Your typical gaming rig doesn’t need anywhere near 256GB of RAM, but we do use our PCs for things other than gaming. Things like content creation or virtual machines come to mind. Either that or running Chrome with a hundred tabs open.

If you are one of the few that needs capacious amounts of system memory, you’re in luck. MSI has begun the process of rolling out Intel 600 and 700-series motherboard BIOSes that support up to 256GB of system RAM. These BIOSes are in addition to those it has already rolled out that add support for 256GB of RAM to its AM5 motherboard range.

When Intel’s 12th Gen family and 600-series motherboards launched, the maximum amount of VRAM you could install was 128GB. For most of us that was fine, but when you start factoring in RAM-hogging things like virtual machines, software development, multi-channel music production or any of a thousand other things, even 128GB can be limiting.

Then came non-binary memory, which meant you could buy mod…

It may come as no surprise that Intel is releasing new lower-power versions of its 13th Gen chips. These new 65W versions of its Raptor Lake processors promise to deliver much the same spec as their more power-hungry counterparts, albeit with more moderate clock speeds to help keep demands low on the system. That should mean it’s these chips that end up in cheaper 13th Gen prebuilt gaming PCs from here on out.

In terms of the differences you can expect, we have the Core i9 13900 for example. This chip contains the same eight Performance-cores and 16 Efficient-cores as the K-series Core i9 13900K. However, the Core i9 13900 is rated to a 5.6GHz boost clock—200MHz slower than the full-fat Core i9 13900K and the same as the mobile Core i9 13980HX. 

Otherwise there are all the benefits of Raptor Lake architecture here in full, so I’d argue it’s a pretty sweet deal. Or at least not something I’d worry about if I were buying a prebuilt PC today—this chip seems…

Back in 2019, a live-action version of Final Fantasy 14—the critically-acclaimed MMORPG with an expanded free trial, you know the one—was in the works. Announced as a collaboration between Sony Pictures Television and Hivemind (responsible for Netflix’s The Witcher series), it seemed like a natural pairing.

Unfortunately, it looks like that particular project is dead in the water according to Hivemind’s co-founder Dinesh Shamdasani on Twitter. When asked for an update on the project, he responds that it’s “Dead.” He continues to write: 

“We took around a fantastic pilot script by Ben Lustig & [Jake Thornton] along with a multi-season plan they built with our show runners but got rejected across the board. The size and scale needed to do it right proved too much for anyone to want to risk. Amazon came closest.”

Jake Thornton, a scriptwriter on the project, also noted that the project’s failure “was a real result of Covid unfortunately. We took i…

In what scientists will someday call “a marketing collabo of supernatural potency,” Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone has revealed that he wants to get some kind of crossover going with Fortnite. Specifically, he’d like to transplant a few of the citizens of his sedate farming sim into Epic’s Omniverse, handing them a combat shotgun and letting them go ham on other people’s licenced trademarks.

Barone was asked about his willingness to do a Stardew/Fortnite crossover by YouTuber Panedwards (via IGN). “I’ve been trying to,” came Barone’s reply, who particularly wants “Pam in Fortnite” but is “open to doing a collab” in general.

If you’re not up to date with the latest edition of the Stardew Yellow Pages, Pam is the character who’s a crusty, jaded old diner waitress in everything but, ah, her actual career. She’s the Pelican Town bus driver and Penny’s mother, a salt-of-the-earth working class kind of person who’s seen it all and knows what it’s like when times get tough.…

Valve’s let slip a preview for SteamOS 3.5, the system that runs the Steam Deck, among a few other things, and you can now opt-in to an updated build rich with visual improvements and tweaks—among a few other fixes. 

The biggest single change is that Valve has rebalanced the Steam Deck’s default colors. It’s now using the sRGB primary colors, meaning it has a slightly warmer and more vibrant set of colors by default. By going to Settings -> Adjust Display Colors you can tune Color Vibrancy and Color Temperature, either with a test image or whatever game you’re running. You can also swap back to the previous color set or to a boosted color range that’s more vibrant but will possibly introduce some gradient clipping.

The big new feature is that a Steam Deck can now support High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) on external monitors, the trick being of course that the display and your USB-C adapter have to support it. Still, good news for tho…

Valve has put out a blog post revealing that Team Fortress 2 will be getting a “major update” this summer⁠, which is to say that it won’t just be getting the usual injection of new cosmetic items, but a whole smorgasbord of “items, maps, taunts, unusual effects, war paints and who knows what else?”

The only catch is that it will all have to be provided by the community: Valve has put out a call for Steam Workshop submissions to be made by May 1 for this “as-yet unnamed, un-themed, but still very exciting summer-situated (but not summer-themed) (unless you want to develop summer-themed stuff) update.”

To put things in perspective, Team Fortress 2’s last major update came just last October with “Scream Fortress 14.” If that doesn’t sound too bad, I would like to note that TF2’s last non-Scream Fortress major update was all the way back in 2017 with Jungle Inferno. This additionally seems to have been the last time TF2 received new content made in-house by Valve with …