The best part is that DLSS 3.5 not only brings Ray Reconstruction support but is supported across all RTX GPUs and also supports the latest DLSS Super Resolution AI framework for much better image reconstruction.

The elimination of these denoisers also means that the engine is less crammed up and has more room to breathe which as a result opens up room for better performance too. We will get to the performance aspect in a bit but for now, let's talk about how to enable DLSS 3.5 within Cyberpunk 2077.

(OP - here's some related video links)
Gamers Nexus Cyberpunk 2.0 Ray Reconstruction COmparison
Hardware Unboxed- Better Ray Tracing, (Almost) No Cost -

The 4X strategy genre has a new upstart – with Paradox’s Interactive’s Millenia taking aim at Civilization’s crown.

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Enter Millenia, a new IP from Paradox Interactive, developed by independent developer C Prompt Games. You won’t know C Prompt – they’re new – but core members of their team have worked on titles like Age of Mythology, Age of Empires, Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo. The strategy pedigree is there.

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Announcement Trailer

While most of us whiled away the many days of pandemic-induced lockdown in 2020 binge-watching Netflix and baking our own bread for some reason, acclaimed anime screenwriter Gen Urobochi (Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Psycho-Pass) went ahead and built his own video game. That game, a rough demo that featured a rabbit in a mechanical suit blasting his way through piles of junk in a post-apocalyptic world, would eventually serve as the jumping off point for Rusty Rabbit, the new 2.5D Metroidvania from developer Nitro Plus announced this week at Tokyo Game Show.

This Metroidvania with roguelike elements takes place thousands of years after humanity has abandoned the Earth, and rabbits have taken over. Stamp, the long-eared main character, spends his days piloting his mech suit ‘Junkster’ through the giant ruins of a giant space elevator in search of valuable scrap. When one day he stumbles upon clues to the whereabouts of his missing daughter on an abandoned ‘D-Tam’ computer terminal, it sends Stamp on a search for more of these computer terminals buried throughout Rusty Rabbit’s Metroidvania-style maze. All the while battling enemies and hunting for treasures, then subsequently making return trips to his base camp at the surface in order to upgrade his suit.

YouTube Video

These new drivers don't promise much by way of specifics. Though Nvidia does say they provide "the best gaming experience for the latest new games supporting DLSS 3.5 technology and DLSS Ray Reconstruction including Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty."

That's probably reason enough to go out and download this driver package. Cyberpunk is chocked full of the latest graphics features, including Ray Reconstruction. Our Dave has been playing around with Ray Reconstruction in Cyberpunk 2077 ahead of time, and he's quite smitten with it already.

Driver link

Build A Rocket Boy, the studio founded by former Rockstar exec Leslie Benzies, has announced plans for an imminent PC closed alpha test of its ambitious-looking game creation platform Everywhere.

This closed alpha will be accessible to players who sign up for an account at Everywhere.game.

A new trailer for Everywhere, released today, shows some of the biomes you can explore and play around with in the game, as well as some swooping camera pans through its Ready Player One-style hub. There's also a glimpse at some of the types of mini-games you can build and a brief look at the game's editor mode, which lets you tweak creations you've made on the fly.

YouTube Trailer

Some time into figuring out Fantastic Haven's UI and menu options, I received a notification that a gryphon—who I'd so nicely made a little patch of grassland for—had gone rogue. Tabbing back to my settlement, I watched the little rascal sprint for my quarantine building and smack it before my helpful golems came along to calm the poor blighter down.

These charming little vignettes give the creatures of Fantastic Haven a whole lot of personality, even if they're only in your enclosures for a short period of time. Fantastic Haven is a Fantasy Management builder—meaning you'll be making adjustments to your clinic for wondrous beasts from a top-down view, plonking down buildings, assigning your wizards to tasks, navigating a research tree, that sort of thing.

YouTube Trailer
Steam Page

Looking to dust off Cyberpunk 2077 for the new 2.0 update? If you want the game looking, and running, like Johnny Silverhand's Porsche 911 Turbo, you should enable one of the game's many available upscaling technologies. You have a few to choose from: DLSS, FSR, and XeSS.

You can take your pick of the lot with a modern GeForce graphics card installed in your PC, though I would stick with Nvidia's own DLSS. Cyberpunk 2077 has become the poster child for new DLSS versions, including DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction, and it looks real good. But those with AMD or Intel cards, or older Nvidia GPUs, don't have that option available to them.

(OP: Article has some comparison shots with sliders)

After a draining day's reportage upon the thoroughly alien doings of vast corporate publishers, I like nothing better than to flee, blabbing and weeping, into the arms of a micro-RPG. Scumhead's Franzen - released a few days ago on Steam and Itch - has a couple of big draws, straight off the bat. Firstly and least importantly, it's free, which it really shouldn't be. Secondly and more significantly, it's one of those rare RPG miniatures that is both richly imagined and snappy, with a busy and befuddling world in which you have immediate clear motivations that escalate rapidly and breed Dire Implications. It also looks like a 16-bit Pathologic, so consider me firmly on board.

YouTube Trailer
Steam Page
Itch Page

A new version of Stardock's cosmic empire wrangler Galactic Civilizations IV, titled Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Edition, will release out of early access on Steam and the Epic Games Store on 19th October - which also happens to be Stardock's 30th anniversary. It's "by far the biggest expansion Stardock has ever made", according to company founder Brad Wardell, who claims this latest dollop of interstellar tyranny will "transform the gameplay in ways not seen in a 4X game before". By which he chiefly means that the Supernova Edition uses large language learning models to generate civ backstories on demand. Let's dig in!

There's a catch, though. Because of the lightweight and portable design of this thing, there isn't much space for super high-performance computing. If you were hoping to max out all of your games in a device that fits in your backpack, your best bet is still going to be one of the best gaming laptops. However, where the ROG Ally shines – much like the Steam Deck – is in playing the indie games that make PC gaming so magical in the first place.

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The Asus ROG Ally Z1 is equipped with a 7-inch FHD display, which is much better than the 800p display on the Steam Deck. However, while the ROG Ally Z1 has a slightly more powerful APU, the extra resolution is going to cause some performance problems if you're not careful – more on that later.

The problem here is that you're going to want to take full advantage of this display. It's a 7-inch IPS beauty rated at 500 nits of brightness and can theoretically reproduce 100% of the sRGB color spectrum. It's absolutely stunning, especially when the brightness is turned up.

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Star Citizen’s long-running development has inched forward yet again, this time to the Alpha 3.20 stage. The latest update, dubbed “Fully Loaded”, overhauls the Arena Commander mode, adds new PvP modes, maps, and racetracks, and adds new missions and ships to the Persistent Universe portion of the space sim.

This is the largest update to Arena Commander since its introduction in 2014, developer Cloud Imperium Games said, and delivers “more focused, bite-sized gameplay with diverse content for racers, fighters, and competitors climbing the leaderboards”.

The update also adds the MISC Hull C ship, the “titan of the cargo hauling profession with room for a crew of up to four players”, and the Fury LX, a racing variant of the recently added Mirai Fury snub fighter. New features include automatic cargo loading and unloading at space stations to support the Hull C’s expansive cargo capacity.

YouTube Trailer

... The First Descendant, whose open cross-play beta is currently enjoying a healthy spot on Steam's most played games list. At the time of this writing, The First Descendant has over 77,591 concurrent players, and that figure continues to rise. It's easy to imagine it landing into the top 10 by the end of the day.

So what is it? Well, The First Descendant is a free-to-play, sci-fi, third-person, co-op shooter that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world. But instead of one where rogue machines destroyed human civilization, you fight off monsters to ensure the survival of humanity's remains following an alien attack.

The First Descendant is developed by Nexon (Korea's Tencent, basically). The beta is live until September 25, but the full game doesn't have a release date. Even in these busy weeks for major video game releases, the game already has a sizeable audience. Obviously, it remains to be seen whether it can bring all those players back at launch.

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Steam Page

AMD has updated its Radeon Adrenalin driver with the latest edition, 23.9.2. The newest version brings unified driver support for AMD Radeon RX 7700 and RX 7800, which the previous driver lacked, and there was a separate download for these two SKUs. Besides merging into a single unified driver, the new update brings Lies of P, Party Animals, and The Crew Motorfest game support for AMD Radeon graphics. In this driver release, the AMD Radeon Anti-Lag+ feature is introduced for Starfield, Witcher 3, ELDEN RING, Immortal of Aveum, and an Anti-Lag+ screen overlay for system latency. AMD fixed some issues like application crashing while playing Baldur Gate 3 with Vulkan API on RX 7900 XTX, limited GPU clock tuning on RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT, application crash while playing SMITE on RX 7900 XTX, and application crash or driver timeout while playing F1 2023 on RX 7800 XT. There is no Cyberpunk 2077 update yet in this driver release.

You'll need just 40GB of storage to install Mirage, with a variety of CPUs and GPUs supported for running the game somewhere between 1080p 30fps and up to 4K and 60fps.

On the low end, you're looking at a Nvidia GeForce 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 570 with 8GB RAM. On the high end, you'll need a Nvidia GeForce 3080 or AMD Radeon 6900 with 16GB RAM.

Terraria developer Re-Logic is donating $100k to two open source engines in the wake of Unity's recent policy changes.

Re-Logic does not even use Unity, but in a statement via X (formerly Twitter) the developer said it felt it "cannot sit idly by as these predatory moves are made against studios everywhere".

Godot and FNA will receive $100k each, and Re-Logic will also continue sponsoring both with a further $1k per month. "All we ask in return is that they remain good people and keep doing all that they can to make these engines powerful and approachable for developers everywhere," said Re-Logic.

Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 is coming soon - the first showcase for DLSS 3.5 ray reconstruction, integrated into a full DLSS package including super resolution and frame generation, all combining to produce a state-of-the-art visual experience. In this roundtable discussion, we discuss how ray reconstruction works, how it was developed and its applications outside of path-traced games. We also talk about the evolution of the original DLSS, the success of DLSS in the modding community and the future of machine learning in PC graphics.

Many thanks to all participants in this roundtable chat: Bryan Catanzaro, Vice President Applied Deep Learning Research at Nvidia, Jakub Knapik VP Art and Global Art Director at CD Projekt RED, GeForce evangelist Jacob Freeman and Pedro Valadas of the PCMR sub-Reddit.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:10 When did the DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction project start and why?
00:04:16 How did you get DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction up and running?
00:06:17 What was it like to integrate DLSS 3.5 for Cyberpunk 2077?
00:10:21 What are the new game inputs for DLSS 3.5?
00:11:25 Can DLSS 3.5 be used for hybrid ray tracing titles and not just path traced ones?
00:12:41 What is the target performance budget for DLSS 3.5?
00:14:10 Is DLSS a crutch for bad performance optimisation in PC games?
00:20:19 What makes machine learning specifically useful for denoising?
00:24:00 Why is DLSS naming kind of confusing?
00:27:03 What did the new denoising enable for Cyberpunk 2077's graphical vision?
00:32:10 Will Nvidia still focus on performance without DLSS at native resolutions?
00:38:26 What prompted the change internally at Nvidia to move away from DLSS 1.0 and pursue DLSS 2.0?
00:43:43 What do you think about DLSS mods for games that lack DLSS?
00:49:52 Where can machine learning go in the future for games beyond DLSS 3.5?

Welcome to the world of gaming, where innovation meets eccentricity. Gamers, much like any other subculture, have their fair share of trends and products that, while well-intentioned, often land on the cringe-worthy spectrum. In this blog post, we're diving headfirst into the top 5 cringe-worthy items that you might find in a gaming setup. From gaming gloves that look like you're about to perform open-heart surgery to energy drinks that promise to turn you into a gaming superhero, prepare for a

Its been a while since we had a new entry of the famous Dark Souls or Bloodborne Formula, but its here and it is good. What I can say to you without spoiling is that the story is the highlight which for this type of game, is never the case.

Dwarf Fortress from Bay 12 Games and Kitfox Games has a fresh update available on Steam today, and this brings with it their official Native Linux support.

With the latest update now out they said they're going to continue working in parallel on different parts of the game like the adventure mode, with more to show on that coming soon. More user interface work is being done too and more work on the fort mode.

What's Coming To Xbox Game Pass

• Party Animals (Console, Cloud) - September 20
• Payday 3 (Console, PC, Cloud) - September 21
• Cocoon (Console, PC) - September 29
• Gotham Knights (Xbox Series X/S, PC, Cloud) - October 3 | Our Review
• The Lamplighter’s League (Xbox Series X/S, PC, Cloud) - October 3

What’s Leaving On September 30

• Beacon Pines (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Despot’s Game (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Last Call BBS (PC)
• Moonscars (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Outriders (Cloud, Console, and PC) | Our Review
• Prodeus (Cloud, Console, and PC)

GENERAL UPDATES

• We're implementing some updates to how we load your accessories, like gun buddies and weapons skins, so that it will reduce your load times. This will land mid-patch.

AGENT UPDATES

Sage

• We’ve updated Sage’s voice lines and added interaction lines with more Agents.

COMPETITIVE UPDATES

• There has been a wave of competitive rank boosting with bots and real players. In an effort to protect against this abuse, we have introduced restrictions where Ascendant players and higher can only invite players with Platinum rank and higher to their competitive party.
• We will continue to actively monitor botting abuse and ban any accounts suspicious of this behavior.
• For more information on our Gameplay Systems and our approach to combating disruptive behavior, check out our recent VALORANT Systems Health Series.

GAMEPLAY SYSTEMS UPDATES

• Made some back end updates for Combat Reports in order to fix instances where all the correct information wasn't showing. Please let us know if there are any weird behaviors—especially after death and pre-round start.

BUG FIXES

Gameplay Systems

• Fixed a rare bug where you would be revealed unintentionally in places that you shouldn’t be seen after purchasing a weapon.
• Fixed an issue where the Spike plant and defuse UI bar did not appear for minimal HUD observers.
• Fixed a bug where vision cones would flicker at the start of a round on Sunset.

"Dragon Age in the early days had its fair share of identity crises," Flynn says. "Was it going to be a tools-driven, modding-driven game like Neverwinter Nights? Was it going to be a big singleplayer RPG like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion?"

"Dragon Age on PC shipped with the toolset, so we did do that," Flynn says.

Dragon Age: Origins does have a quite prolific modding community that's created new party members, tons of hairstyles and armor sets, combat mods, and more. The output for Dragon Age 2 was noticeably smaller. Then BioWare switched to DICE's Frostbite Engine, notoriously difficult for modders to use, especially without official tools, and Dragon Age: Inquisition's modding community was hamstrung.

"I wish we'd kept that up and stuck to that," Flynn says of shipping Dragon Age games with modding tools. "Unfortunately we got, I'd say, a little too homogenous between Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I wish we would have kept more of a PC-centric, Neverwinter-like identity for Dragon Age."

Flynn describes the move to Frostbite as a push to standardize tools internally across BioWare's then-growing studios. "We had so many different engines for so long at BioWare," Flynn says, explaining that the studio hoped to create a more common vocabulary across teams who could share what they'd built with one another's projects.

A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google's position leading up to Stadia's closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise.

"For Stadia to succeed, both consumers and publishers needed to find sufficient value in the Stadia platform. Stadia conducted user experience research on the reasons why gamers choose one platform over another. That research showed that the primary reasons why gamers choose a game platform are (1) content catalog (breadth and depth) and (2) network effects (where their friends play).

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"However, Stadia never had access to the extensive library of games available on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam. More importantly, these competing services offered a wider selection of AAA games than Stadia," Zimring says.

According to the statement, Google would also offer to pay some, or all, of the costs associated with porting a game to Stadia's Linux-based streaming platform to try and get more games on the platform. Still, in Google's eyes, this wasn't enough to compete with easier platforms to develop for, such as Nvidia's GeForce Now.

In the lead-up to Diablo 4's first season back in July, the game received a patch that was universally unpopular. That feels like an understatement—the community revolt was fierce enough to cause an honest-to-Lilith emergency broadcast where the devs stated: "we don't plan on doing a patch like this ever again".

Far from repeating the mistakes of the past, it seems the Diablo team are slowly reversing them entirely. As spotted by Gamesradar, a hotfix has increased the experience gain for killing monsters in World Tier 3 by 5%, and 15% in World Tier 4.

This goes some way to fixing the nerfs which had players up in arms—nerfs that crushed XP bonuses for killing higher level monsters (from 25% at three levels or higher to a piddly 15% at around ten levels higher) alongside the World Tier bonuses they're just now u-turning on.

While this is technically good news, it looks like plenty of players would prefer these missteps were never made in the first place. In a post on the game's subreddit, players took the hotfix less like a kind gift and more like an overdue admission the devs had messed up. The top-rated comment by user SQRTLURFACE reads: "Classic Blizzard. Reduce XP, then Give XP back, call it a hotfix/patch."