Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Last year’s annual CPU tug-of-war was cleanly won by AMD, its obscenely fast Ryzen 7 9800X3D almost singlehandedly leaving Intel and their Core Ultra chips in a heap of mud and P.E.-spec rope. Coming soon to press that advantage are the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D, a pair of even higher-spec processors that headlined AMD’s plethora of CES 2025 hardware announcements.

No pricing (or exact release date) on these yet, but they both up the core and thread counts over the 9800X3D while peaking at higher boost clock speeds. And, of course, they share the same 3D V-Cache design that makes the 9800X3D such a superlative CPU in the first place. If you don’t know what this is and how it helps game performance, imagine how much faster you could eat Wotsits if you had a massive bucket of them on your desk at all times, instead of having to get up and walk to the kitchen to grab individual packs. In this case the Wotsits are data, the bucket is 3D V-Cache, and the hastened ruination of your digestive system is games running faster.

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Yesterday, we reported that the US federal government had placed Chinese video game publisher Tencent – owner of League Of Legends developers Riot Games, Path Of Exile developers Grinding Gear and much more besides – on a list of Chinese military companies. The list in question is part of a strategy of counteracting what the US sees as the close relationship between China’s armed forces and various civilian technology suppliers and research projects.

At the time of publication yesterday, a Tencent spokesperson had commented that the listing was based on a “misunderstanding”. In a statement sent to RPS overnight and also published online, Tencent’s chairman Ma Huateng and executive board have now said that they’re prepared to get legal if the misunderstanding isn’t resolved.

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God-wrecking MOBA Smite 2 is going free-to-play next week after four months of paid early access. The game of omniscient deities scrapping over lanes and minions has been playable since September last year by early bird “founders” willing to pay some bucks (it had plenty of closed alphas since May too) but now it’s finally opening up to the rest of us mere mortals. And it’s throwing in a new “god” too, the genie-toting thief Aladdin.

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Chinese publisher Tencent are the biggest video game company in the world. Their wholly owned subsidiaries including League Of Legends developers Riot Games, Path Of Exile developers Grinding Gear Games, and UK outfit Sumo Group. They own shares in everything from Epic Games through Ubisoft to Silent Hill 2 rebooters Bloober Team. Are you a game developer? Odds are that at least one percent of your body belongs to Tencent. Maybe one of your toes.

And now it turns out that Tencent are some kind of military operator, as well. Or at least, that’s what the US Department of Defence would have us believe: they’ve just somewhat randomly added the firm to an infamous list of Chinese military companies, together with lithium-ion battery maker CATL. This potentially makes it difficult for Tencent to do business in the States, but Tencent say that it’s all based on a “misunderstanding”.

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There’s a new Lenovo Legion Go on the way, and while it’s ditching the signature detachable controllers, it’s still got something unusual to stick on its CV. The Lenovo Legion Go S is a smaller, cheaper take on Lenovo’s portable gaming PC, and it’s on track to become the first officially licensed SteamOS handheld outside of Valve’s own Steam Deck range.

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Last night, at CES 2025, Nvidia finally announced their RTX 50 series graphics cards, and can I just say that I am wise to the RTX 5090’s tricks. A GPU that eats up to 575W and costs £1939 / $1999? Yeah, nice try, Geoffrey N. Vidia, but such a mad card couldn’t possibly exist in reality. It’s clearly only here to make the other ones, the RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070, look like better deals.

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Countless are the pretenders to Dungeon Keeper‘s skull-buttressed throne, but I sense a certain fearful promise in The Deadly Path, a building management and roguelike strategy game from Owlskip Enterprises. The setup here is that you’re stuck in a tabletop underworld with a bunch of elder gods, or Dread Deities. As Custodian of this dusty funereal expanse, you must place structures on tiles around your throne room, striving to fulfil the desires of whichever Dread Deity is in play, while fending off pernicious attackers from the realm of light. Here’s a trailer.

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If you gotta go fast, you probably don’t want to be a stubby-legged spearman who climbs every ladder like a geriatric walrus. Yet that’s the challenge taken up yesterday by speedrunners at Awesome Games Done Quick. The UFO 50 speedrun includes an impressive dart through the retro collection’s most bewildering game, the ancient and mysterious Barbuta, in which your character is a frustratingly slow hero with a fearfully short attack range. They managed to complete it in less than five minutes. Not only does the run (and its helpful commentary) serve as a short and sweet explanation of why Barbuta is so glitchily fascinating, it also left plenty of time to marathon another three games from the collection.

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I don’t want to talk to a game. I assume I’m not alone in this, because the tech’s been around for donkey’s and barely anyone tries to use it. Mass Effect 3 tried voice commands. Socom U.S Navy Seals shipped with a headset. “Dunno if I wanna be shouting out tacticool commands in my living room,” wrote a Redditor on the subject four years ago, speaking to my very soul in the process. “Gimme the clunky buttons instead”.

Thankfully, you can also use your keyboard to interrogate suspects in murder mystery Dead Meat. It’s a moody, slightly goofy noir puzzler that lets you ask anything you want. Whether this means you’ll always get a worthwhile response, I’m not sure. “Want to discuss their alibi? Probe them on the meaning of life? Confess your love? Or just troll them mercilessly? Your words hold power, and anything goes,” reads the Steam page. Here’s a trailer.

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It’s not being spelt out overtly, but there is a whiff of Intel’s new Battlemage GPUs being pitched as what the Alchemist generation should have been. Those eventually grew into their PCIe shoes, but only after months of dial-shifting driver updates – whereas the flagship B580 promises Nvidia-besting games performance from the off. Even at such a stage in the current graphics generation (the GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 could be revealed literally tonight, at CES 2025), there is something enticing about that proposition.

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