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Helldivers 2 just had its first balance update. While mechs are still en-route, this payload is certainly nothing to sniff at—especially since it’s still adding one major feature to the game: True to the game’s Starship Troopers inspiration, meteors are now a major concern for the hardworking patriots of Super Earth. I’m sure nothing bad will happen to Buenos Aires, though.

“Many planets now have additional environmental challenges that will appear at random while you are deployed, from fire tornadoes to meteor showers and many more,” the patch notes state. Helldivers 2 actually already had fire tornadoes in the planet of Hellmire—but as far as I can tell they were just background dressing. Until now, that is.

Eradicate missions—which were previously used a…

What’s the going rate on eBay for a wardrobe of old t-shirts, a boxed, factory-sealed, time-warp condition ATI Radeon 8500 AGP and a mostly house-trained cocker spaniel? Because I’m going to flog the lot and get me some sweet 4K OLED action. Sorry, B-dog.

That’s right, folks, both the Alienware and Samsung versions of the hot new 32-inch 4K gaming OLED monitor thing have had haircuts to the tune of at least $200. That puts the Alienware at $999 and the Samsung at just under $1,050.

Arguably, neither has actually achieved genuine “cheap” status, but you’ve got to get off the pot at some point, and thus my metaphorical flush has been pulled.

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• Alienware 32 AW3225QF | 4K 240Hz OLED| $999 @ Dell
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Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the collapsed multi-billion crypto exchange FTX, was jailed earlier this month until his trial date, following what a judge said was “probable cause to believe that the defendant has attempted to tamper with witnesses at least twice” while on bail. This related to Bankman-Fried sharing personal writing by his former partner and FTX colleague Caroline Ellison with a journalist: his bail was revoked on August 11, and he’s been detained ever since in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center.

Now Bankman-Fried’s lawyer is saying that the conditions in prison are such that they’re preventing the former crypto king and billionaire from preparing for his trial (thanks, Sky News). The claim came during a court hearing in which Bankman-Fried was cha…

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The avalanche of Starfield mods hasn’t stopped since its release. You can tweak everything from its inventory screen to the difficulty of its firefights. But out of all the mods out there, a few are so useful that they’re borderline essential.

There are three mods that you should install to smooth out some of Starfield’s roughest spots. None of them make fundamental changes to how you play the game, so you don’t need to worry about spoiling your first playthrough.

Think of these recommendations as a way to dip your toe into mods. The best Starfield mods enhance the game in ways people found lacking otherwise, but some of them go further than others. Not everyone wants to skip every take-off and landing animation with their fancy spaceship, but a lot of peopl…

Helldivers 2 is going through some growing pains—its runaway success is a blessing for any developer, but it’s also thrust the game into a burning spotlight. With a massive playerbase comes scrutiny, review bombing, and community drama in heaps. 

As part of said growing pains, CEO Johan Pilestedt recently admitted he believes the game’s balancing patches have “gone too far”. Recent replies from community manager Twinbeard on the game’s Discord have subsequently confirmed that there’s a ton of balancing talks going on at Arrowhead HQ right now—and that the pressure’s been building.

In a series of 10 questions offered to Discord-goers, Twinbeard noted that the team was “aware there’s a lot of concern regarding warbond cadence and us possibly over-balancing and…

It was only a matter of time before AMD and Nvidia responded to their bad driver days, and both have dropped a new release on the same day which should mitigate problems with both Radeon and GeForce GPUs. Though one is an actual fix, the other just bakes in a previously announced workaround.

Nvidia’s new 531.26 GeForce Hotfix driver is dedicated to ridding its users of an annoying bug that caused the Nvidia Container software to eat up more than its fair share of CPU resources on exiting a game. 

We only reported on the double GPU driver issue a couple of days ago, so it hasn’t taken the green team long to address it. The earlier workarounds were none to onerous, to be fair—either rolling back to a previous driver or just ending the Nvidia Container task in Task M…

The latest figures are in from the ol’ Peddmeister Massive and they show graphics card sales have increased for the third straight quarter. The best news comes from comparing the most recent quarter in these new Jon Peddie Research figures, that of Q4 2023, to the same period in 2022 with a resulting 32% year-on-year increase. 

But for AMD the numbers still look grim. Its latest GPU family is also its worst performing in over 20 years when it comes to its impact on market share.

For AMD, the best spin you can put on the figures is that its market share increased from a fairly pitiful 12% in Q4 2022 to a merely mediocre 19% for Q4 2023. Jon Peddie has Intel at just 1% share for the most recent quarter, which sounds about right; Arc graphics are pretty much nowhere.