Items tagged with mods
If you weren't there in the late 90s, it is very difficult to explain the particular cachet that "3dfx Voodoo" has among a certain generation of PC gaming enthusiast. 3dfx cards never had the best image quality, they rarely actually had the absolute best performance, and for the first two generations, the VGA...
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If you're still cranking along on something like an aged Sandy Bridge system for gaming, you don't need us to tell you that you need every extra bit of performance you can get. Well, if you're keen to install a clever hack to the UEFI firmware of your motherboard, you may be able to enable Resizable BAR ("ReBAR")...
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DLSS frame generation lets folks with GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards enjoy a boost to frame rate in supported games with very little downside. The interpolation is mostly performed by hardware on the GPU that isn't doing anything else, so the only real penalty is a small hit to input latency. You do have to have...
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The original Doom and Doom II games have a rich and thriving mod community that continues to this day. The title just celebrated its 30th anniversary yesterday, and to commemorate the occasion, one of the very best "megawads" of all time—that's community parlance for a level set with a full game's worth of maps—has...
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If you bought a Steam Deck with a 256GB or 512GB SSD inside, you're probably not aware of an issue that affects people with the cheaper 64GB model. You see, games on SteamOS download pre-compiled shader libraries as well as additional data to help with Steam Deck compatibility, and this data can take up quite a bit of...
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Blizzard is putting teeth behind its warning against cheating in Diablo IV, and thousands of players have since been banned. One of the better-known examples of players cheating involves an exploit called the "Seasonal Exploit," which allows players to transfer items between the Eternal and Seasonal realms.
Most...
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When you read that headline, you're probably thinking it's like Doom on the NES, or like running GTA V on the OG Game Boy—a trick, or "hack" that doesn't really use the original hardware. Well, you'd be mistaken. This is the real PC version of GTA V running on real Nintendo Switch hardware, albeit one that's been...
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The unaware PC gamer will buy a graphics card based on how much video RAM it has and might be disappointed at its performance. The uninitiated will then tell you that video RAM doesn't matter, because games rarely use that much. Those truly in the know are well aware that current games are pushing past the 8GB...
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When a big console game finally comes to PCs, three things happen in roughly this order: PC gamers complain about the port, hackers tear it to pieces, and then modders go to town, creating unique experiences you won't find on the console versions. Case in point: a new mod for The Last of Us Part 1 that turns the...
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Back in the day, liquid cooling meant "custom loop," but you only needed to worry about the two or three processors at the most. These days, when you're doing custom-loop liquid-cooling, you need to cool almost every major component on every single board. That means cooling memory and power delivery hardware as well...
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Alright, reader—are you ready to be confused? DLSS is NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling. It has two primary forms: DLSS 2 upscaling and DLSS 3 frame generation. Despite the name, neither one is actually "super-sampling" anything. Instead, they are both "up-sampling"; DLSS 2 is doing it spatially, and DLSS 3 is...
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Greybeards like your author recall the original 3dfx (then stylized as 3Dfx) Voodoo Graphics card with immense nostalgia. It was the card that brought the term "3D accelerator" to the mainstream with incredible performance in the then-new GLQuake. They generally came with 4MB of EDO DRAM on board, but a YouTuber has...
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If you're reading this HotHardware, chances are good that you're someone who enjoys getting information from written articles as opposed to just videos. It's also likely that have enjoyed computing as a topic in general for many years. If those two things are true, you might just be in the target audience for Celso...
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Traditionally speaking, Pokémon has been a fairly linear game where you proceed from area to area after overcoming the challenges in each zone. The latest titles in the series, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, broke that mold and took the franchise in an open world direction. Of course, Pokémon wasn't the only series to go...
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As you may well know, the original Nintendo Wii is based on fundamentally the same CPU as Nintendo's previous home system, the Gamecube. That's an IBM PowerPC chip known as "Broadway," which is essentially the same thing as the PowerPC 750CL. It's a 32-bit CPU that runs at 729 MHz, and is a very close relative to the...
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We have come a long way from punching a hole into the side panel of our cases when it comes to case mods. We have seen added windows, improved airflow, worse airflow, and even unique objects used as cases. Some mods may be as simple as sleeper builds where you have a powerful PC inside an old case. Others are more...
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AMD's AM5 socket and Ryzen 7000 processors retain compatibility with CPU coolers designed for Socket AM4. This presents a problem, because the LGA-style socket is much slimmer than the PGA style used on Socket AM4, so using the same coolers meant building Socket AM5 CPUs with extremely thick heatspreaders. Despite...
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AMD's Socket AM5 is a notable improvement over Socket AM4 in that it's impossible (or at least, much more difficult) to accidentally yank your CPU out of the socket when you're changing heatsinks. However, it does have its own share of annoyances. Chief among them is the cut-out design of the CPU IHS, which could...
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Many people dream of meeting their heroes. It seems like tech YouTuber Samperson got that opportunity in a round-about way recently, when legendary PC game designer John Romero reacted to a Twitter post showing how a fan got the 1993 classic first-person shooter DOOM running in Notepad.
Almost as popular as the...
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Hey dog lovers, do you want to play the popular new game Stray but just can't bring yourself to it because it's not a dog? Well, you're in luck— thanks to a fun little mod the cute little cat can be turned into an adorable little puppy!
Stray was only released a few days ago, but it has made splashes thanks to its...
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The PlayStation 5 is gigantic for a game console. There's no two ways about it; Sony's latest dedicated gaming system is a beast of a machine that occupies more space than a typical Mini-ITX custom PC. It's bigger than the Falcon Northwest Tiki we just reviewed, and that machine came with a GeForce RTX 3080...
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When we talk about modding third-person fantasy RPGs on the PC, you almost assuredly will start thinking about the Elder Scrolls series, and particularly Part V: Skyrim, with its enormous library of user mods. Those games have official modding tools straight from Bethesda, and they're built in such a way that they're...
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