PC Gaming
The eras of Apex Legends can be mapped out by a handful of milestone patches: the arrival of Evo Shields, the introduction of the map rotation, the first objective mode that’d eventually become Mixtape, and more recently the new iteration of Ranked. Experimentation is baked into Apex’s identity. Respawn has never shied away from making…
Apex Legends is growing up. The hit battle royale celebrates its fifth anniversary this month, but instead of basking in the past with an Apex OG party, Respawn is squarely focused on the future. Season 20 is nigh, and it’s bringing a handful of major changes that aim to reduce complexity and eliminate some of…
The best Black Swan build in Honkai: Star Rail centres around buffing the fortune teller’s DoT damage. This five-star character is laser-focused around dealing DoT—or damage-over-time—and supporting teams that also like to slowly chip away at enemies with wind shear, bleed, burn, or shock. Black Swan stacks the Arcana effect on enemies, dealing wind damage…
For games to use a graphics card for rendering all the nice visuals, one of the countless steps involved is mapping the contents of the VRAM to the system memory. For many years, this was limited to a maximum of 256MB, until Resizable BAR was heavily promoted by AMD. This feature of the PCI Express…
Gaming laptops have long perpetuated the myth that they’re designed for ‘gaming on the go’ but the reality is very different: gaming battery life is generally measured in minutes rather than hours. That means you’re unlikely to be spending long thrashing around Baldur’s Gate 3 away from a plug socket when your high-end notebook’s GPU…
Secret Level This article first appeared in PC Gamer magazine issue 392 in January 2024, as part of our Secret Level series. Every month we talk to the unsung heroes of games development, and explore what makes their roles vital. Although recently promoted to art director at Larian, Alena Dubrovina hadn’t originally planned a career…
Anomaly Agent feels like a tie-in game for an ’80s movie that never existed. The first game from developer Phew Phew Games, Anomaly Agent starts with a bang. You’re dropped into the action mid-mission, your boss harping at you over the radio to stay focused while interdimensional anomalies crop up all around you. You play…
Valve’s monthly analysis of its Steam Hardware Survey for January was published the other day and the figures made for interesting, if not unexpected, reading. For example, Windows 11 was making small gains against Windows 10, and the number of CPU cores and amount of system RAM are all steadily increasing. I’ve been monitoring the…
Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part 2 recently received an all-singing all-dancing remaster for PlayStation 5, which was both something of a surprise (the game was only released in 2020) and managed to over-deliver with a slew of new modes, cut content, creator commentary, and of course native 4K. Sony hasn’t yet announced whether…
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor has scooped this year’s Grammy for best video game soundtrack making it the second game to receive the award since its inauguration last year. Specifically given for “Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive media”, the award was won by Stephen Barton and Gordy Haab, for their work writing…