Remember those “new” Ryzen 5000 chips AMD launched last week alongside its actually new Ryzen 9000 CPUs? Turns out the benchmarks AMD provided for them are horribly misleading.

YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed spotted that something was a bit rotten in the Denmark of the Ryzen 7 5800XT and Ryzen 9 5900XT gaming numbers AMD put out to promote the chips.

AMD benchmarks showed the 5800XT beating Intel’s Core i5-13600K across a number of games, while the 5900XT was shown having the better of the Core i7-13700K.

The problem with those claims is multifold, and it starts like this. The “new” AMD CPUs are minor tweaks of existing chips based on the Zen 3 architecture. The 5800XT is an eight-core CPU with specs very close to the existing Ryzen 7 5700X, while the 5900XT is a 16-core alternative that’s specced to within a whisker of the Ryzen 9 5950X.

The point is that both of the “new” chips are largely known quantities, even without detailed third-party testing. But h…

Update: Naughty Dog has since released a hotfix to address the performance issues.

Original story: Seasoned PC gamers are used to dealing with the wonderful world of very buggy ports. Sometimes they’re infuriating game-breaking issues, but more often than not they’re just dumb, or annoying. The PC port for Naughty Dog’s hit The Last of Us had fans very excited when it was announced last year, but it seems we’ve been offered helpings of both kinds of bugs in equal measure. While this has left many fans upset with their experience, the good news is Naughty Dog is aware and already at work investigating many common problems.

Naughty Dog has listed the known issues for the PC version of The Last of Us Part 1 on the official PC support page. They range from shader problems—which likely just lead to weird visuals—to the game not booting at all. The post comes with the promise that these bugs are all being investigated…

Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren has been shown the door, as the board of directors has decided that it is in need of “different leadership” to take the company forward. The move comes just six months after the catastrophic launch of struggling heist-shooter Payday 3.

Sjögren became acting CEO of Starbreeze in October 2020 following the resignation of then-CEO Mikael Nermark, and was appointed to the position permanently in March 2021. Three years later, he’s very suddenly out, and while a specific reason for his ouster was given it sure doesn’t sound like the Starbreeze board of directors was happy with how things have been going.

“The company has a clear strategy centered around creating attractive games on our own and licensed IPs,” Starbreeze chairman Torgny Hellström said in a press release (via Game Developer). “The board’s consolidated assessment is that the execution of strategy needs a different leadership.”

Hellström thanked Sj&ouml…

Secretlab’s pricing is a bit odd; you have direct pricing, indirect pricing, and now a Black Friday sale price. What that usually means you’ll find a Secretlab gaming chair going for less on Secretlab’s own website than on, say, Amazon. Though through Black Friday you’ll also score an extra discount to bring the fantastic Secretlab Titan Evo gaming chair down from $549 to $519.

That $30 discount is a familiar sight. It’s pretty much the standard sale price we expect to see from Secretlab on one of its ‘Signatures’ chairs for any major sales event throughout the year. Though it’s still a decent way to shave some money off the gaming chair that I still use in the office to this day, and the one I rate as the best gaming chair. 

At least you know you’re getting this chair for pretty much the best price it’ll go for nowadays. These chairs have increased in price over the years with Secretlab citing increased shipping and material costs—you won’t often find one goi…

There’s no getting around it: if you’re looking to pick up an RTX 4080 graphics card this holiday, the deals aren’t that impressive. Of the best GPU deals we’ve gathered, most sites are only cutting prices by $50-$100 bucks, the most elusive among them being the RTX 4080.

Good RTX 4080 deals are so rare that we’ve already seen one sell out—a $140-off deal for a Gigabyte card at Best Buy. Rest in peace, but the good news is there’s a Newegg deal that’s nearly as good still in stock: the MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 4080 16GB can currently be snagged for $1,080 at Newegg.

Just 20 bucks shy of the sold-out Best Buy card. Not too shabby, but be aware that’s only after going through Newegg’s $30 rebate process and punching in the $20 discount code BFCCY2Z36 at checkout. 

• We’re curating all the best Black Friday PC gaming deals right here.

As an added bonus, Nvidia is giving away Al…

I was a little surprised to learn that Ubisoft is publishing a second 2D Prince of Persia game so soon after The Lost Crown, meaning both were in development simultaneously. This one is a bit different though: It’s not developed by a Ubisoft studio, and it’s releasing on Steam in early access this May, which is notable because Ubisoft has been doing timed Epic Games Store exclusives for the past several years. 

The Rogue Prince of Persia was announced at today’s Triple-I Initiative showcase, although its existence was leaked earlier. It’s being developed by Evil Empire, the studio founded to make DLC for popular roguelite Dead Cells while Motion Twin moved on to a new project, and sees the Prince reacting to a Hun invasion with his usual melee combat and platforming. As the “rogue” bit of the title hints, though, something new happens when the Prince inevitably finds himself at the bottom of a spike trap.

Lucky for our impaled Prince, he’s been “living a roguelite h…

“A celestial flower blooms, as a vicious wasp protects. Complete their entwined symbiotic life cycle in a realm crawling with hunger,” reads the simple description for Nidus, an upcoming twin-stick shooter from indie developer Caleb Wood.

What it describes is some of the most entrancing gameplay snippets and trailers I’ve seen all year. Nidus is a twin-stick arcade shooter that looks to be some seriously demanding gameplay. Here’s the trick: You control both flower and wasp as a symbiotic organism to survive their strange ecosystem long enough to complete their life cycle. 

The two characters push and pull against each other. The wasp can smash, slice, and sting enemies with great speed. The flower has a more stable movement, and can seemingly fire projectiles both directionally and in spinning bursts. As the wasp takes down enemies it collects energy that it can use to pollinate the flower, which lets it unleash those burst attacks—and heal the duo.

Non…

While Intel has been busy making bets on its 18A node as part of its accelerated roadmap towards chip making dominance, TSMC appears to have been beavering away in the background to undercut it. 

It’s just announced its own “angstrom-class” process, A16, which thanks to its backside power delivery implementation looks set to not only offer significantly improved performance compared to its upcoming NP2 process, but also improve energy efficiency, too. Intel has its own competing backside power delivery tech, PowerVia. While Intel says it will begin producing chips on 18A next year, it doesn’t expect to start producing large volumes of chips on the 18A node until 2027.

TSMC says that chips built on the new A16 process will provide an 8-10% speed improvement over N2P at the same voltage, with a 15-20% power reduction at the same speed and up to a 1.10X chip density improvement for data centre products. The company aims to begin production on chips using the tech in 20…

Late last year Twitch began to take the issue of gambling streams on its platform seriously, issuing new guidelines that prohibited such content and triggering an exodus of content creators that gambled on-stream. This saw major figures such as xQc, a hugely popular Canadian streamer who often gambles big money and admits he has a problem, move over to Twitch rival Kick, which allows gambling (though the $100 million definitely helped).

Twitch has now begun to get more laser-focused on these guidelines, and has issued a new edict that prohibits streamers from either promoting or being sponsored by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) skin gambling sites. Estimating the size of this grey industry is a near-impossible task, but it’s fair to say it is enormous, enormously popular, and has been a part of the CS:GO scene pretty much since Valve added skins (heck, I’ve gambled CS:GO skins in the past via sites that let you bet on tournament results). There a…