It’s time to stop ignoring the CPU in your gaming PC

Jacob Roach / Digital Trends There’s one thing that will strike fear into the heart of any PC gamer: a CPU bottleneck. It’s unimaginable that you wouldn’t get the full power of your GPU when playing games, which is often the most expensive component in your rig. And although knowledge of what CPU bottlenecks are … Read more

AMD needs to fix this one problem with its next-gen GPUs

Jacob Roach / Digital Trends AMD’s current-gen graphics cards have been a revelation. Last generation, AMD was able to hit performance parity with Nvidia while sacrificing ray tracing performance. This generation, AMD is maintaining parity while getting closer in ray tracing, as showcased by GPUs like the RX 7900 GRE. But the next frontier of … Read more

The ReSpec newsletter is here: your weekly breakdown of the tech behind PC gaming

Corey Thompson / Digital Trends The world of PC gaming moves fast. New titles are constantly being developed and discovered, game-changing hardware launches that could affect your next PC upgrade, and news breaks that can alter the stakes for some of the biggest PC companies in the world. We’re so invested in this corner of … Read more

How one unexpected game changed the Steam Deck forever

Jacob Roach / Digital Trends The Steam Deck has grown into a certified smash success. With multiple millions of units sold, the device has changed the way we think about PC gaming, spawned numerous clones, and secured a future for handheld gaming devices. With the backing of a multibillion-dollar corporation, that might not come as … Read more

AMD’s big FSR 3 compromise just isn’t working

AMD AMD made a compromise with FSR 3. The frame-generation tech was announced in November 2022, and it took nearly a year for it to show up in a game. Even now, months after release, FSR 3 is only available in 12 games, the lion’s share of which are legacy titles and single-player games that … Read more

Anything is possible in this new era of gaming monitors

Jacob Roach / Digital Trends Sometimes, you get everything you’ve wanted. We probably won’t see much innovation from gaming monitors over the next couple of years. We’re on the heels of CES 2024, and we saw some exciting gaming monitor announcements — the first 4K QD-OLED displays, a 480Hz OLED monitor, and even some experimentation … Read more

PC ports need to be better in 2024. Here’s how

Digital Trends I’ve said it once, and I’ll saw it again: 2023 wasn’t a great year for PC gaming. We saw some excellent games, but most were marred by poor ports that exhibited performance issues, bugs, and other game-breaking problems. Even at the end of the year, though, things are looking up, and I hope … Read more

Here are the best (and worst) PC games I tested in 2023

Jacob Roach / Digital Trends I test the performance and features of dozens of new PC games every year. It’s usually just a way to round up some optimized settings for the latest games, but 2023 challenged that approach. It was a notoriously troublesome year for PC releases, but for as many busted ports that … Read more