One hundred and seventy nine bucks for a high refresh 1440p panel? To paraphrase Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction, 1080p’s dead, baby, 1080p’s dead. Give it up for the MSI Optix G271CQP, yours for a mere $179 thanks to Amazon Prime Day.

At least, we’d struggle to pick 1080p now that you can have high refresh 1440p for such an affordable price. But there has to be a catch, right? Well, the obvious issue is that the MSI Optix G271CQP runs VA rather than IPS panel tech.

In the past, VA tended to suffer from poor pixel response. But that just isn’t true any longer. This monitor is rated at 1ms for response, albeit that’s MPRT not GtG. MSI doesn’t quote a figure for GtG response, which is a bit more representative of real-world usage. But most 1ms MPRT panels come in at 2ms GtG, whic…

Buckle up Simmers, we’re (hopefully) on the cusp of some meaty fixes for The Sims 4. As EA continues to pile expansions and kits on top of a game that’s nearing the big 1-0, crashes and buggy gameplay have become part and parcel of The Sims 4 experience. It’s become a mighty frustrating time—one that’s recently led me to go crawling back into the loving arms of The Sims 2 in retaliation—and it seems like EA is finally realising the problem is too big to ignore.

In a tweet on the official Sims account, the developer admitted things have gotten a little out of control. “We know that technical issues with The Sims 4 have interrupted your gameplay over time and we recognize that this has caused you much frustration,” the statement read. “Today, we can share that we have as…

Lenovo has a new dual-screen laptop out, the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i. This is no concept machine. It’s not even a clunky beta-feelin’ early stab that you can buy but probably shouldn’t. It’s a polished, slick, highly usable PC. Which begs the question, is this the future of laptops, even laptops for gaming?

Just to head the most obvious scepticism off at the pass, it really wasn’t all that long ago that Blackberries with physical keyboards ruled the smartphone and the world scoffed at the idea of on-screen keyboards. Who would want type on one of those?

So, polling the plebs and finding they mostly reject the idea of an on-screen laptop keyboard doesn’t mean much. They didn’t think they wanted one on a phone, either, and look how that went.

Hold that thought while we cover…

On June 6, Velan Studios’ online dodgeball brawler Knockout City will have its servers taken offline, just over two years after going live. Game director Jeremy Russo explained the decision in a special announcement, writing that, “Despite over 12 million players and billions of KOs around the globe, there are several aspects of the game in need of major disruption to better attract and retain enough players to be sustainable. Since we are a small, indie studio, it’s simply impossible for us to make those kinds of systemic changes in the live game while continuing to support it.”

Last year, Knockout City went free-to-play and independent, leaving behind Electronic Arts, which had published it as part of the EA Originals label. According to SteamDB’s charts, the switch to free-to-p…

Remnant 2’s first DLC dropped a short while ago—and it’s a pretty good romp. It adds a whole new area to explore, a new class, and some new gear to grab—it also enhances Losomn as a whole, since having the DLC lets its areas and bosses crop up during your randomised runs of the main campaign.

In an interview with the game’s creative director David Adams (also the president of development studio Gunfire Games) Exputer asked whether he’d consider adding a survival mode to the game, a la Call of Duty’s Zombies.

“Right now, we are focused on the second DLC we’re working on. That’s the ‘official’ answer. The ‘unofficial’ answer is we would love to explore a new game mode,” says Adams. “Maybe not exactly like Survivor, but something that scratches the same …

We reported on AMD’s latest graphics driver dump yesterday. AMD detailed a pretty exhaustive list of benefits and performance improvements with Adrenalin Edition Driver 23.2.1. Conspicuously missing were any claims of huge ray-tracing performance boosts of up to 40%.

Reportedly, however, that’s exactly what some owners of AMD Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs are experiencing. But there’s a catch. Thus far, it seems the really big boosts in performance relate to synthetic tests of ray-tracing performance.

By way of example, one Twitter user claimed a performance uplift from 27.84 fps to 38.17 fps in 3DMark’s DirectX Ray tracing feature set benchmark running on an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT. Another poster saw performance in the same benchmark increase from 31.51 fps to 42.58 fps on an R…

First reported by VGC, Square Enix announced that it plans on ousting company president Yosuke Matsuda. Following shareholder approval, Matsuda will be replaced with Takashi Kiryu, who came to the company from managing the Dentsu Innovation Initiative in 2020.

Matsuda’s run since taking over for Yoichi Wada in 2013 has been, what else, a mixed bag. His tenure saw an increased number of PC ports, some simultaneously launching with their console counterparts, but that timeliness is hardly a given⁠—Final Fantasy 7 Remake took over a year to come to PC, while Final Fantasy 16 will likely take more than six months. 

It’s also worth noting that the publisher has become synonymous with poor PC ports more broadly: Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins, Forspok…

The world’s been drab and grey ever since we learned Henry Cavill—world’s most beautiful PC gamer—announced he’d be hanging up his silver sword and departing Netflix’s Witcher TV series. With The Witcher season 3 (Cavill’s last) about to air, we’ve got more questions than ever. Will Liam Hemsworth be a decent Geralt? Why is Cavill leaving? Is there even a point continuing the show without him?

Turns out that The Witcher’s creative leads had similar questions themselves. In a recent chat with Total Film magazine (via GamesRadar), showrunner Lauren Hissrich revealed that, in the aftermath of Cavill’s departure, staff “had the choice to have Geralt exit and to end the show,” but it ultimately proved to be something that they weren’t “willing to do”.

“There’s just to…

Activision’s bold new vision for unifying the Call of Duty experience is off to a bad start. With the early release of Modern Warfare 3’s campaign, players are discovering that launching Call of Duty HQ, the unified front end for current and future CoD titles, is required to access the new game. That might not be such a big deal if it wasn’t so slow, inelegant, and seemingly pointless. Call of Duty is now a launcher within a launcher, and it sucks.

I’ll explain: Before you can launch Modern Warfare 3, you have to launch Modern Warfare 2 first. Seriously. “Call of Duty HQ” is just the Modern Warfare 2/Warzone client under a new name.

Switching between Modern Warfares 2 and 3 from the HQ is not like switching modes. Once you’re on the main menu, you could jump immediately into…