PC Gaming

Season two of Marathon’s live service rollout happens on Tuesday, June 2nd. When it drops, players on all platforms (Xbox, PlayStation 5, Steam) can play the full game for free through June 9th, with progress carrying over if you buy the game. Bungie confirmed a discount is coming, too, so stay tuned.

We already knew that the RAM crisis would affect pricing for Valve’s upcoming Steam Machine console, but several hundred dollar price hikes for the Steam Deck don’t give us much hope for affordability.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, SK Hynix and Micron both passed the milestone this week. The spike in value for the world’s three largest DRAM manufacturers follows a months-long global memory shortage, driven by demand from AI data centers, that’s causing prices to skyrocket on everything from phones to game consoles.

This 3.5-hour GamersNexus video makes me wonder. We knew tariffs, RAM prices, and oil prices were scaring buyers away, but it’s something different to watch a Cooler Master guy, standing in a warehouse full of unsold PC cases, dish for 30 minutes straight — or see how Thermal Grizzly’s thermal paste sales have cratered.

First announced in 2012 and with no release date so far, Star Citizen has now collected over $1 billion in crowdfunding. That’s the kind of growth model we can build an economy around.

Don’t want to spread any FUD, since it sounds like there’s more than meets the eye, but there’s been one report of the Controller’s exposed charging pins latching onto a magnetic watch strap (while that watch was also charging) in a potentially dangerous way. We’ve asked Valve. Let us know if you see something similar!

Helldivers 2 is getting upscaling support on PC and consoles on May 27th. In a blog post, Arrowhead Studios announced an upcoming patch will add DLSS, FSR, XeSS, and PSSR support. It will also add optimizations like VRR on PS5, and Nvidia Reflex for reduced latency on PC.

As one of many updates to Steam store tags, Valve has added “Bullet Heaven,” which it defines as: “The opposite of Bullet Hell; Focus on upgrades while automatically attacking hordes of enemies”.

A security bulletin from Nvidia breaks down new vulnerabilities found in some of its GPU drivers for Windows and Linux and vGPU software. As Digital Foundry and Club386 point out, they affect drivers prior to 596.36 on the current branch, so if you’re running the most recently released update (596.49, which was released on May 12th), you don’t have anything to do.

Digital Foundry put the $600 laptop through some benchmarks and came away underwhelmed. It was possible to get a playable 30FPS out of Control and Death Stranding with quality dialed back. But, more demanding titles required dropping to 720p or, in the case of Cyberpunk 2077, refused to play at all.

Yesterday I posted about my my PC woes. I successfully completed an AIO water cooling transplant, though it took me more hours than I expected. What I didn’t expect was how valuable the LED lighting setup I bought years ago from Neweer was. My apartment doesn’t have great natural light, so I’m now a big believer in having a powerful spotlight on hand to do work at home.

So says Valve designer Lawrence Yang in an interview with NerdNest. After the Steam Controller quickly sold out, Valve introduced a reservation system so people wait for their turn to buy. The launches of the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, whenever they happen, could be even more competitive — maybe a reservation system would ease a little bit of the chaos.

The AIO water cooling unit for my homebuilt PC just failed, and so I briefly considered building a new system. Then I looked at current RAM/SSD prices. They’re so outrageous that I’ll indefinitely stay out of my usual five-year cycle of a rebuild. I’d love to hear from my fellow PC builders in the comments whether they’re also feeling stuck with their hardware.

Back in 2015, somebody wrote a program to make the original Steam Controller “sing” Doom’s theme song and other music. Catch up to 2026, and people are already making music with the new Steam Controller. Here’s “Still Alive” from Portal, and I love this rendition of the Super Mario Bros. 2 theme.

Discord has announced some big improvements available now in its Linux client. Phoronix notes that they include official support for more distros, support for hardware-accelerated video encoding, improved screen capture, better power efficiency on Steam Deck, support for Discord’s official auto-updater, and more.

The $219.99 Scuf Omega offers four rear paddles, two unique side buttons, trigger stops, five “G-Key” macro buttons, plus numerous other settings configurable through the Scuf mobile app. You can also swap its magnetic face plate, and remove all of the face buttons, if need be. Its TMR joysticks also set it apart from Sony’s $200 DualSense Edge, though it lacks adaptive triggers and haptics.

With the files, people can more easily make accessories for the hardware. “Feel free to use these to make your own Puck holders, Controller sweaters, or whatever else you want to create!” Valve says on the GitLab page with the files.

The Arctis Nova Omni succeeds its best-in-class Arctis Nova Wireless from 2022. It’s more of the same (good!), but with wireless hi-res audio support (24-bit/96kHz) like the $599 Elite from last year, plus Xbox support built into every model. I’m testing it now against the Turtle Beach Stealth Pro II, which also offers wireless hi-res audio and swappable batteries for $50 less. Stay tuned.

According to Valve:

Brockman said that focusing on the game was his idea, in a project worked on by several people, later explaining that DeepMind was working on something similar with a different game but “had nothing” yet, contributing to their decision not to open-source the technology.