide to the best settings for an ideal prettiness-to-performance ratio.

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People who read my articles have exceptionally good taste, which is why I will assume you are already intimately familiar with Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. For those who are not and somehow got here by mistake, it will save me a lot of time if you go away and read them all. Oh fine, I will explain Hex. And also, if I have time, a real life man with ants in his computer.

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As a monster-collecting, knowingly cynical, base-building survival game, Palworld is officially Not My Thing in at least three different ways. But I do like the Steam Deck, as well as feeling a sense of being vaguely useful. Thus, instead of moaning about holding down a button for 20 seconds to plant some berry seeds, I’ve tested how Palworld adapts to life on Valve’s handheld – and worked out which are the best settings to use with the Deck’s modest hardware.

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If the RTX 4070 Super was all about addressing its predecessor’s so-so performance gains, the RTX 4080 Super’s course correction is more deeply rooted in issues of cold, hard coinage. For better and worse, it turns out – while this Super-fied GPU knocks hundreds off the RTX 4080’s starting price, any excitement for a potential new 4K champion is quickly muted by it barely moving the dial on straight FPS output. If, indeed, it’s not somehow running slower.

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Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth isn’t exactly spawned from the most hardware-bothering of game series. Most previous LADs, be they Kiryu’s Adventures in Punching or the more turn-based reboot have all been technically gentle affairs, and Infinite Wealth is ultimately another one. At the same time, it shares with Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name a newfound interest in PC-specific tricks. That means a full selection of DLSS, FSR and XeSS upscalers, plus DLSS 3 frame generation. Real yakuza might use a gamepad, but it seems real fuzz-haired RPG fantasists use graphics cards.

Let’s take a closer look, then, at how RGG’s latest crime caper performs on PC. We’ll also work out its best settings, to keep it running smoother than a legally distinct Segway.

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For such a ma-bloody-hoosive RPG, it turns out Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth can fit rather snugly in the diminutive Steam Deck. Developers RGG Studio revealed, a full two weeks before launch, that Valve had awarded it coveted Verified status – a mark of honour for games that run, control, and generally operate well on the handheld.

What that golden sticker doesn’t explain is that to keep above a suitable 30fps, Infinite Wealth does demand that you swing the stolen bicycle of quality reductions directly into the soft skull of its graphical settings. It’s perfectly doable, mind, so if LADding around Hawaii sounds like as much fun to you as Ed’s review makes it seem, read on to find out how Infinite Wealth gets on with the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED.

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The latest Steam Deck beta client update is out, and it’s made a pretty neat addition to the quick-access performance menu. A tap of the Y button now brings up a brief explainer for whichever individual setting is currently highlighted, a handy lil’ reference for anyone who wants to customise how their Deck (or Steam Deck OLED) runs without knowing exactly how things like TDP limits and half-rate shading affect performance. Clearly it’s also a brutal attack on the livelihoods of honest hardware editors who write guides to this sort of thing, but whatever, Valve.

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It’s been two whole graphics card generations since Nvidia last tried the whole Super-branded refresh thing, and from what I recall of that sweaty 2019 summer, most of the updated RTX 20 series cards were meek rejigs of GPUs that didn’t really need replacing in the first place. Having tried the new RTX 4070 Super, though, it looks like Nvidia aren’t just redeeming the Super badge – they might just right the wrongs of the RTX 40 family as a whole.

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CES 2024 is drawing to a close, and honestly, I’m not especially sad to see it go. While the Las Vegas tech megashow is probably the closest thing PC gaming hardware has to an E3 (and in some ways surpasses it, given CES still exists), this year’s event has been characterised by an all-too-credulous obsession with AI nonsense. Not the fun/useful DLSS kind that makes your games run faster – more the kind that replaces actual creative work with dubiously-sourced robot media. Icky stuff, even by Vegas standards.

Mercifully, not everyone was there to flog Stable Diffusion boxes and imaginary ChatGPT friends, so there is actually some interesting new kit to look forward to in 2024. I’ve rounded up the highlights here, along with some of the more questionable AI-based showings – because they may well merit discussion, even if that discussion amounts to "Is this a good idea?" followed by "No."

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MSI are the latest gaming gear makers to unveil a Steam Deck-alike, announcing the Claw as part of their CES 2024 showcase. The Claw – great name, by the way – actually looks and sounds closer to the Asus ROG Ally than Valve’s handheld, being a Windows 11-based device without any flashy hardware tricks like the Lenovo Legion Go’s detachable controllers. All the same, it’s aiming to stand out among these portable PCs through two means: its engorged 53Whr battery, and the industry-first use of a 14th-gen Intel Core Ultra chip as its APU.

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Nvidia have resurrected their Super refresh branding for a new trio of GeForce graphics cards: the RTX 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, and RTX 4080 Super. The announcement, part of the GPU giant’s CES 2024 showcase, was light on specifics about gaming performance – but all three promise marked improvements on their 40 series predecessors. And, in the RTX 4080 Super’s case, even a big ol' price drop.

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Even with the rising power of integrated graphics, the prospects of getting high-quality, high-rez gaming capability in a laptop of ultrabook proportions is still years from becoming a feasible reality. Until then, slimmer gaming laptops like the HP Omen Transcend 16 remain the closest approximation of that dream, cramming discrete GPUs – the Nvidia Geforce RTX 4060, in this case – into lighter, narrower chassis designs.

The usual catch with such devices, sadly, is an overeagerness to appear aspirational. Which is, to be clear, the nicest thing I can say about a Razer Blade 16 costing £2500 for its own RTX 4060 model. Despite the name, however, the Omen Transcend 16 is much more down to earth – it still offers enough premium trappings to feel like a step up from chunkier laptops, but at its current pricing of £1199 / $1429, it’s a fair trade as well. And it supports Nvidia DLSS 3, dash of futureproofing tech that might just soothe any worries about buying a 2023-spec PC in 2024.

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It’s been encouraging to see how post-Steam Deck handheld PCs aren’t merely copying Valve’s homework. The Asus ROG Ally made a (mostly) successful attempt at slimming down while upping performance, and now we have the Lenovo Legion Go: an even higher-concept portable with Switch-style detachable controllers. One of which transforms into a mouse. It’s a bit mad but I’ve always loved the concept’s ambition, even as I rendered working protypes a little less... working.

I’m happy to report that this, the Legion Go’s retail version, is far more resistant to such improprieties. Moreover, it’s basically the best Windows handheld out there right now – though some occasional fiddliness, and the looming issue of the Steam Deck OLED, mean it isn’t necessarily the finest palmable PC outright.

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Intel have finally confirmed the full lineup and specs for their 14th gen Meteor Lake CPUs, which for now is comprised entirely of ultrathin laptop chips with the new Core Ultra branding. I appreciate that a PC gaming site might not be the most natural home for this information, considering both that these are not technically gaming CPUs and that that Meteor Lake’s most hyped-up feature is more of a productivity aid: a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for client-side AI work. However, as the new H-series parts also integrate Intel Arc graphics for the first time, there is some interesting potential for them to transform lightweight ultrabooks into viable gaming laptops.

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I find myself agreeing with Ed’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora review so closely that we may as well have plugged our USB dreadlocks into the same magic tree. This is indeed an extremely Ubisoft game, with all the busywork and go-here-shoot-that roteness that entails, and although it throws some genuinely gorgeous visuals into the bargain, these also come at the cost of steep hardware requirements.

That said, good performance ain’t out of the question, at least not for modern CPUs and graphics cards. It will just take some digging through the graphics menus – digging that I’ve now completed, so join me as my blackened fingers bash out a convenient guide to Frontiers of Pandora’s PC performance and best settings.

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By Nvidia’s count, there are now 500 games and applications that employ DLSS upscaling and ray tracing visual effects – or "RTX technologies," in GPU superpower speak. While there’s arguably some cheekiness behind that count, as ray tracing in particular is not an RTX-exclusive feature, it is nonetheless quite the feat for a set of tools that launched in subjectively auspicious circumstances back in 2018.

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Mechanical keyboards may offer a superior typing experience, but they are also A) expensive, and B) loud. So if you're looking to save money on your next PC build, or you want to play games late at night without incurring the wrath of your household, then the Razer Cynosa Lite will offer a cheaper, quieter experience. It also packs in a lot of features for a budget board, and you get grab this already inexpensive peripheral for less than half-price this Black Friday weekend.

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Gaming laptops are a tougher proposition at a time when the Steam Deck offers portable PC gaming at a fraction of the cost. Yet while Valve's handheld is great for playing indie games and older AAA titles, there are some circumstances where it's simply not fit for purpose. It isn't really suited for twitchy multiplayer shooters, while glossy ray traced experiences are beyond its capabilities. So if you're after that kind of gaming on the go, a laptop remains ideal, and you can get a great portable gaming device for less than a grand this Black Friday weekend.

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Amazon doesn't specifically list this as a Black Friday deal. But it's certainly a bargain that you can take advantage of this Black Friday weekend. AMD's Ryzen 5 5600X processor is available for just either side of half-price, depending on which side of the pond you live on. Regardless, that's a big chunk off one of the best gaming CPUs around.

When Katharine reviewed the 5600X back in 2020, she called it "a stonkingly fast gaming CPU". It's a six-core, twelve thread processor, with each of its Vermeer processors providing speedy single-core performance, making it an ideal CPU for playing both modern multithreaded games, and older single-thread titles. There are of course plenty of faster CPUs around these days, but you'll pay significantly more for those, and it's only prudent to do so if you're looking to get the highest framerates at 1080p. If you're gaming at 4k, then it's your GPU that'll be doing most of the heavy lifting, and your funds are better spent there.

It's also worth noting that the 5600X is highly power efficient, with a TDP of just 65 watts. This makes it both more economical and more environmentally friendly that a lot of CPUs, an important consideration if your energy bills are making you wince.

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While the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 is most at home tearing through 1440p games, it’s a graphics card that can do a little bit of everything – even a spot of light 4K, and at a drastically lower price than the next GPU in the stack, the RTX 4070 Ti. Black Friday now provides the chance to grab one for even less, with good-quality partner cards having fallen as low as £550 in the UK and $515 in the US.

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Modern PC gaming is a constant battle for drive space, what with having to store huge games like Call of Duty: Warzone and similarly massive videos like my fail compilations in Call of Duty: Warzone. Hence, I'm always on the lookout for discounts on storage, and when it comes to reliable SSDs, you'll struggle to find a better balance of quality and price than WD's Blue SN570. That goes double when the best NVMe SSD for gaming is on sale, and right now you can get substantial savings on the 1TB SN570 this Black Friday.

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Razer have just launched, in a teamup with UK retailer Laptops Direct, one of the more unusual Black Friday deals I’ve seen thus far. In addition to several-hundred-quid savings on various Razer Blade gaming laptops, these also come bundled with a Razer Edge Android tablet and its Kishi V2 Pro controller – a bonus package worth £450 by itself. A free bag, worth £89, is thrown in as well, as is a copy of Alan Wake 2 for selected models. Potentially, then, you could walk away with £579 in freebies, all on top of your savings on the laptop itself. Interesting.

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Nvidia’s RTX 4060 Ti is likely one of the hotter properties this Black Friday week; its dual 1080p/1440p capabilities, ray tracing and DLSS 3 support, efficiency, and relatively restrained pricing make it one of the best graphics cards of the current generation. Now, there’s an all-too-rare opportunity to grab one at significantly less than RRP/MSRP, with the triple-fan MSI GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Ventus 3X OC falling to £380 in the UK and $370 in the US.

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I like to think my Steam Deck OLED review was a sufficiently broad piece of opinioning, but in the spirit of plurality – and because we already did it with that Steam Deck Second Opinion video – I wanted our head honcho Katharine to give her take. She’s also been getting to grips with the Steam Deck OLED behind the scenes, and happens to be an expert on portable gaming devices with organic light-emitting diode screens. An expert on yearning for them, anyway.

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To quickly recap my Steam Deck OLED review, Valve’s refreshed handheld is brilliant, serving up major improvements to screen quality and battery life while making loads of little quality-of-life tweaks. Its reveal was a surprise, mind – haven’t Valve repeatedly said that there wouldn’t be another new Steam Deck for ages?

Not quite. That warning was always qualified in that a more powerful Deck was still a ways off, and the Steam Deck OLED’s performance improvements are both tiny and a likely incidental result of its efficiency savings. This very point was repeated to me in an interview with Valve designer Jay Shaw and software engineer Jeremy Selan, which also covered the Steam Deck family’s future, its current struggles with intensive big-budget games, and why they want "more, more, more" rivals like the Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go.

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While the Steam Deck OLED is awash with upgrades over the original handheld PC, it’s not a full replacement, and Valve still reckon that anyone wanting a proper Steam Deck 2 will be waiting a while.

I was told as much on the Steam Deck’s first anniversary earlier this year, and according to Valve designer Jay Shaw and software engineer Jeremy Selan, that stance won't change once the Steam Deck OLED releases on November 16th. In an RPS interview, the full version of which is coming soon, the two developers explained why the real next generation of Steam Deck will take a few years – and why they decided against making the Steam Deck OLED’s new processor more powerful as well.

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I didn’t know the Steam Deck OLED existed until last week, and yet it’s essentially something I’ve wanted for nearly two years. As great a handheld gaming PC as the original Steam Deck is, its slightly bland IPS display and short battery life are some definite weak points – points to which newer, shinier rivals, such as the Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go, have been happy to apply pressure.

Valve are keen to stress that this OLED-equipped model represents an update, not a whole generational switcheroo. Yet there’s much, much more behind that screen that just some different diodes. This is a lighter, brighter, longer-lasting, sometimes even faster-running take on the SteamOS handheld, and one that sneaks in some surprise upgrades as often as it addresses issues with the original Steam Deck. I love it.

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Valve love their surprise hardware announcements, and there’s just been a doozy in the Steam Deck OLED. It’s a "definitive" refresh of the existing Steam Deck handheld PC that swaps the underwhelming IPS display for a brighter, more vibrant OLED panel, while making numerous battery life improvements – up to and including a new, more efficient AMD APU – that promise significantly more time away from the mains. It’s not far off either: the Steam Deck OLED’s release date is November 16th, just one week away.

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You can probably guess what’s coming. Alan Wake 2’s PC performance has been the subject of nervous uh oh-ing since well before the release of its onerous system requirements; Remedy comms director Thomas Puha even implored players to "look at the image quality" instead of framerates, like Dean Learner exalting the storytelling of Punch of Judy.

Actually, that’s not fair. Alan Wake 2 is much more enjoyable than Punch and Judy. And, like Remedyverse predecessor Control, there is something impressive about just how much visual tech you can choose to put on show: ray tracing, path tracing, Nvidia Ray Reconstruction, frame generation via DLSS 3, the lot. This wealth of options has produced the most intricate settings guides I’ve put together in ages, and you can consult it yourself lower down this page.

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Cities: Skylines 2 is, much like the wonkily roaded, pollution-choked helltown I’ve built within it, a work in progress. Developers Colossal Order upped the citybuilding sequel’s system requirements well in advance of launch, and more recently admitted to have "not achieved the benchmark we targeted" for PC performance. Instead, future improvements are promised, to patch Skylines 2 into better shape.

I wish I could say that this is all just pessimism, born from an overabundance of caution and expectation management. But no, it is just a bit of a mess, one capable of putting freshly mixed concrete shoes on even the fastest graphics cards. I’ve worked out a best settings guide that, compared to the available graphics presets, can better balance performance and visuals – though be warned that this will feel more like urgent repair work than a dream remodel.

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Following three years solely on the Epic Games Store, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2’s recent Steam launch was a largely happy occasion – save for it carrying over the same always-online requirement as it has on Epic. Yesterday’s 1.1 patch for the Steam version has now made offline play possible, but in a move that simultaneously makes loads of and absolutely no sense, it’s only available on the Steam Deck.

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Lexar's NM790 4TB NVMe SSD thrums at the heart of my most beautiful , functional computer, the Digital Foundry CPU test bed. And now it can thrum at the heart of your PC too, as this capacious drive has dropped in price from $210 to $177 at Amazon US.

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LG makes a ton of monitors, so it's perhaps unsurprising that I wasn't familiar with their 34WP60C-B ultrawide model. This unassuming choice normally retails for $450, but does offer a higher-than-average 160Hz refresh rate to go along with a 34-inch VA panel and 3440x1440 resolution.

Today though, this monitor crashes into new relevance as it's been discounted to just $200 at LG's US store, an incredible price that makes it almost an impulse buy pickup for anyone that wants to try out the majesty of an ultrawide monitor.

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Samsung's 990 Pro PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD is the fastest gaming drive we've ever tested - faster even than the Crucial T700, a PCIe 5.0 SSD. And unlike that SSD, the 990 Pro works on a wide range of PCs and even the PS5, and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

In fact, today it's down to $129.99 for a 2TB Heatsink model on Amazon as part of the firm's Big Deal Days, which is a pretty sweet offer - albeit one restricted sadly to Prime customers.

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Meta may have spent the last couple of years tumbling down a metaverse rabbit hole, but the company is still responsible for creating the best VR hardware around. The Meta Quest 2 was the ideal gaming VR package: powerful and accessible enough to provide easy, convincing immersion, while also staying highly affordable. Nonetheless, Meta’s sudden fixation on creating a legless version of Second Life did have me worried about the future trajectory of its VR hardware. What daft gimmickry would their next headset come festooned with, and what would it mean for the future of the Quest as a gaming device?

With the Meta Quest 3, we have the answer. And the truth is, Meta’s latest headset does have a whiff of Metaverse about it. Dubbed a "mixed reality" device, its raison d’être is to break down the barrier between reality and the virtual world. While mixed reality is an angle I’m not wholly sold on from a gaming perspective, crucially, the features that make it a mixed reality device are useful even if you don’t want to hold a meeting in your office with a bunch of bisected Sims. Moreover, they’re built into a headset that is more powerful, more comfortable, and generally better than the Meta Quest 2.

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Assassin’s Creed Mirage is, so says the Alice B review, "the most enjoyable Assassin’s Creed game for years." That’s thanks in part to a returning focus on classic AC stealthing in a single, densely detailed city, and this back-to-basics approach extends to the technical side too. Mirage cares not for being the glossy poster child of ray-traced glamour; it’s just a game that looks pretty nice and runs well on PC, older hardware and Steam Decks included.

It also keeps its list of graphics settings relatively brief, though there are a few in there that can dish out some extra frames per second at little cost to the visuals. Here it is, then: your complete guide to Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s PC performance, from its refreshingly reasonable system requirements to its best settings combinations.

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FSR 3, AMD’s framerate-roiding answer to DLSS 3 frame generation, is ready to roll in its first supporting games. Great! Except these are currently limited to tedious magic shooters Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum, which is less great.

Regardless, this could be a major moment for basically any modern graphics card that isn’t an Nvidia RTX 40 series model. FSR 3’s Fluid Motion Frames system works in a broadly similar manner to DLSS 3, piecing together whole new frames outside of the usual GPU rendering pipeline and slipping them onto your screen between the 'real' frames. The result (in theory – I’ll be trying FSR 3 out in depth next week) is higher FPS with no extra strain on your PC, and unlike Nvidia’s frame generation, it doesn’t need any specialist hardware to work. Therefore older cards, as well as recent AMD GPUs like the RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT, could get a new lease of life in games that support it.

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Want an RX 6800 XT graphics card? And a Solidigm P41 Plus 512GB SSD? And Starfield? For $486? Thanks to a Newegg bundle, that offer is open for you right now when you use code EEGCWA827 with these two items in the checkout.

Here are the links you'll need:

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Malenia, Blade of Miquella, is a menace. Even among Elden Ring’s cast of bastard-hard bosses, the Goddess of Rot distinguishes herself as an ender of lives, a relentless steel tempest that has shredded the most prepared and dextrous of adventurers. She’s also been beaten, rather soundly, by a man using only his mouth.

Or, to be more precise, a QuadStick FPS, a specialised game controller comprised of a mouth-operated joystick and several 'sip and puff' switches. It’s the favoured tool of professional streamer and Guinness World Record holder Rocky "RockyNoHands" Stoutenburgh, who in 2022 used it to become the first quadriplegic Elden Ring player to claim Malenia’s scalp. This was a win for a QuadStick as well: a showcase of how adaptive hardware and clever controller design could make games more accessible than ever, enabling players with disabilities to match and exceed the heroics of their able-bodied peers. And yet, there’s little sense – among disabled players, advocacy groups, or even controller manufacturers – that accessible hardware is entering its golden age. While major breakthroughs have been made, high prices and commercial concerns still carry the threat of willing, eager players being left behind.

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The polished-up 2.0 update for Cyberpunk 2077 is out now, ahead of its Phantom Liberty expansion on September 26th. I’ve been trying out both, partly to see if the 2.0 newly raised hardware requirement of SSD storage is a warning worth heeding.

Hard lines against hard drive installations are new to PC games, but it was only a couple of weeks ago when Starfield showed the dangers of crossing them. Broken audio, regular freeze-ups, load times so long you could measure them with a calendar... an SSD really is the only way to play Starfield, and it sounded like Cyberpunk 2077 would follow suit. "We advise against running the game on an HDD (or on a SD card on Steam Deck) due to lower bandwidth which may cause new content to not stream properly," reads CD Projekt Red’s 2.0 patch notes. That’s us told.

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Samsung's 980 Pro NVMe SSD may not be quite as fast as the later 990 Pro, but it's still an incredibly rapid option that's often available at a more reasonable price. Samsung is currently running a money-back promotion that brings this high-end PCIe 4.0 drive down to an attractively low price in both 1TB and 2TB varieties.

You can get £30 back on the 2TB size, bringing the price to £94, while the 1TB size offers £20 back, resulting in a final price of £52. (This cashback offer runs until 9th October 2023, for the record; see their site for more info.) These are great deals and well worth considering if you want to upgrade your PC (or even PS5) with one of the fastest SSDs on the market.

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Now that’s more like it. The Radeon RX 7700 XT and Radeon RX 7800 XT graphics cards don’t just fill out a 1440p-shaped hole in AMD’s current lineup – they both, the latter in particular, make the kind of spirited attempt to get up in Nvidia’s face that previous red team GPUs simply didn’t.

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When the Lenovo Legion Go revealed itself, I was unconvinced by its portability credentials but enticed by the wireless mouse transmogrification of its detachable, Nintendo Switch-like controllers. A sparkling sliver of Swiss Army handheld design, providing a familiar taste of desktop play that the Steam Deck or Asus ROG Ally could never achieve without a USB dock.

Turns out, now that I’ve tried the Legion Go for myself, I was worried about the wrong thing. It’s nowhere near as heavy or cumbersome as it looks, and while the breakaway controls remain an exciting prospect, they also risk introducing an acute pain point. At the very least, the model I tested proved highly vulnerable to lead-handed RPS hardware editors, because I left the building very much with the impression that I’d broken it.

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Fast 2TB NVMe SSDs are continuing their downwards slide towards affordability, with Crucial's popular (and fast) P5 Plus PCIe 4.0 SSD reaching a new low of $88 at Newegg today. That price is courtesy of a $10 discount when you use code SSACW527 and runs for today only.

The P5 Plus is a drive that we've covered many times over on the RPS Deals beat, as it comes very close in performance to the top options in its category - your Samsung 990 Pros and your WD SN850xs - while often costing much less.

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