2019 feels like forever ago now, thanks to a barrage of world-changing events bludgeoning us around the proverbial heads year after year. This played out in the PC and broader tech industry to the tune of chip shortages and a general industry slowdown. Now, judging from some industry reports about motherboard shipments, it looks like the PC market (and therefore the PC gaming market) could be back in business.
Digitimes (via IT Home) reports that, according to “industry sources,” motherboard shipments are set to recover in the second half of 2024. This is based on previous shipping information and estimates for 2024. Tallying up the numbers relayed, it looks like the four major motherboard vendors (Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock) might reach a sizeable 33,700,000 motherboards shipped by year’s end.
This coincides with other positive developments in the PC and component industry, such as PC sales steadily increasing and Q4 2023’s GPU sales seeing a 32% year-on-year inc…
เอลอย อลอนโซ่ ผู้ช่วยผู้ฝึกสอน ฟุตซอลชายทีมชาติไทย ให้สัมภาษณ์ หลังจบเกม ฟุตซอลโลก 2024 รอบ 16 ทีมสุดท้าย
สำหรับเกมดังกล่าว ฟุตซอลไทย พ่าย ฝรั่งเศส 2-5 โดยไทยได้สองประตูจาก จุดโทษของ ศุภวุฒิ เถื่อนกลาง และ ณรงค์ศักดิ์ วิงวอนคำพูดจาก สล็อตเว็บตรง
“ครึ่งแรกเราทำได้ดีที่สุดเท่าที่เราเล่นทัวร์นาเมนต์นี้เลย เรามีโอกาสจบสกอร์หล…
เมรีโน่ ย้ายจาก โซเซียดาด มาร่วมทีม อาร์เซน่อล ในช่วงท้ายตลาดซัมเมอร์ที่ผ่านมา แต่โชคร้ายบาดเจ็บระหว่างซ้อมทำให้ยังไม่ได้ประเดิมสนามให้ทีมจนถึงตอนนี้
แต่ล่าสุด กองกลางทีมชาติสเปนชุดแชมป์ยูโร 2024 กลับมาซ้อมได้เบาๆ ตั้งแต่ก่อนเกมลีกเมื่อสุดสัปดาห์ ก่อนซ้อมเต็มรูปแบบกับเพื่อนร่วมทีมเมื่อวันจันทร์ที่ผ่านมาที่เป็นการเตรียมทีมครั้งสุดท้ายก�…
Shadows of Doubt, the noir immersive sim that we once called “Deus Ex for incorrigible snoops” has got an early access release date. You’ll be able to stalk its voxelized streets and read everyone else’s emails (but in, like, a good guy way) on April 24 this year.
I’m intrigued by this one. I’ve been following Shadows of Doubt ever since it first started making all the right noises back in 2020. Set in a procedurally generated city (that gets generated, procedurally, when you hit New Game) in an alternative, cyberpunk 1980s, the game features “a fully simulated world with hundreds of citizens” each going about their separate little lives, and all with “their own name, job, apartment and daily routine”.
Your job is to creep on just about all of them in order to catch a murderer. Using an array of gadgets and whatever warped solutions you can conjure up using the game’s systems—plus, naturally, a conspiracy cork board where you draw red string between suspects—…
The big four brands shipped 30% fewer motherboards in 2022 than 2021, according to Taiwan’s Digitimes. Overall, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock shipments fell from 44.5 million to 31.5 million.
ASRock was the worst hit according to Digitimes (via Tom’s Hardware), falling from around six million units in 2021 to 2.7 million in 2022, a precipitous drop of 55%. MSI took a pretty big knock, too, falling from 9.5 to 5.5 million units, or 42% down.
The two biggest brands, Asus and Gigabyte, were somewhat more resilient. Asus dropped 25% from 18 million to 13.6 million, while Gigabyte fared best sliding by 14% from 11 million motherboards in 2021 to 9.5 million in 2022.
It’s not clear without diving behind Digitime’s paywall whether either Intel or AMD board shipments were particularly badly hit over the other. Reportedly, all of the big brands are expecting to at least match their 2022 performance in 2023 or better it, so the tide is perhaps turning.
Of cours…
When it comes to trying to experience everything a sprawling hundred-hour RPG has to offer, New Game+ can often be an essential tool for running through a game a second or third time without causing too much psychological damage. Some games, like the Persona series, even require a NG+ run if you want the full completionist adventure.
It makes it all the more baffling, then, that Sega’s upcoming Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is locking its New Game+ mode behind its Deluxe and Ultimate editions, which cost an extra $15 and $40 on top of the base game respectively. This is a series which, traditionally, has had its own features locked behind a NG+ run such as the legendary difficulty mode.
Specifically, NG+ is being folded into the ‘Master Vacation Bundle’ which isn’t included with the game’s base version. According to the game’s official website the bundle also includes a bonus dungeon, special sujimon (from a Pokémon-like mode), resort guests, outfits “and more.”&…
Modern SSDs are an engineering wonder. They’re extremely fast and very reliable, despite being housed next to massive heat-belching graphics cards in gaming PCs. But like all silicon-based chips, they have limits to how hot they can run before losing data or failing completely. However, two teams of researchers have developed a type of flash memory that’s capable of retaining data at temperatures that make an afternoon on Venus look cold in comparison.
The details of the work were published in the Nature journal (via Interesting Engineering), though the University of Pennsylvania nicely summarised the findings for those without a background in doctorate-level material science. Two research teams in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, headed by Deep Jariwala and Roy Olsson, dedicated months of work to finding the perfect thickness of ferroelectric aluminum scandium nitride (AlScN), to use as a base material for a flash memory device.
Everyday flash memory, su…
Back in 2020, a team of StarCraft 2 veterans announced the launch of a new outfit, Frost Giant Studios, with the stated goal of creating “the next great PC real-time strategy game.” We got our hands on that effort, called Stormgate, earlier this year, and it certainly looked like Frost Giant was on track to deliver that promise, with a debut effort that’s “shaping up to be a brilliant blend of modern and classic RTS.”
Clearly we’re not the only ones excited for it: Frost Giant launched a $100,000 Kickstarter campaign on December 5 to support the development of Stormgate, and it was fully funded in just 15 minutes.
Stormgate is an RTS that pits far-future humanity against the invading forces of the demonic Infernal Host in a pitched battle for the fate of the Earth. “It’s built on familiar foundations,” online editor and PC Gamer strategy guy Fraser Brown said in his June preview, which is to be expected from a game coming from Blizzard veterans, but it’s not just a nosta…
The cyberpunk-fantasy world of 1989 tabletop RPG Shadowrun has been adapted into videogames multiple times, beginning with an RPG for the SNES all the way back in 2003. In 2007, FASA Studio and Microsoft released a multiplayer shooter in the vein of Counter-Strike based on the setting, and it sank like a stone. At the time, a full-price shooter that was multiplayer-only was an even bigger risk than it would be today, and fans of Shadowrun saw it as a genre mismatch. On release, it reviewed poorly and sold worse.
While designer Bill Fulton has previously said, “Shadowrun was originally envisioned as a game with a full campaign mode,” more information about what that campaign would be like and why it was cut was revealed during a recent video AMA with the developers.
“It was a linear, progression-based System Shock-style RPG-type experience,” said community manager David Abzug. He also explained that, rather than using the same maps as the multiplayer mode, the campa…
He was out of town when I visited Firaxis to play Civilization 7 earlier this month, but I did walk past the office from which Civilization creator Sid Meier continues to guide the strategy developer. One example of that guidance, although it came 14 years ago now, was the quick addition of Ghengis Khan as a free Civilization 5 update.
“We ended up shipping Civ 5 without Genghis Khan,” said Civ 7 executive producer Dennis Shirk in a recent interview with GameRant. “Sid said, ‘What?’ We ended up releasing Genghis Khan the next month in a free update because he was right. We shouldn’t have shipped without Genghis Khan, so there’s always going to be that collection, that foundation.”
The topic obviously came up in connection to Civ 7’s leaders, which we haven’t yet seen the full list of, although we know that it won’t be limited to heads of state this time—Benjamin Franklin is a leader, for example.
We know Mongolia is in Civilization 7, so it seems like a…