gaming

punch-out’s-mike-tyson-has-been-defeated-in-under-two-minutes-for-the-first-time

Punch-Out’s Mike Tyson has been defeated in under two minutes for the first time

Bismuth explains the unreasonable luck needed for a record-setting Tyson fight at around the 56: 30 mark in this 2024 video.

Summoning Salt says Tyson here gave him a “perfect pattern” during his first phase of endless uppercuts, something that happens only 1 in 1,600 bouts. And later in the fight, the game’s random-number generator cooperated by adding only an extra 16 frames of delay (~0.8 in-game seconds) compared to a “perfect” run. Combined, Summoning Salt estimates that Tyson will only punch this quickly once every 7,000 to 10,000 attempts.

“It’s over,” Summoning Salt said live on Twitch when the record-setting match was finished, in a surprisingly even tone that came over what sounds very much like a dropped controller. “I thought I’d be a lot more excited about this. Holy shit, dude! It’s fucking over… Dude, am I dreaming right now? … I’m sorry I’m so quiet. I’m kind of in shock right now that that just happened.”

Where do we go from here?

With his near-perfect combination of both skill and luck, Summoning Salt’s new record surpasses his own previous world record of precisely 2: 00.00 on the in-game clock. That mark, set just eight months ago, was just three frames off of displaying 1: 59 on the in-game timer for the first time.

Summoning Salt was also the first runner to break the 2: 01 barrier on Tyson in 2020, a feat he has since replicated just 15 times over tens of thousands of attempts. “There’s essentially no difference between all of those [2:00.xx] fights and this one, except I got better luck from Tyson on this fight,” he writes. “Finally, after nearly half a decade, the 1: 59 has happened.”

Summoning Salt discusses the difficulty of beating 2: 13 on Tyson in 2020, months before setting a then-record time of 2: 00 himself

Ironically, just before posting his first 2: 00.xx fight in 2020, Summoning Salt posted a video discussing in part just how difficult it was for speedrunners to beat Matt Turk’s 2007 record of 2: 13 on Tyson. “For years it was just this impossibly fast time that the top players just couldn’t get close to,” Summoning Salt said at the time. “Of course, other top players fought Tyson years later, but their best efforts came up short… they couldn’t touch it. It stood alone.”

Summoning Salt is now just over a second off of the tool-assisted speedrun record of 1: 58.61, which uses emulated gameplay to fight a theoretical “perfect” bout every time. But after spending years on what he writes “is the greatest gaming achievement I have ever accomplished,” Summoning Salt seems ready to hang up his virtual boxing gloves for good.

“I have no plans to ever improve this time,” he writes. “It will be beaten by somebody one day, likely by matching this fight and then getting better luck in phase 3. I have no interest in competing for that but am extremely proud to have gotten the first sub 2 ever on Mike Tyson.”

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The Sims re-release shows what’s wrong with big publishers and single-player games


Opinion: EA might be done with single-player games—but we’re not.

The Sims Steam re-release has all of the charm of the original, if you can get it working. Credit: Samuel Axon

It’s the year 2000 all over again, because I’ve just spent the past week playing The Sims, a game that could have had a resurgent zeitgeist moment if only EA, the infamous game publisher, had put enough effort in.

A few days ago, EA re-released two of its most legendary games: The Sims and The Sims 2. Dubbed the “The Legacy Collection,” these could not even be called remasters. EA just put the original games on Steam with some minor patches to make them a little more likely to work on some modern machines.

The emphasis of that sentence should be on the word “some.” Forums and Reddit threads were flooded with players saying the game either wouldn’t launch at all, crashed shortly after launch, or had debilitating graphical issues. (Patches have been happening, but there’s work to be done yet.)

Further, the releases lack basic features that are standard for virtually all Steam releases now, like achievements or Steam Cloud support.

It took me a bit of time to get it working myself, but I got there, and my time with the game has reminded me of two things. First, The Sims is a unique experience that is worthy of its lofty legacy. Second, The Sims deserved better than this lackluster re-release.

EA didn’t meet its own standard

Look, it’s fine to re-release a game without remastering it. I’m actually glad to see the game’s original assets as they always were—it’s deeply nostalgic, and there’s always a tinge of sadness when a remaster overwrites the work of the original artists. That’s not a concern here.

But if you’re going to re-release a game on Steam in 2025, there are minimum expectations—especially from a company with the resources of EA, and even more so for a game that is this important and beloved.

The game needs to reliably run on modern machines, and it needs to support basic platform features like cloud saves or achievements. It’s not much to ask, and it’s not what we got.

The Steam forums for the game are filled with people saying it’s lazy that EA didn’t include Steam Cloud support because implementing that is ostensibly as simple as picking a folder and checking a box.

I spoke with two different professional game developers this week who have previously published games on Steam, and I brought up the issue of Steam Cloud and achievement support. As they tell it, it turns out it’s not nearly as simple as those players in the forums believe—but it still should have been within EA’s capabilities, even with a crunched schedule.

Yes, it’s sometimes possible to get it working at a basic level within a couple of hours, provided you’re already using the Steamworks API. But even in that circumstance, the way a game’s saves work might require additional work to protect against lost data or frequent problems with conflicts.

Given that the game doesn’t support achievements or really anything else you’d expect, it’s possible EA didn’t use the Steamworks API at all. (Doing that would have been hours of additional work.)

A pop-up in The Sims says the sim has accidentally been transferred $500 because of a computer bug

Sadly, this is not the sort of computer bug players are encountering. Credit: Samuel Axon

I’m not giving EA a pass, though. Four years ago, EA put out the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, a 4K upscale remaster of the original C&C games. The release featured a unified binary for the classic games, sprites and textures that were upscaled to higher resolutions, quality of life improvements, and yes, many of the Steam bells and whistles that include achievements. I’m not saying that the remaster was flawless, but it exhibited significantly more care and effort than The Sims re-release.

I love Command & Conquer. I played a lot of it when I was younger. But even a longtime C&C fan like myself can easily acknowledge that its importance in gaming history (as well as its popularity and revenue potential) pale in comparison to The Sims.

If EA could do all that for C&C, it’s all the more perplexing that it didn’t bother with a 25th-anniversary re-release of The Sims.

Single-player games, meet publicly traded companies

While we don’t have much insight into all the inner workings of EA, there are hints as to why this sort of thing is happening. For one thing, anyone who has worked for a giant corporation like this knows it’s all too easy for the objective to be passed down from above at the last minute, leaving no time or resources to see it through adequately.

But it might run deeper than that. To put it simply, publicly traded publishers like EA can’t seem to satisfy investors with single-purchase, single-player games. The emphasis on single-player releases has been decreasing for a long time, and it’s markedly less just five years after the release of the C&C remaster.

Take the recent comments from EA CEO Andrew Wilson’s post-earnings call, for example. Wilson noted that the big-budget, single-player RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard failed to meet sales expectations—even though it was apparently one of EA’s most successful single-player Steam releases ever.

“In order to break out beyond the core audience, games need to directly connect to the evolving demands of players who increasingly seek shared-world features and deeper engagement alongside high-quality narratives in this beloved category,” he explained, suggesting that games need to be multiplayer games-as-a-service to be successful in this market.

Ironically, though, the single-player RPG Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 launched around the same time he made those comments, and that game’s developer said it made its money back in a single day of sales. It’s currently one of the top-trending games on Twitch, too.

It’s possible that Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke hit the nail on the head when he suggested at the Game Developers Conference last year that a particular approach to pursuing quarterly profits runs counter to the practice of making good games.

“I’ve been fighting publishers my entire life, and I keep on seeing the same, same, same mistakes over and over and over,” he said. “It’s always the quarterly profits. The only thing that matters are the numbers.”

Later on X, he clarified who he was pointing a finger at: “This message was for those who try to double their revenue year after year. You don’t have to do that. Build more slowly and make your aim improving the state of the art, not squeezing out the last drop.”

In light of Wilson’s comments, it’s a fair guess that EA might not have put in much effort on The Sims re-releases simply because of a belief that single-player games that aren’t “shared world experiences” just aren’t worth the resources anymore, given the company’s need to satisfy shareholders with perpetual revenue growth.

Despite all this, The Sims is worth a look

It’s telling that in a market with too many options, I still put the effort in to get the game working, and I spent multiple evenings this week immersed in the lives of my sims.

Even after 25 years, this game is unique. It has the emergent wackiness of something like RimWorld or Dwarf Fortress, but it has a fast-acting, addictive hook and is easy to learn. There have been other games besides The Sims that are highly productive engines for original player stories, but few have achieved these heights while remaining accessible to virtually everyone.

Like so many of the best games, it’s hard to stop playing once you start. There’s always one more task you want to complete—or you’re about to walk away when something hilariously unexpected happens.

The problems I had getting The Sims to run aren’t that much worse than what I surely experienced on my PC back in 2002—it’s just that the standards are a lot higher now.

I’ve gotten $20 out of value out of the purchase, despite my gripes. But it’s not just about my experience. More broadly, The Sims deserved better. It could have had a moment back in the cultural zeitgeist, with tens of thousands of Twitch viewers.

Missed opportunities

The moment seems perfect: The world is stressful, so people want nostalgia. Cozy games are ascendant. Sandbox designs are making a comeback. The Sims slots smoothly into all of that.

But go to those Twitch streams, and you’ll see a lot of complaining about how the game didn’t really get everything it deserved and a sentiment that whatever moment EA was hoping for was undermined by this lack of commitment.

Instead, the cozy game du jour on Twitch is the Animal Crossing-like Hello Kitty Island Adventure, a former Apple Arcade exclusive that made its way to Steam recently. To be clear, I’m not knocking Hello Kitty Island Adventure; it’s a great game for fans of the modern cozy genre, and I’m delighted to see an indie studio seeing so much success.

A screenshot of the Twitch page for Hello Kitty

The cozy game of the week is Hello Kitty Island Adventures, not The Sims. Credit: Samuel Axon

The takeaway is that we can’t look to big publishers like EA to follow through on delivering quality single-player experiences anymore. It’s the indies that’ll carry that forward.

It’s just a bummer for fans that The Sims couldn’t have the revival moment it should have gotten.

Photo of Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon is a senior editor at Ars Technica. He covers Apple, software development, gaming, AI, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

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football-manager-25-canceled-in-a-refreshing-show-of-concern-for-quality

Football Manager 25 canceled in a refreshing show of concern for quality

The developer’s statement notes that preorder customers are getting refunds. Answering a question that has always been obvious to fans but never publishers, the company notes that, no, Football Manager 2024 will not get an update with the new season’s players and data. The company says it is looking to extend the 2024 version’s presence on subscription platforms, like Xbox’s Game Pass, and will “provide an update on this in due course.”

Releasing the game might have been worse

Credit: Sports Interactive

Fans eager to build out their dynasty team and end up with Bukayo Saka may be disappointed to miss out this year. But a developer with big ambitions to meaningfully improve and rethink a long-running franchise deserves some consideration amid the consternation.

Licensed sports games with annual releases do not typically offer much that’s new or improved for their fans. The demands of a 12-month release cycle mean that very few big ideas make it into code. Luke Plunkett, writing at Aftermath about the major (American) football, basketball, and soccer franchises, notes that, aside from an alarming number of microtransactions and gambling-adjacent “card” mechanics, “not much has changed across all four games” in a decade’s time.

Even year-on-year fans are taking notice, in measurable ways. Electronic Arts’ stock price took a 15 percent dip in late January, largely due to soft FC 25 sales. Players “bemoaned the lack of new features and innovation, including in-game physics and goal-scoring mechanisms,” analysts said at the time, according to Reuters. Pick any given year, and you can find reactions to annual sports releases that range from “It is technically better but not by much” to “The major new things are virtual currency purchases and Jake from State Farm.”

So it is that eFootball 2022, one of the most broken games to ever be released by a brand-name publisher, might be considered more tragedy than farce. The series, originally an alternative to EA’s dominant FIFA brand under the name Pro Evolution Soccer (or PES), has since evened out somewhat. Amid the many chances to laugh at warped faces and PS1 crowds, there was a sense of a missed opportunity for real competition in a rigid market.

Football Manager is seemingly competing with its own legacy and making the tough decision to ask its fans to wait out a year rather than rush out an obligatory, flawed title. It’s one of the more hopeful game cancellations to come around in some time.

Football Manager 25 canceled in a refreshing show of concern for quality Read More »

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Donkey Kong’s famed kill screen has been cleared for the first time

A short emulator-aided demonstration of how the broken ladder glitch works (not shown: the dozens of frame-perfect inputs needed to pull it off).

Better to be lucky than to be good

While players have theorized about using the broken ladder glitch to pass the kill screen for years, it initially seemed like even this glitched shortcut was too slow for the short kill screen timer. Yet when Kosmic attempted the same trick using his own emulator-assisted setup recently, he says he was able to complete the level on his first try. What gives?

As it turns out, Kosmic was the beneficiary of some significant luck. Basically, every time Donkey Kong throws a barrel, there is a 1 in 32 chance that he will wait an extra half second or so before throwing the next barrel (this random process is explained in way too much detail in this Pastebin). Since the game’s bonus timer only ticks down when Donkey Kong actually throws a barrel, the semi-rare delay can give Mario the crucial extra frames he needs to reach the top of the kill screen using the broken ladder glitch.

Funnily enough, this randomized barrel-throwing delay can theoretically repeat indefinitely, provided the game’s randomizer picks the same lucky 1-in-32 sequence over and over again. If Donkey Kong decides to delay his barrel throw about 19 times in a row, Mario would actually be able to complete the kill screen normally, without the broken ladder glitch (and without facing many barrels, even). Of course, the chances of that happening on unmodified arcade hardware are nearly 1 in 40 octillion (1 in 32^19, to be precise), so don’t count on encountering it in the wild any time soon.

Mario dies on level 22-6, which Kosmic now considers the “true” Donkey Kong kill screen.

Mario dies on level 22-6, which Kosmic now considers the “true” Donkey Kong kill screen. Credit: Kosmic

With the ladder glitch, though, Kosmic’s emulator-assisted run needed significantly less luck to pass the kill screen at 22-1. He was even able to push the game past the next four stages (including previously unseen spring and pie factory screens) to reach level 22-6.

Kosmic calls that stage the game’s true kill screen, as there’s currently no known way for Mario to remove all eight rivets quickly enough to overcome the glitch-shortened timer, even with emulator assistance. Then again, for decades, players assumed there was no way to complete level 22-1, either. Maybe someone will figure out a clever method for beating this new kill screen with 40 more years of sustained effort.

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nintendo-patent-explains-switch-2-joy-cons’-“mouse-operation”-mode

Nintendo patent explains Switch 2 Joy-Cons’ “mouse operation” mode

It’s been a month since we first heard rumors that the Switch 2’s new Joy-Cons could be slid across a flat surface to function like a computer mouse. Now, a newly published patent filed by Nintendo seems to confirm that feature and describes how it will work.

The international patent was filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization in January 2023, but it was only published on WIPO’s website on Thursday. The Japanese-language patent—whose illustrations match what we’ve seen of Switch 2 Joy-Con precisely—features an English abstract describing “a sensor for mouse operation” that can “detect reflected light from a detected surface, the light changing by moving over the detected surface…” much like any number of optical computer mice. Schematic drawings in the patent show how the light source and light sensor are squeezed inside the Joy-Con, with a built-in lens for directing the light to and from each.

A schematic diagram of the Switch 2’s Joy-Con light sensor

A schematic diagram of the Switch 2’s Joy-Con light sensor Credit: Nintendo / WIPO

A machine translation of the full text of the patent describes the controller as “a novel input device that can be used as a mouse and other than a mouse.” In mouse mode, as described in the patent, the user cradles the outer edge of the controller with their palm and places the inner edge “on, for example, a desk or the like.”

In this configuration, the user’s thumb can still access the analog stick (which is now pointing horizontally) while the index and middle fingers are positioned so the two shoulder buttons “can be operated as, for example, a right-click button and a left-click button,” according to the patent. The patent describes this configuration as “easy to hold” or “easy to grip.” It also goes to great lengths to explain how the shoulder buttons wrap around the curved top corner of the controller and thus are “easy to press” by pushing either downward or closer to horizontally with a finger.

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amd-promises-“mainstream”-4k-gaming-with-next-gen-gpus-as-current-gen-gpu-sales-tank

AMD promises “mainstream” 4K gaming with next-gen GPUs as current-gen GPU sales tank

AMD announced its fourth-quarter earnings yesterday, and the numbers were mostly rosy: $7.7 billion in revenue and a 51 percent profit margin, compared to $6.2 billion and 47 percent a year ago. The biggest winner was the data center division, which made $3.9 billion thanks to Epyc server processors and Instinct AI accelerators, and Ryzen CPUs are also selling well, helping the company’s client segment earn $2.3 billion.

But if you were looking for a dark spot, you’d find it in the company’s gaming division, which earned a relatively small $563 million, down 59 percent from a year ago. AMD’s Lisa Su blamed this on both dedicated graphics card sales and sales from the company’s “semi-custom” chips (that is, the ones created specifically for game consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation).

Other data sources suggest that the response from GPU buyers to AMD’s Radeon RX 7000 series, launched between late 2022 and early 2024, has been lackluster. The Steam Hardware Survey, a noisy but broadly useful barometer for GPU market share, shows no RX 7000-series models in the top 50; only two of the GPUs (the 7900 XTX and 7700 XT) are used in enough gaming PCs to be mentioned on the list at all, with the others all getting lumped into the “other” category. Jon Peddie Research recently estimated that AMD was selling roughly one dedicated GPU for every seven or eight sold by Nvidia.

But hope springs eternal. Su confirmed on AMD’s earnings call that the new Radeon RX 9000-series cards, announced at CES last month, would be launching in early March. The Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT are both aimed toward the middle of the graphics card market, and Su said that both would bring “high-quality gaming to mainstream players.”

An opportunity, maybe

“Mainstream” could mean a lot of things. AMD’s CES slide deck positioned the 9070 series alongside Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti ($799) and 4070 Super ($599) and its own RTX 7900 XT, 7900 GRE, and 7800 XT (between $500 and $730 as of this writing), a pretty wide price spread that is still more expensive than an entire high-end console. The GPUs could still rely heavily on upscaling algorithms like AMD’s Fidelity Super Resolution (FSR) to hit playable frame rates at those resolutions, rather than targeting native 4K.

AMD promises “mainstream” 4K gaming with next-gen GPUs as current-gen GPU sales tank Read More »

vghf-opens-free-online-access-to-1,500-classic-game-mags,-30k-historic-files

VGHF opens free online access to 1,500 classic game mags, 30K historic files

In the intro video, Salvador talks about looking through their archives and stumbling on the existence of Pretzel Pete, a little-remembered early 3D driving/platform game. Despite its extreme obscurity, the game is nonetheless mentioned in the 1999 E3 catalog and an old issue of PC Gamer, both of which are now memorialized forever in the VGHF digital archives.

Getting this kind of obscure information into a digitized, easily searchable form was “a lot harder than it sounds,” Salvador said. Beyond getting archival-quality scans of the magazines themselves (a process aided by community efforts like RetroMags and Out of Print Archive), extracting the text from those pages proved difficult for OCR software designed for the high-contrast, black-text-on-white-background world of business documents. “If you’ve ever read a ’90s video game magazine, you know how crazy those magazine layouts get,” Salvador said.

VGHF Head Librarian Phil Salvador talks about the digital library launch.

To get around that problem, Salvador said VGHF Director of Technology Travis Brown spent months developing a specially designed text-recognition tool that “handles even the toughest magazine pages with no problem” and represents “a significant leap in quality over what we had before.” That means it’s easier than ever to find 81 separate mentions of Clu Clu Land from across dozens of different issues with a single search.

Unfortunately, the vast wealth of video game information on offer here does not include direct, playable access to retail video games, which libraries can’t share digitally due to the limitations of the DMCA. But the VGHF and other organizations “continue to challenge those copyright rules every three years,” leaving some hope that digital libraries like this may soon include access to the source material being discussed.

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sony-removes-playstation-account-requirement-from-4-single-player-steam-games

Sony removes PlayStation account requirement from 4 single-player Steam games

Sony’s game publishing arm has done a 180-degree turn on a controversial policy of requiring PC players to sign in with PlayStation accounts for some games, according to a blog post by the company.

A PlayStation account will “become optional” for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, God of War Ragnarok, The Last of Us Part II Remastered, and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. Sony hasn’t lost hope that players will still go ahead and use a PlayStation account, though, as it’s tying several benefits to signing in.

Logging in with PlayStation will be required to access trophies, the PlayStation equivalent of achievements. (Steam achievements appear to be supported regardless.) It will also allow friend management, provided you have social contacts on the PlayStation Network.

Additionally, Sony is providing some small in-game rewards to each title that are available if you log in with its account system. You’ll get early unlocks of the Spider-Man 2099 Black Suit and the Miles Morales 2099 Suit in Spider-Man 2, for example—or the Nora Valiant outfit in Horizon: Zero Dawn.

Some of these rewards are available via other means within the games, such as the Armor of the Black Bear set for Kratos in Ragnarok.

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gog-revamps-its-“dreamlist”-feature-to-better-pry-old-games-out-of-publishers

GOG revamps its “Dreamlist” feature to better pry old games out of publishers

Black & White was intriguing; it had classic Molyneaux over-reach and deserves, in the words of one Ars staffer, a re-release so that “a new generation can realize just how janky it is.” As detailed in a documentary by Noclip, the B&W games are stuck in publishing purgatory. Microsoft acquired Lionhead’s IP and assets, while Electronic Arts retains the publishing rights to the B&W games, and nobody has yet been able to align those two very large planets.

GOG has added its own “Our Pick” tag to games it wants to see brought forward onto modern systems. Among them is Freelancer, which Ars’ Samuel Axon described in our 2024 roundup of non-2024 games as “a sincere attempt to make games like Elite (Dangerous) and Wing Commander: Privateer far more accessible.” GOG selected Freelancer as one of its staff picks for the Dreamlist, citing its “dynamic economy and engaging storyline.”

The main thing GOG would be fixing with Freelancer, as with many games, would be simple availability, as the game is not available on any proper digital storefront. Axon reports that, in having an original disc, installing Freelancer was not too hard, with the installer working in Windows 11. You can apply community patches, like an “HD Edition” mod, but Axon preferred playing at a non-native resolution (1024×768) at 4:3 and adjusting his monitor.

Other notable games GOG and its voting public want to see brought back are Final Fantasy VII (the original, not the remake), the point-and-click Discworld adventure, Command & Conquer: The Ultimate Collection, and The Operative: No One Lives Forever.

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new-fpga-powered-retro-console-re-creates-the-playstation,-cd-rom-drive-optional

New FPGA-powered retro console re-creates the PlayStation, CD-ROM drive optional

Retro game enthusiasts may already be acquainted with Analogue, a company that designs and manufactures updated versions of classic consoles that can play original games but also be hooked up to modern televisions and monitors. The most recent of its announcements is the Analogue 3D, a console designed to play Nintendo 64 cartridges.

Now, a company called Retro Remake is reigniting the console wars of the 1990s with its SuperStation one, a new-old game console designed to play original Sony PlayStation games and work with original accessories like controllers and memory cards. Currently available as a $180 pre-order, Retro Remake expects the consoles to ship no later than Q4 of 2025.

The base console is modeled on the redesigned PSOne console from mid-2000, released late in the console’s lifecycle to appeal to buyers on a budget who couldn’t afford a then-new PlayStation 2. The Superstation one includes two PlayStation controller ports and memory card slots on the front, plus a USB-A port. But there are lots of modern amenities on the back, including a USB-C port for power, two USB-A ports, an HDMI port for new TVs, DIN10 and VGA ports that support analog video output, and an Ethernet port. Other analog video outputs, including component and RCA outputs, are located on the sides behind small covers. The console also supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

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nvidia-starts-to-wind-down-support-for-old-gpus,-including-the-long-lived-gtx-1060

Nvidia starts to wind down support for old GPUs, including the long-lived GTX 1060

Nvidia is launching the first volley of RTX 50-series GPUs based on its new Blackwell architecture, starting with the RTX 5090 and working downward from there. The company also appears to be winding down support for a few of its older GPU architectures, according to these CUDA release notes spotted by Tom’s Hardware.

The release notes say that CUDA support for the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPU architectures “is considered feature-complete and will be frozen in an upcoming release.” While all of these architectures—which collectively cover GeForce GPUs from the old GTX 700 series all the way up through 2016’s GTX 1000 series, plus a couple of Quadro and Titan workstation cards—are still currently supported by Nvidia’s December Game Ready driver package, the end of new CUDA feature support suggests that these GPUs will eventually be dropped from these driver packages soon.

It’s common for Nvidia and AMD to drop support for another batch of architectures all at once every few years; Nvidia last dropped support for older cards in 2021, and AMD dropped support for several prominent GPUs in 2023. Both companies maintain a separate driver branch for some of their older cards but releases usually only happen every few months, and they focus on security updates, not on providing new features or performance optimizations for new games.

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nvidia-geforce-rtx-5090-costs-as-much-as-a-whole-gaming-pc—but-it-sure-is-fast

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 costs as much as a whole gaming PC—but it sure is fast


Even setting aside Frame Generation, this is a fast, power-hungry $2,000 GPU.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 starts at $1,999 before you factor in upsells from the company’s partners or price increases driven by scalpers and/or genuine demand. It costs more than my entire gaming PC.

The new GPU is so expensive that you could build an entire well-specced gaming PC with Nvidia’s next-fastest GPU in it—the $999 RTX 5080, which we don’t have in hand yet—for the same money, or maybe even a little less with judicious component selection. It’s not the most expensive GPU that Nvidia has ever launched—2018’s $2,499 Titan RTX has it beat, and 2022’s RTX 3090 Ti also cost $2,000—but it’s safe to say it’s not really a GPU intended for the masses.

At least as far as gaming is concerned, the 5090 is the very definition of a halo product; it’s for people who demand the best and newest thing regardless of what it costs (the calculus is probably different for deep-pocketed people and companies who want to use them as some kind of generative AI accelerator). And on this front, at least, the 5090 is successful. It’s the newest and fastest GPU you can buy, and the competition is not particularly close. It’s also a showcase for DLSS Multi-Frame Generation, a new feature unique to the 50-series cards that Nvidia is leaning on heavily to make its new GPUs look better than they already are.

Founders Edition cards: Design and cooling

RTX 5090 RTX 4090 RTX 5080 RTX 4080 Super
CUDA cores 21,760 16,384 10,752 10,240
Boost clock 2,410 MHz 2,520 MHz 2,617 MHz 2,550 MHz
Memory bus width 512-bit 384-bit 256-bit 256-bit
Memory bandwidth 1,792 GB/s 1,008 GB/s 960 GB/s 736 GB/s
Memory size 32GB GDDR7 24GB GDDR6X 16GB GDDR7 16GB GDDR6X
TGP 575 W 450 W 360 W 320 W

We won’t spend too long talking about the specific designs of Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards since many buyers will experience the Blackwell GPUs with cards from Nvidia’s partners instead (the cards we’ve seen so far mostly look like the expected fare: gargantuan triple-slot triple-fan coolers, with varying degrees of RGB). But it’s worth noting that Nvidia has addressed a couple of my functional gripes with the 4090/4080-series design.

The first was the sheer dimensions of each card—not an issue unique to Nvidia, but one that frequently caused problems for me as someone who tends toward ITX-based PCs and smaller builds. The 5090 and 5080 FE designs are the same length and height as the 4090 and 4080 FE designs, but they only take up two slots instead of three, which will make them an easier fit for many cases.

Nvidia has also tweaked the cards’ 12VHPWR connector, recessing it into the card and mounting it at a slight angle instead of having it sticking straight out of the top edge. The height of the 4090/4080 FE design made some cases hard to close up once you factored in the additional height of a 12VHPWR cable or Nvidia’s many-tentacled 8-pin-to-12VHPWR adapter. The angled connector still extends a bit beyond the top of the card, but it’s easier to tuck the cable away so you can put the side back on your case.

Finally, Nvidia has changed its cooler—whereas most OEM GPUs mount all their fans on the top of the GPU, Nvidia has historically placed one fan on each side of the card. In a standard ATX case with the GPU mounted parallel to the bottom of the case, this wasn’t a huge deal—there’s plenty of room for that air to circulate inside the case and to be expelled by whatever case fans you have installed.

But in “sandwich-style” ITX cases, where a riser cable wraps around so the GPU can be mounted parallel to the motherboard, the fan on the bottom side of the GPU was poorly placed. In many sandwich-style cases, the GPU fan will dump heat against the back of the motherboard, making it harder to keep the GPU cool and creating heat problems elsewhere besides. The new GPUs mount both fans on the top of the cards.

Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards have had heat issues in the past—most notably the 30-series GPUs—and that was my first question going in. A smaller cooler plus a dramatically higher peak power draw seems like a recipe for overheating.

Temperatures for the various cards we re-tested for this review. The 5090 FE is the toastiest of all of them, but it still has a safe operating temperature.

At least for the 5090, the smaller cooler does mean higher temperatures—around 10 to 12 degrees Celsius higher when running the same benchmarks as the RTX 4090 Founders Edition. And while temperatures of around 77 degrees aren’t hugely concerning, this is sort of a best-case scenario, with an adequately cooled testbed case with the side panel totally removed and ambient temperatures at around 21° or 22° Celsius. You’ll just want to make sure you have a good amount of airflow in your case if you buy one of these.

Testbed notes

A new high-end Nvidia GPU is a good reason to tweak our test bed and suite of games, and we’ve done both here. Mainly, we added a 1050 W Thermaltake Toughpower GF A3 power supply—Nvidia recommends at least 1000 W for the 5090, and this one has a native 12VHPWR connector for convenience. We’ve also swapped the Ryzen 7 7800X3D for a slightly faster Ryzen 7 9800X3D to reduce the odds that the CPU will bottleneck performance as we try to hit high frame rates.

As for the suite of games, we’ve removed a couple of older titles and added some with built-in benchmarks that will tax these GPUs a bit more, especially at 4K with all the settings turned up. Those games include the RT Overdrive preset in the perennially punishing Cyberpunk 2077 and Black Myth: Wukong in Cinematic mode, both games where even the RTX 4090 struggles to hit 60 fps without an assist from DLSS. We’ve also added Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, a recent release that doesn’t include ray-tracing effects but does support most DLSS 3 and FSR 3 features (including FSR Frame Generation).

We’ve tried to strike a balance between games with ray-tracing effects and games without it, though most AAA games these days include it, and modern GPUs should be able to handle it well (best of luck to AMD with its upcoming RDNA 4 cards).

For the 5090, we’ve run all tests in 4K—if you don’t care about running games in 4K, even if you want super-high frame rates at 1440p or for some kind of ultrawide monitor, the 5090 is probably overkill. When we run upscaling tests, we use the newest DLSS version available for Nvidia cards, the newest FSR version available for AMD cards, and the newest XeSS version available for Intel cards (not relevant here, just stating for the record), and we use the “Quality” setting (at 4K, that equates to an actual rendering version of 1440p).

Rendering performance: A lot faster, a lot more power-hungry

Before we talk about Frame Generation or “fake frames,” let’s compare apples to apples and just examine the 5090’s rendering performance.

The card mainly benefits from four things compared to the 4090: the updated Blackwell GPU architecture, a nearly 33 percent increase in the number of CUDA cores, an upgrade from GDDR6X to GDDR7, and a move from a 384-bit memory bus to a 512-bit bus. It also jumps from 24GB of RAM to 32GB, but games generally aren’t butting up against a 24GB limit yet, so the capacity increase by itself shouldn’t really change performance if all you’re focused on is gaming.

And for people who prioritize performance over all else, the 5090 is a big deal—it’s the first consumer graphics card from any company that is faster than a 4090, as Nvidia never spruced up the 4090 last year when it did its mid-generation Super refreshes of the 4080, 4070 Ti, and 4070.

Comparing natively rendered games at 4K, the 5090 is between 17 percent and 40 percent faster than the 4090, with most of the games we tested landing somewhere in the low to high 30 percent range. That’s an undeniably big bump, one that’s roughly commensurate with the increase in the number of CUDA cores. Tests run with DLSS enabled (both upscaling-only and with Frame Generation running in 2x mode) improve by roughly the same amount.

You could find things to be disappointed about if you went looking for them. That 30-something-percent performance increase comes with a 35 percent increase in power use in our testing under load with punishing 4K games—the 4090 tops out around 420 W, whereas the 5090 went all the way up to 573 W, with the 5090 coming closer to its 575 W TDP than the 4090 does to its theoretical 450 W maximum. The 50-series cards use the same TSMC 4N manufacturing process as the 40-series cards, and increasing the number of transistors without changing the process results in a chip that uses more power (though it should be said that capping frame rates, running at lower resolutions, or running less-demanding games can rein in that power use a bit).

Power draw under load goes up by an amount roughly commensurate with performance. The 4090 was already power-hungry; the 5090 is dramatically more so. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The 5090’s 30-something percent increase over the 4090 might also seem underwhelming if you recall that the 4090 was around 55 percent faster than the previous-generation 3090 Ti while consuming about the same amount of power. To be even faster than a 4090 is no small feat—AMD’s fastest GPU is more in line with Nvidia’s 4080 Super—but if you’re comparing the two cards using the exact same tests, the relative leap is less seismic.

That brings us to Nvidia’s answer for that problem: DLSS 4 and its Multi-Frame Generation feature.

DLSS 4 and Multi-Frame Generation

As a refresher, Nvidia’s DLSS Frame Generation feature, as introduced in the GeForce 40-series, takes DLSS upscaling one step further. The upscaling feature inserted interpolated pixels into a rendered image to make it look like a sharper, higher-resolution image without having to do all the work of rendering all those pixels. DLSS FG would interpolate an entire frame between rendered frames, boosting your FPS without dramatically boosting the amount of work your GPU was doing. If you used DLSS upscaling and FG at the same time, Nvidia could claim that seven out of eight pixels on your screen were generated by AI.

DLSS Multi-Frame Generation (hereafter MFG, for simplicity’s sake) does the same thing, but it can generate one to three interpolated frames for every rendered frame. The marketing numbers have gone up, too; now, 15 out of every 16 pixels on your screen can be generated by AI.

Nvidia might point to this and say that the 5090 is over twice as fast as the 4090, but that’s not really comparing apples to apples. Expect this issue to persist over the lifetime of the 50-series. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Nvidia provided reviewers with a preview build of Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS MFG enabled, which gives us an example of how those settings will be exposed to users. For 40-series cards that only support the regular DLSS FG, you won’t notice a difference in games that support MFG—Frame Generation is still just one toggle you can turn on or off. For 50-series cards that support MFG, you’ll be able to choose from among a few options, just as you currently can with other DLSS quality settings.

The “2x” mode is the old version of DLSS FG and is supported by both the 50-series cards and 40-series GPUs; it promises one generated frame for every rendered frame (two frames total, hence “2x”). The “3x” and “4x” modes are new to the 50-series and promise two and three generated frames (respectively) for every rendered frame. Like the original DLSS FG, MFG can be used in concert with normal DLSS upscaling, or it can be used independently.

One problem with the original DLSS FG was latency—user input was only being sampled at the natively rendered frame rate, meaning you could be looking at 60 frames per second on your display but only having your input polled 30 times per second. Another is image quality; as good as the DLSS algorithms can be at guessing and recreating what a natively rendered pixel would look like, you’ll inevitably see errors, particularly in fine details.

Both these problems contribute to the third problem with DLSS FG: Without a decent underlying frame rate, the lag you feel and the weird visual artifacts you notice will both be more pronounced. So DLSS FG can be useful for turning 120 fps into 240 fps, or even 60 fps into 120 fps. But it’s not as helpful if you’re trying to get from 20 or 30 fps up to a smooth 60 fps.

We’ll be taking a closer look at the DLSS upgrades in the next couple of weeks (including MFG and the new transformer model, which will supposedly increase upscaling quality and supports all RTX GPUs). But in our limited testing so far, the issues with DLSS MFG are basically the same as with the first version of Frame Generation, just slightly more pronounced. In the built-in Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark, the most visible issues are with some bits of barbed-wire fencing, which get smoother-looking and less detailed as you crank up the number of AI-generated frames. But the motion does look fluid and smooth, and the frame rate counts are admittedly impressive.

But as we noted in last year’s 4090 review, the xx90 cards portray FG and MFG in the best light possible since the card is already capable of natively rendering such high frame rates. It’s on lower-end cards where the shortcomings of the technology become more pronounced. Nvidia might say that the upcoming RTX 5070 is “as fast as a 4090 for $549,” and it might be right in terms of the number of frames the card can put up on your screen every second. But responsiveness and visual fidelity on the 4090 will be better every time—AI is a good augmentation for rendered frames, but it’s iffy as a replacement for rendered frames.

A 4090, amped way up

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The GeForce RTX 5090 is an impressive card—it’s the only consumer graphics card to be released in over two years that can outperform the RTX 4090. The main caveats are its sky-high power consumption and sky-high price; by itself, it costs as much (and consumes as much power as) an entire mainstream gaming PC. The card is aimed at people who care about speed way more than they care about price, but it’s still worth putting it into context.

The main controversy, as with the 40-series, is how Nvidia talks about its Frame Generation-inflated performance numbers. Frame Generation and Multi-Frame Generation are tools in a toolbox—there will be games where they make things look great and run fast with minimal noticeable impact to visual quality or responsiveness, games where those impacts are more noticeable, and games that never add support for the features at all. (As well-supported as DLSS generally is in new releases, it is incumbent upon game developers to add it—and update it when Nvidia puts out a new version.)

But using those Multi-Frame Generation-inflated FPS numbers to make topline comparisons to last-generation graphics cards just feels disingenuous. No, an RTX 5070 will not be as fast as an RTX 4090 for just $549, because not all games support DLSS MFG, and not all games that do support it will run it well. Frame Generation still needs a good base frame rate to start with, and the slower your card is, the more issues you might notice.

Fuzzy marketing aside, Nvidia is still the undisputed leader in the GPU market, and the RTX 5090 extends that leadership for what will likely be another entire GPU generation, since both AMD and Intel are focusing their efforts on higher-volume, lower-cost cards right now. DLSS is still generally better than AMD’s FSR, and Nvidia does a good job of getting developers of new AAA game releases to support it. And if you’re buying this GPU to do some kind of rendering work or generative AI acceleration, Nvidia’s performance and software tools are still superior. The misleading performance claims are frustrating, but Nvidia still gains a lot of real advantages from being as dominant and entrenched as it is.

The good

  • Usually 30-something percent faster than an RTX 4090
  • Redesigned Founders Edition card is less unwieldy than the bricks that were the 4090/4080 design
  • Adequate cooling, despite the smaller card and higher power use
  • DLSS Multi-Frame Generation is an intriguing option if you’re trying to hit 240 or 360 fps on your high-refresh-rate gaming monitor

The bad

  • Much higher power consumption than the 4090, which already consumed more power than any other GPU on the market
  • Frame Generation is good at making a game that’s running fast run faster, it’s not as good for bringing a slow game up to 60 Hz
  • Nvidia’s misleading marketing around Multi-Frame Generation is frustrating—and will likely be more frustrating for lower-end cards since they aren’t getting the same bumps to core count and memory interface that the 5090 gets

The ugly

  • You can buy a whole lot of PC for $2,000, and we wouldn’t bet on this GPU being easy to find at MSRP

Photo of Andrew Cunningham

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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