Bethesda has released a major update for the original DOOM & DOOM II which brings various new features such as Steam support, native widescreen rendering support, DeHackEd support, Deathmatch 3.0 in split-screen multiplayer, crosshair support, and more across the PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Android and iOS ports of the games. The new widescreen rendering support is the first time in an official port, the original DOOM renderer has been modified to natively render 16:9 without any letterboxing. This update should greatly improve the performance and Quality of Life for gamers, you can view the complete change log below.

When id Tech's lead developer announced that id Tech 7 the game engine responsible for Doom Eternal could run at 1000 FPS many assumed current hardware wouldn't be able to hit the mark. Polish hardware retailer X-kom in collaboration with Bethesda has achieved this feat with only consumer hardware and some serious liquid nitrogen overclocking. The challenge was part of the QuakeCon at Home event and saw X-kom push the Intel Core i7 9700K to 6.6 GHz paired with an ASUS RTX 2080Ti Strix overclocked to 2.4 GHz. The motherboard used was the ASUS Maximus XI APEX which was powered by a 1200 W Be Quiet Straight Power supply.

Bethesda over the weekend posted a teaser to the very first expansion of DOOM Eternal, one of 2020's brighter spots. Titled "The Ancient Gods, Part One," (which indicates more parts); the DLC is an expansion of the original's campaign, and appears to pick off from it. Urdak (a dimension that's compared to Heaven) is in tatters and swarming with demons following the events of "Eternal," and Doomguy is resurrected by Father (creator of the universe) to clean it up. The teaser features a monologue by Father that sounds an awful lot like Vega. "Am I the Father?" were its last words as it was consumed by Urdak's computers. The 30-second teaser shows us an Urdak-like locale, demons with a new blue buff, possibly as they're resurrected by the summoner (which makes a comeback from DOOM (2016)). We also see a new more formidable makyr heavy enemy than the walking piñatas from "Eternal." Beth will post an extended trailer on August 27, at Opening Night Live of Gamescom 2020.The teaser follows.

Today, noblechairs are excited to launch the official noblechairs HERO Gaming Chair - DOOM Edition! The "DOOM Edition" will be available to purchase through many retailers worldwide. noblechairs recently announced their partnership with games publisher, Bethesda Softworks, and have already released an officially licensed Fallout Edition gaming chair.

The DOOM Edition by noblechairs has been designed to take distinctive elements from the game - making it a must have for enthusiasts and fans of the DOOM franchise. The chair comes with an all black base, blood-red accents and an exceptional design throughout. It features multiple rune markings, including the iconic glyph on the front of the chair, the mark of the DOOM Slayer.

Amazon Studios has licensed the rights to the Fallout game series from Bethesda Game Studios and plans to create a new TV series with acclaimed producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy's Kilter Films attached to produce the project. Amazon Studios has committed to develop the entire techno-thriller drama series which is currently in pre-production. Kilter Films also produces HBO's Westworld which has been well received and was recently picked up for a fourth season.

Kilter FilmsFallout is one of the greatest game series of all time. Each chapter of this insanely imaginative story has cost us countless hours we could have spent with family and friends. So we're incredibly excited to partner with Todd Howard and the rest of the brilliant lunatics at Bethesda to bring this massive, subversive, and darkly funny universe to life with Amazon Studios.

The Fallout Vault-Tec Edition gaming chair by noblechairs is now available to purchase! Last month, noblechairs announced their partnership with the games development studio, Bethesda Softworks, and an official Fallout Edition gaming chair was teased. Today, noblechairs are excited to launch the official noblechairs HERO Gaming Chair - Fallout Vault-Tec Edition to market. It will be available to purchase across many retailers worldwide.

The Vault-Tec Edition by noblechairs takes inspiration from the Fallout series and features Vault Boy and the Vault-Tec Corporation logos on the front and the rear of the chair, along with the famous blue and yellow colour scheme. It also includes "Prepare for the Future'' - a staple phrase within the Fallout franchise.

id Software's Marty Stratton clarified the issues introduced in Doom Eternal following its Update 1. Via a Reddit post, the developer informed its audience that Denuvo's introduction into the game with Update 1 (a move that sparked a review-bomb on Steam and a quick backpedaling from the company regarding its inclusion) said that the anti-cheat software actually wasn't responsible for the reported issues.

The developer said that the actual performance issues introduced with Update 1 lie in changes in the graphics memory handling code, as well as some bugs introduced alongside customizable skins. The developer also went on to say that the decision to include Denuvo post-release wasn't one forced by publisher Bethesda, but an entirely in-house one, and that the subsequent decision to remove the protection has nothing to do with Denuvo's software quality. Of course, the addition of an always-on DRM solution to Doom Eternal as a post-release patch still stands, as users that previously acquired the game did so without knowledge of its eventual addition. Look after the break for a complete transcript on the comment.

Someone at Bethesda or id Software thought it was a good idea to retrofit "Doom Eternal" with the vastly unpopular Denuvo DRM as an anti-cheat component, two months following its March launch, as part of "Update 1" (a major game patch). This invited the wrath of gamers as they review-bombed the game on Steam. The game's executive producer Marty Stratton took to Reddit, to announce that Denuvo will be removed in the game's next update (without announcing a timeline), while defending it. Stratton maintains that the performance issues noticed in Update 1 are not related to the Denuvo implementation. If you've read our comprehensive review of Denuvo, where we go into the technical aspects of the DRM solution, you'll know that it can be implemented in a number of ways, some of which inflict performance penalties.Image Courtesy Modern Vintage Gamer

Doom Eternal has been review-bombed over the weekend, as disgruntled players took to Steam to show their thoughts on the the game's Update 1. The issue isn't in the update itself or it changing core gameplay functions; rather, it's based on the inclusion of Denuvo's Anti-cheat mechanism for the multiplayer component of the game, which is also running in the single-player campaign - considered to be the core of any Doom game.

Players are against the inclusion of Denuvo and its monitoring subroutines due to it having a a kernel-level service that monitors gameplay. Gamers are noting performance decreases, framerate drops, crashes, and deleted Saves after the game's latest update. Others are voicing their discontent at the fact that Denuvo has been added post-purchase of the game; players that might not choose to buy the game over that detail have already bought it, and refunds are apparently not being entertained. Doom Eternal's previous 90% user review score on Steam now stand at a measly 50%, which is absolutely undeserving of the game itself. Doom may be Eternal, but its community feedback sure isn't.

In the latest episode of Inside Xbox, Microsoft showed off trailers for several new games including Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and Dirt 5. Alongside the new game trailers, Microsoft also published a list of over 140 publishers and studios all working on games for the new console. Big names such as 2K Games, Activision, Bethesda, Bungie, Electronic Arts, SEGA, Square Enix, and Ubisoft are all present along with countless smaller publishers and studios. The full list of publishers and studios can be found below.

Bethesda Softworks, ZeniMax Media and our global family of studios want to do more than keep you entertained and connected through our games during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the impact of this health crisis being so great and widespread, we want to help by donating to an array of international and local charities which are directly involved with COVID-19 relief efforts. We plan to donate $1,000,000 to the following front-line organizations.

Players of Bethesda's Fallout 76 have been met with a relatively underwhelming game from the very beginning, starting with the number of bugs and puzzling design decisions that shipped with it. Since then, Fallout 76 has definitely become more polished; however, like any good Bethesda game (and one as expansive and with as many systems as a Fallout, it has to be said), Fallout 76 just recently introduced what has to be one of the most aggravating bugs of all time with the introduction of its Wastelanders expansion.

The expansion, which has been met as a much-needed step towards the game feeling like a proper Fallout, introduces Wastelanders, or NPCs that actually go on about their business, and are available to accompany you in a variety of missions. The Wasteland now seems a lot less empty... Though thanks to the introduced bug, you know might wish it to be the desolate place it always has been. You see, players are reporting that when they die alongside one such NPC, they sometimes end up looting the player character's corpse... For their very best weapon. Which they then proceed in using when you respawn. And which you can't get back, because you can't pickpocket them, or actually kill them - they just go to sleep. If this was a feature, this might've been a cautionary tale in living in a post-apocalyptic setting where every man fends for himself... As it stands, though, it's just a particularly wicked bug that can undo hours upon hours of grinding. Look after the break for a video that shows just that moment of disillusionment.

NVIDIA's GeForce Now game streaming service has been a bit of a hit and miss lately, with some of the bigger publishers like Activision-Blizzard, Bethesda, and 2K games revoking availability of their digital game libraries on NVIDIA's service. Possible reasons for those events were unknown and the platform did suffer from it. Some speculations were that the publishers were going to switch their preferred online streaming service platform or build their own. So far it is still a mystery. However, it seems like there is no end to the pain, as some very big publishers decided to revoke their digital libraries as well.

Big names like Microsoft Xbox Game Studios, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Codemasters, and Klei Entertainment have all decided to stop offering their games on the GeForce Now game streaming platform. This is very much a major disappointment and another big setback to the platform, as now you can not play any of the titles from these publishers. Titles from the games series like Halo, Gears of War, Forza, Dirt Rally, Batman and many more, are now not available. It remains to be seen if these publishers announce a move to another streaming service, so we have to wait.

EPIC has made available two more free games this week. One of them is the well-known, Bethesda-published and Avalanche Studios-developed Just Cause 4, which sees players diving (sometimes literally) into the open-world city of Solis. Featuring complete mayhem and a third-person gameplay perspective, the game was received to lukewarm reviews (currently stands at 68 Metacritic score) and even worse consumer reception (sitting at a not-so-pretty 4.8 user score).

The other entry is Wheels of Aurelia (developed by Santa Ragione srl), which is pitted as a "immersive road trip" through the 1970's Italian West Coast (in the coherently-named Via Aurelia). The soundtrack and experience, as well as the chance to learn some history and cultural context of 1970's Italy, should be your main expectations while diving into this game; as a gameplay experience, it seems to have left much to be desired, sitting with a Metascore of 63 and a 4.0 user score. You can grab these via the EPIC launcher, as always.

Noblechairs, the well-known manufacturer of PC accessories and better known for the quality of their gaming chairs, has announced that they are working in partnership with Bethesda to adapt that publisher's franchises to branded products. The agreement will see Noblechairs designing products around the Fallout and Doom franchises for release in 2020.

Other game franchises will follow in this adaptation (wondering what they'll be doing with the steampunk design of Dishonored). It's currently unknown what special features (if any) these chairs will include, or if it's simply a matter of aesthetics. Pricing hasn't yet been shared, but since these will likely be designed around Noblechairs' existing products, you should take a look at that pricing and then add some leeway for licensing costs.

Bethesda today released the final system requirements for its upcoming massacre-fest Doom Eternal. The game, which is geared for release just 10 days from now (March 20th), promises to be one of the most impressive (and fluid) games in recent times, if the original, modern Doom is anything to go by.

Bethesda has even gone so far so as to list preferred specs for gamers that want to play in 4K at 60 FPS or in 1440p at 120 FPS: and these are pretty abusive, with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti being required - likely because of its gargantuan 11 GB VRAM. AMD's Ryzen 7 3700X or Intel's Core i9-9900K are the requirements here, alongside 16 GB of system RAM. Check after the break for a breakdown on recommended specs for other resolutions and quality settings, and for Bethesda's trailer showing off customization options for your DOOM slayer. Do you have what it takes to run the game?

NVIDIA's GeForce NOW game-streaming service had been hit or miss lately depending on how you look at its current situation, given the fact that Activision-Blizzard removed its game catalog from the GeForce NOW service and the fact that CD Projekt RED announced that Cyberpunk 2077 will be present on the platform. Some moves like the one coming from Activision-Blizzard are taking a tole on the new game streaming platform, while others like the addition of Cyberpunk 2077 are giving the platform users hope to see it become a viable option.

To add to the pain, Bethesda Softworks, a maker of many popular titles such as the DOOM, Fallout, Wolfenstein, and The Elder Scrolls series, has decided to pull a big part of its game library from the NVIDIA GeForce NOW game streaming service. In another surprising turn of events, a part of NVIDIA staff announced that Bethesda Softworks will pull most of its games form the GeForce NOW platform, excluding Wolfenstein Youngblood, which will remain playable to give users a chance to experience it with "RTX on". We do not know why big publishers are pulling their game libraries form this platform, so we have to wait for more information in the future.

I don't know about you, but I've found the Dishonored universe to be one of the most interesting ones to be explored in gaming in recent years. Now, publisher Bethesda has made the dishonored franchise available via CD Projekt Red's GOG digital storefront, which means DRM-free versions of games you get to keep forever, as well as digital goodies. The original Dishonored and DLC, alongside Dishonored 2 and its expansion Death of the Outsider (too late for a spoiler alert, uh?) are now available with discounts up to 75% off.

Wolfenstein: The New Order and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood are also available through GOG as of now, so if you have a Nazi-killing craving lurking somewhere in your conscious or subconscious mind, GOG has that itch covered for you with hefty discounts as well (and these are extensive to the entirety of Bethesda's published catalogue on GOG, including those more retro pieces of gaming such as Quake and Doom). Go now, and be happy.

Well, this is something new. Human Head Studios, who have developed and just released Rune 2 yesterday on the Epic Games Store as an exclusive release, today announced their studio was shutting down. At the same time, Bethesda announced it was founding a new game studio, Roundhouse Studios, which would be fully populated by the Human Head Studios' staff, left unemployed from the closure of that developing label. While it's obviously great that in effect nobody was left unemployed... Does this "make sense much"?

It does. However, there are some interesting tidbits to this story. One of the more pressing questions is: how will Rune 2 be supported in the future? That question wasn't addressed by now Roundhouse Studios Creative Director Chris Rhinehart - we just assume the game has been released in an "as is" state and it doesn't matter whether there are some breaking bugs in that release. Any reported bug will be filed under "no developer found; won't fix". There are also some more interesting nuances to this deal, though. You might remember Human Head Studios previously worked on Prey 2, with Bethesda acting as publisher, but was removed from the project after the studio declined Bethesda's offer to buy Human Head Studios. This action cost the studio the IP, and led them towards development of Rune 2. However, all of that bad blood has seemingly been left behind them, according to press releases from both parties. You can read those after the break.

In heartbreaking news to slayers prepping for the hotly anticipated addition to the franchise, DOOM Eternal, id Software announced that the game's release has been delayed to the 20th of March, 2020, from its earlier 22nd November 2019 release. In its announcement, id Software put quality-assurance as the main reason behind the delay. The developer assured gamers that the game will be worth the additional 5 months of wait. id also announced a few updates, namely Invasion Mode, a gameplay mode that allows you to "invade" another player's game as a playable demon, a Nintendo Switch version that follows the other platforms, and the availability of DOOM 64 on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.

We've been covering the loot box controversy for a while on TechPowerUp now. Independently of which side of the fence you're on - that loot boxes are akin to gambling and thus unethical in some of their implementations, or just cold to the entire issue - it's likely good news for everyone that these so-called "surprise mechanics", as they've been called, will now see their odds being disclosed by console makers and publishers.

Bethesda revealed that "Wolfenstein Youngblood" will launch a day earlier for the PC platform globally, on July 25. Console platforms PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch get the game on July 26. This prioritization of the PC platform is symbolic and underscores the vast revenue-base the platform constitutes. The PC is already Ubisoft's biggest revenue source.

A separate VentureBeat report reveals that at launch, "Youngblood" won't support real-time ray-traced eye-candy, which would be added at a later date through a patch. "We're working together with NVIDIA on that, but ray tracing won't be available at launch," said executive producer Jerk Gustafsson. "Youngblood" will be one of the first non-DirectX AAA titles to implement RTX. The game uses the Vulkan 3D API, and its RTX feature-set is exclusively NVIDIA's handiwork.

This is an interesting way to go about implementing DRM in the form of Denuvo - include it in one digital store release, but don't use it on another. This is what Bethesda has apparently done with the game, releasing a non-Denuvo enabled version of the game on their Bethesda Store, whilst offering a Denuvo-inclusive version on the Steam Store - without warning users of this feature on the platform.

After considerable outcry from buyers of the game, who weren't made aware of Denuvo's inclusion, Bethesda has promptly removed the DRM suite from the Steam release, meaning that it is now at parity with the version being distributed on the Bethesda Store. Whether the non-inclusion of Denuvo on the Bethesda store was a matter of making the wrong executable available only the company knows, but it's strange to license the DRM for a single store release - and Bethesda sure didn't include it "accidentally" on the Steam version, which makes the act of not listing it a debatable one. Of course, with one version not sporting the DRM, release groups have already started distributing the game in a cracked state, which obviously invalidates any protection Denuvo might provide.

Just in time for the release of Bethesda's open-world first-person shooter Rage 2 (find our performance analysis here), AMD has released their latest installment of the Radeon Adrenalin 2019 edition drivers for their graphics cards to make the most of the game. Indeed, AMD claims an improvement in game performance of up to 16% on the Radeon VII relative to last month's 19.4.3 drivers, and this is in addition to added support for the big Windows 10 May 2019 update and instruction tracing for AMD's GPU Profiler version 1.5.X. There is a plethora of fixed issues listed as well, and the usual list of known bugs, all of which can be seen past the break. We have also hosted the drivers installer for your convenience, which can be found at the link below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.5.1

As we draw closer to the release of Rage 2, publisher Bethesda has released the official PC system requirements for the game. The original Rage pushed the boundaries of rendering technology with its Mega Texture technology (which featured some slight streaming issues as available textures were rendered visible according to the scene).

The least of the requirements are set at an Intel Core i5-3570 or an AMD Ryzen 3 1300X CPU, paired with 8 GB of RAM and the long-in-the-tooth GTX 780 3 GB or R9 280 3GB. Recommended configurations will have to pack, at least, an Intel Core i7-4770 or AMD Ryzen 5 1600X CPU with 8 GB of RAM and an Nvidia GTX 1070 8GB or AMD Vega 56 8GB graphics card. The 8 GB of RAM in the recommended settings is a welcome surprise, in that most games have now been requiring 16 GB of system RAM. Unfortunately, Bethesda didn't mention what gameplay experience can be expected from the recommended system configuration. RAGE 2 releases on May 14th.