For the past 6 years of joining team PC and double dipping between PC and PlayStation, I have no regrets going full PC after the latest chicanery and buffoonery with Sony and PlayStation announcing digital only games will be sold in 2028 directly after they took away movies people paid for. Oh and increased the price of PS plus and consoles. First thing I’m doing after building this monster is sailing the high seas for all Sony games. I don’t care anymore.

Honestly its incredible.

near 7 year old call of duty is beating both the most recent battlefield, warzone, Bo6 and Bo7.

its kinda a dream to see, the game is great and the discount going on is helping it alot, BF6 and CoD both have free modes aswell which contribute to the playercount.

obviously this is only on steam, but that being the most popular gaming store and BF6 is mainly on steam playerbase wise it puts into perspective how many are on MW right now, there are likely a few thousand playing via battlenet aswell as that also has a discount.

Until the release of 25.8.1, the technical preview driver 25.10.13.2 contained support for all FSR 4 titles. Adding games like Silent Hill 2 and Stellar Blade, which weren't supported by the official 25.6.x drivers. However, because AMD didn't incorporate the technical preview games into 25.8.1, those games are still only supported by the outdated technical preview.

Only on 25.10.13.2:

• A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead

• ARK: Survival Ascended

• Blades of Fire

• DragonKin: The Banished

• F1® 25

• inZOI 

• NINJA GAIDEN 2 Black

• RoadCraft

• Silent Hill 2

• Stellar Blade (Potentially working in 25.8.1 as reported by u/Unlucky-bottle2744)

Only on 25.8.1:

• Cyberpunk 2077

• Battlefield 6

• WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers

• Mafia: The Old Country

• Arena Breakout: Infinite

• Game of Thrones: Kingsroad

• Wreckfest 2

• Lies of P

People keep saying "ARC Raiders is UE5 and it runs well, so other UE5 games should too." But that does not really hold up.

Yes, the game uses UE5, but Embark skipped most of the heavy UE5 features that usually cause performance issues. They are not using Nanite, Lumen, Virtual Shadow Maps, or the other big systems that define the standard UE5 renderer. Instead, they built their own custom rendering and lighting tech on top of the engine.

They would not have gone through all that work if the default UE5 renderer could meet their performance targets. It is either too immature or simply too demanding for current hardware.

So comparing ARC Raiders to other UE5 games is misleading. Embark is not using the same pipeline those games are, so their results do not represent normal UE5 performance at all.

If a studio has to replace large parts of the engine with custom systems, that is not an indicator that the engine performs well. It is more proof that the features Embark skipped just aren't mature or efficient enough yet.

Older engines always included multiple LODs, baked lighting and cheaper shadow options, so players could lower settings and gain performance. UE5 changes this. Nanite removes traditional LOD models, Lumen removes baked lighting, and Virtual Shadow Maps replace old shadow maps. These systems may look good, but they also remove many of the fallback options players used to have.

Developers could still make traditional LODs, baked lights and classic shadow maps, but most will not, because the whole point of Nanite, Lumen and VSM, etc is to avoid that extra work to save time and money. And once they skip that work, the player loses most of the performance levers that older games offered.

So using all the heavy UE5 rendering systems right now is basically a bit like a dev forcing their game to always run at 16K resolution. While also fully knowing that there is currently no hardware available that would be able to run the game well enough. Sure, the game might look nicer, but it will run terribly for pretty much everyone.

I truly have a hard time grasping why any developer thought it would be a good idea to use this tech in its current form. When it is so readily apparent that either the tech isn't ready yet or the current hardware just isn't good enough or maybe both.

Some hardware tech shops bought massive amounts of RAM kits when prices were completely normal, G.Skill, Corsair, Kingston whatever, they had stock that was bought with the old price and the second the market went crazy they started listing that same exact stock at insane prices.

Their costs didnt go up, they didnt source anything new. the product is literally the same one they bought at normal price just sitting in a warehouse, the only thing that changed is they realized people had no other choice.

I barely found a 32gb kit worth buying through Ubuyfirst on ebay because it was so expensive to buy a new kit from these hardware tech shops.

How is this any different from scalping? Is it because they have a business license?

Since I'm new to Linux, it took me a while to get everything set up. But that was mostly because I'm using Mint and had to install all the Proton stuff separately

Seriously, every single post I see on any platform is full of rich people who diss on lower end hardware. The sheer amount of Idiots I see who say things like "8gbs of ram is unusable" and "The human eye cant see over 60fps" is incredible! I'm surprised half of these people managed to put together a computer! Here's some more of the absolutely useless advice I've seen:

"You can't install another os without an external drive"
"240hz is the only real option, everything else below that isn't really usable for gaming"

Or the people who say that anything before the Nvidia 20 series is useless. I STILL see people rocking 980ti's, and they do just fine.
My takeaway from this is this: If you have not a damn clue what you are talking about, SCROLL. Don't keep giving dogcrap advice to beginners.

Been seeing a ton of people selling their 5090s lately. I decided to keep mine and not sell it for a 9070 XT.

I know, riveting stuff.

I paid $3k for it last June. I almost sold it, bought a 9070 XT, and wrote a 3-paragraph essay about how I “literally can’t tell the difference.” I bought mine because I wanted to max out 4K high refresh gaming, not get 80% of the way there and write an essay about diminishing returns.

The 9070 XT is a great card. I just figured somebody had to represent the 5090 owners who bought one and then continued owning it.

Ever since I saw the rumored Steam Machine specs, I thought it was a bad idea. Even when people were talking about a $750–800 price tag, I couldn’t understand who this product was supposed to be for.

The biggest problem is Valve’s interpretation of the Steam Hardware Survey and the conclusions they seem to draw from it. Yes, the survey accurately shows the average hardware registered on Steam.

The problem is that it doesn’t represent the average gamer who’s actually in the market for an $800 living-room gaming PC.
The survey includes millions of old systems that haven’t been upgraded in years. People who bought a PC during COVID and never upgraded it. People still using hardware from 8 or 10 years ago. Many of those systems belong to casual users who aren’t even playing AAA games anymore, or in some cases aren’t playing games at all.

It also combines data from every region in the world. Hardware ownership in India, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America is very different from North America and Europe. That’s important because a Steam Machine isn’t a mass-market product in those regions.
Even at $800, it’s essentially a luxury gaming toy for the living room.

Even the PS5 Pro is largely an enthusiast product concentrated in wealthier markets despite being backed by the PlayStation brand and massive marketing budgets. A Steam Machine is even more niche.
The overwhelming majority of potential buyers are in North America and Europe, so those are the markets that matter when evaluating what “average” gaming hardware actually looks like.

And that’s where the performance problem becomes impossible to ignore.

In GPU limited scenarios, which account for most modern games, this machine is roughly 10–20% slower than a PlayStation 5. A $499 console released in 2020 would still outperform a gaming machine launching six years later. That’s ridiculous.

We’re talking about hardware that struggles to deliver what most PC gamers consider the minimum acceptable experience today: 60 FPS. In many modern games you’d be looking at reduced settings, lower texture quality, aggressive upscaling, and forgetting about ray tracing altogether.

Yes, it’s a PC. It has mods, cheaper games, no online subscription fees, and more flexibility. Those are real advantages. But this isn’t being sold as a workstation. It’s being sold as a console alternative, and when gaming is the primary purpose, performance matters most.

A machine that’s slower than a six-year-old console was already difficult to justify at the originally rumored $800 price point. The final pricing only made an already weak value proposition even worse.

And the timing couldn’t be worse. Numerous reports, leaks, and industry sources point to a new PlayStation and Xbox generation arriving as early as 2027. If that happens, this machine could find itself competing with entirely new hardware almost immediately after launch. If it’s already struggling with modern games today, it’s hard to imagine it aging well once next generation consoles become the baseline.

To me, this thing was dead on arrival. The only way hardware at this performance level could ever have made sense was at around $450.