Frame generation (oftentimes abbreviated as “FG”) has quickly solidified itself as one of the most vital and hotly debated innovations in modern PC gaming. When implemented correctly and used properly, it can greatly enhance the smoothness of modern, demanding PC games, particularly on high-refresh-rate monitors. Unfortunately, it’s also very easy to misuse under many circumstances, by game developers and gamers alike. As such, we decided to write this guide to illustrate the most optimal ways of using frame generation in modern PC games. Let's clear something up right away: Frame generation isn't a panacea meant to fix low gaming performance […]

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Building a gaming PC in 2026 has become considerably more expensive than it was only a year or so ago, and graphics cards are not solely responsible this time. The ongoing memory shortage has driven up the cost of all DRAM and NAND flash-based products, such as memory kits, SSDs, and graphics cards. For that reason, we consider approximately $1,000 to be the realistic starting point for a decent new gaming PC in July 2026. Even then, some compromises are unavoidable. Moving up to higher pricing tiers allows progressively stronger CPUs and GPUs, not to mention higher system memory and […]

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NVIDIA’s RTX 50 SUPER lineup has been in the rumor mill for quite a while now, and out of all the SKUs expected to be part of Team Green’s mid-cycle Blackwell refresh, the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti SUPER might end up being one of the most interesting cards for gamers, creators, and even local AI users. NVIDIA’s RTX 50 SUPER Lineup - A Rocky Launch For NVIDIA Amidst The DRAM Shortage Before we dive deeper into the RTX 5070 Ti SUPER, let’s first talk about the broader RTX 50 SUPER lineup. NVIDIA’s upcoming consumer GPU launch isn’t expected to be […]

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A Windows PC can look seemingly fine and yet still have some nagging issues. Your CPU usage may be low, your GPU may be running well, your gaming performance may be fine, and yet you may still get random audio crackles, mouse hitches, USB audio dropouts, or short system-wide freezes that seem to come out of nowhere. One possible culprit is high DPC latency. This is one of those technical problems that sounds obscure at first, but once you understand the gist of it, it becomes much easier to diagnose properly. More importantly, it is also one of those problems […]

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It seems that cloud gaming is making headlines once again. A recent viral post from LaurieWired argued that cloud gaming is “obviously more economically efficient than consumer-owned hardware". The logic? A $500 GPU sitting idle for most of its life has terrible cost per FLOP (floating-point operation) per hour efficiency (meaning you paid for lots of GPU power, but most of it sits unused most of the time) compared to datacenter servers shared across countless users. It’s an interesting take, and honestly, there is definitely some truth to it from a pure hardware utilization standpoint. However, that perspective entirely misses […]

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With modern PC games becoming increasingly heavy — especially open-world titles built on Unreal Engine 5 — default graphics presets rarely (if ever) provide the best balance between visual fidelity and performance. Gothic 1 Remake is no exception to that rule. Alkimia Interactive’s remake of the cult-classic RPG is clearly much more visually ambitious than the 2001 original, with a fully rebuilt Valley of Mines, dense settlements, physically richer materials, dynamic lighting, more detailed characters, thicker foliage, and a far more cinematic presentation. However, that jump in visual ambition also comes with a fairly steep hardware cost, and frankly, the […]

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In the world of PC gaming performance analysis, we tend to obsess over frame times, and for good reason. A simple average FPS number can be extremely misleading, while a frame time graph can immediately show you whether a game is delivering frames smoothly or whether it is suffering from stutters, hitches, CPU/platform bottlenecks, or other forms of inconsistent frame pacing. However, as useful as frame times are, there is one major problem with relying on them alone: they do not always tell us what the player actually sees on the monitor. This is especially important nowadays, as modern PC […]

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Ah, the ultimate PC gaming boogeyman: “Is my CPU bottlenecking my graphics card?” It’s the first question we ask ourselves when building a new rig, slapping in a shiny GPU upgrade, or wondering why a game feels like a stuttery mess despite dropping a small fortune on PC hardware. But here is the hard truth, folks: a bottleneck isn’t a permanent stamp on your PC. It is a dynamic, fast-shifting state dictated by the specific game you're playing, the resolution you're running, your graphics presets, and your target framerate. Your system can be completely GPU-bound in a graphically heavy AAA […]

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With Unreal Engine 5 games becoming increasingly common on PC, it is always interesting to see which developers can actually tame Epic Games’ state-of-the-art engine rather than simply brute-forcing their way to good visuals at a massive performance cost. Fatekeeper is a very interesting case in that regard. THQ Nordic and Paraglacial’s dark fantasy first-person RPG is still in a very early access state, so it would be unfair to judge it as if it were a finished product. However, from a technical standpoint, Fatekeeper already manages to stand out as one of the most impressive Unreal Engine 5 releases […]

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Let's face it: the days of running FurMark for 30 minutes, watching nothing explode, and calling your GPU "stable" are long gone. Modern GPUs from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel are smarter, more power-hungry, and far more dynamic in their clock-speed behavior than the older graphics cards we grew up overclocking. GPU synthetic/stress tests like FurMark, OCCT, and 3DMark absolutely still have their place, but treating any single tool as the holy grail of stability is a big mistake. Today's GPUs constantly juggle clocks, voltages, and temperatures on the fly. A GPU overclock (or undervolt) that flies through a traditional rasterized […]

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007 First Light is a very interesting PC release to analyze. On the one hand, IO Interactive’s latest game can look quite good in the right scenes, especially thanks to its strong lighting, high-quality character rendering, solid animation work, and cinematic presentation. On the other hand, it is also a rather frustrating PC port in several important ways, as most of its graphics settings barely scale, some of its temporal reconstruction options behave strangely, and the game can suffer from truly massive performance drops during large explosions. This guide should hopefully help you strike the best balance between visuals and […]

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PC system requirements should be simple. You look at the minimum, recommended, and potentially higher-tier specs, compare them to your rig, and get a solid idea of what to expect. Easy enough, right? Well, not anymore, sadly. Over the last decade or so, PC game system requirements (or PC specs) have become incredibly messy, inconsistent, and sometimes borderline useless. We are dealing with vague targets, aggressive temporal upscaling hidden behind an inconspicuous “1080p” or “4K” label, and "60 FPS" targets that incredibly rely on frame generation, which is absolutely not the same thing as actually rendering 60 full game frames […]

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With PC games becoming increasingly complex nowadays — especially open-world games built on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5 — default/maxed-out graphics settings rarely, if ever, strike the optimal balance between visual fidelity and performance that most PC gamers seek, and LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is no exception to this rule. TT Games’ latest LEGO Batman adventure is certainly a much more visually ambitious game than the studio’s older LEGO titles, with its open-world Gotham City, dense streets, detailed LEGO characters and assets, physically convincing plastic materials, attractive effects, and state-of-the-art UE5-powered visuals. However, this added visual ambition […]

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With PC games growing increasingly complex nowadays — especially those built on Epic Games' infamous Unreal Engine 5 — default/maxed-out graphics settings rarely, if ever, strike the optimal balance between visual fidelity and performance that most PC gamers seek, and Directive 8020 is sadly no exception to this rule. As a demanding UE5-powered cinematic horror game, it should come as no surprise that the game's maxed-out High graphics preset, even without ray tracing or path tracing enabled, can be quite GPU-heavy. However, what is a bit more disappointing is that Directive 8020 ends up being heavier on the GPU than […]

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There is a question that keeps coming back in enthusiast circles every few years: Do computer chips actually get slower as they age? It sounds simple, but the answer is more interesting than a clean yes or no. Your old CPU or GPU usually doesn’t wake up one day and decide to become 10% slower just because it’s been inside your system for five years. In most normal cases, if an older PC feels slower, the culprit is more likely to be accumulated dust, dried/pumped-out TIM (thermal interface material), background apps, operating system bloat, security patches, newer/more demanding games, or […]

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With PC games becoming increasingly complex nowadays — especially large-scale open-world games with dense environments, high-speed traversal, and ray/path tracing — default/maxed-out graphics settings rarely, if ever, strike the optimal balance between visual fidelity and performance that most PC gamers seek, and Forza Horizon 6 is no exception to this rule. Thankfully, Playground Games’ latest open-world racing title arrives on PC with an impressively complete graphics menu, support for modern temporal upscaling solutions, uncapped framerates, ultrawide support, ray-traced reflections, ray-traced global illumination, and even live previews for many of its individual graphics settings. However, while Forza Horizon 6 is a […]

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With PC games growing increasingly complex nowadays — especially ones built on Epic Games's infamous Unreal Engine 5 — default/maxed-out graphics settings rarely (if at all) strike the optimal balance between visual fidelity and performance that most PC gamers seek, and early access sensation Windrose is no exception to this rule. As a demanding UE5 game, it should come as no surprise to many that the game's maxed-out Epic graphics settings will be very GPU-heavy and thus should require some tweaking to achieve better performance on most rigs, without completely sacrificing visual fidelity. This guide should hopefully help you strike […]

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In the world of PC gaming, "badly optimized" is a phrase that gets tossed around more than a grenade in a crowded lobby. Usually, the story goes like this: a shiny new game launches, players crank everything to Ultra, watch their frames per second (FPS) counter like a hawk, and reach a verdict in seconds. If the frame rate isn't high enough to their liking, then the game is deemed "unoptimized". If it runs like butter, then it’s "well optimized". The reality, however, is that PC game optimization is a massive, complicated puzzle. Performance isn't just about how hard a […]

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One of the easiest mistakes to make when building or upgrading a PC is assuming that every M.2 slot on a motherboard is basically the same. After all, they all look nearly identical and take the same "gum stick-shaped" drives. Motherboard marketing pages love to list "4 x M.2" as though that number alone tells the whole story, but in practice, these slots can behave very differently. You could have a perfectly healthy, high-end Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) solid-state drive (SSD) that performs well below expectations simply because it was installed in the wrong slot. If your shiny new PCI-Express […]

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