Elgato, a brand of Corsair, today announced a limited-edition hardware line in collaboration with the award-winning publisher, Bethesda Softworks. The drop features four products—including a custom Stream Deck and dynamic mic—celebrating one of gaming's most beloved franchises, Fallout. It's now the second time Elgato and Bethesda have teamed up, following the release of Starfield in September 2023.

For Bethesda fans, the partnership is a chance to bring home an original Vault-Tec collectible, coinciding with the Fallout TV series debut on Prime Video. It marks a milestone for Elgato too, as the first time they've developed a custom dynamic mic (Wave DX), audio interface (Wave XLR), or boom arm (Wave Mic Arm LP). In addition to hardware, Elgato revealed a suite of digital assets, including a Pip-Boy-inspired voice modifier—offering creators new ways to express themselves online.

With Mods (short for modifications), you can tailor your gaming experience to your unique preferences. Uploaded by creators all over the world, you can pick between anything to create the city of your dreams. Along with Beach Properties, the first wave of Cities: Skylines II Modding will be available. The Beta release of Modding will initially support Map and Code mods. With the Map Editor, you can make maps with the Terraforming Tools you're used to, import hightmaps to create highly accurate depictions of your hometown, and upload your creations to Paradox Mods.

With the Code Tools, you can show off your coding skills and create Code Mods to meet your heart's desire! Future updates will improve on these tools and come to include support for Asset Mods. As we've talked about before, there will be updates to these tools that we are currently working on, and we will see some updates before the 1.0 release. We will be taking your opinion into consideration when we continue to work on the editor and are looking forward to seeing the feedback that you might have. If you're curious on what the process of Modding will look like you can already check it out on the Cities: Skylines II Wiki here.

At CES 2024 in Las Vegas, case maker InWin displayed several innovative new models for custom PC builds. The company continues its reputation for eye-catching designs with the debut of the adjustable flatpack POC One case and highly modular Mini Mod-II and Mod-III chassis. The POC One features interlocking panels for easy snap-together assembly, an advancement over the original April-launched POC line. It includes repositionable top or side handles for portable or horizontal setups. Using a mix of aluminium, other metals, and acrylic, the POC One initially comes in black/orange or blue/silver styles. Despite its minimalist flatpack form, it fits full-size components like 335 mm long triple-slot GPUs, 140 mm tall CPU coolers, and standard ATX power supplies. Three PCIe slots and an included riser allow vertical graphics card mounting.

InWin Development Inc. (InWin), a leading innovator in PC enthusiast and gaming hardware, has introduced the first ever fully modular case, the ModFree PC chassis. Fully interchangeable and expandable, it allows PC enthusiasts to freely transform the design, layout, and structure to meet their exact needs and preferences in hardware and cooling. InWin offers a Base Edition preset featuring Mod-I and Mod-II modules along with three InWin Jupiter AJ140 ARGB case fans. The Deluxe Edition preset comes with Mod-I, Mod-II, and two Mod-III modules, and four Jupiter AJ140 fans too.

ModFree: An Easy, Sustainable System
The ModFree ecosystem is designed around toolless interlocking clips that allow users to easily swap modules around. Unlike conventional chassis, ModFree uses an inverted motherboard design that allows users to showcase their hardware from the left side of the desk instead of competing for space with the mouse pad on the right. Investing in this ecosystem ensures an upgrade to add more cooling or more space is just a module away, which also helps to reduce the environmental impact considering you would no longer need to build an entire new system anytime you need to upgrade. ModFree offers a 3D interactive assembly guide with easy-to-follow demonstrations and ideas for how to use each module. Users can also experiment with designs directly in the app.

Useful Sensors, an AI-focused start-up, today launched the world's first low-cost, off-the-shelf AI module to enable intuitive, natural language interaction with electronic devices, locally and privately, with no need for an account or internet connection. The new AI-In-A-Box module can answer queries and solve problems in a way similar to well-known AI tools based on a large language model (LLM). But thanks to compression and acceleration technologies developed by Useful Sensors, the module hosts its LLM file locally, enabling its low-cost microprocessor to understand and respond instantly to spoken natural language queries or commands without reference to a data center.

Disconnected from the internet, the AI-In-A-Box module definitively eliminates user concerns about privacy, snooping, or dependence on third-party cloud services that are prevalent with conventional LLM-based AI products and services marketed by large technology companies. The AI-In-A-Box module is available to buy now at CrowdSupply, priced at $299.

First, an enormous thank you to all of you playing Starfield and your support. We are absolutely blown away by the response and all you love about the game. We're also reading all your great feedback on what you'd like to see improved or added to the game. This is a game we'll be supporting for years and years to come, so please keep all the feedback coming! Even if we don't get to your requests immediately, we'd love to do it in the future, like city maps. Our priority initially is making sure any top blocker bugs or stability issues are addressed, and adding quality-of-life features that many are asking for.

This first update is a small hotfix targeted at the few top issues were are seeing. After that, expect a regular interval of updates that have top community requested features including:

• Brightness and Contrast controls
• HDR Calibration Menu
• FOV Slider
• Nvidia DLSS Support (PC)
• 32:9 Ultrawide Monitor Support (PC)
• Eat button for food!

We are thrilled to announce that our Grapefruit GPBT keycaps are now available! Originally a limited-edition release, these keycaps were so popular that we decided to make them available to everyone.

Bursting with vibrant tones, the Grapefruit GPBT keycaps are the perfect punch of color for any desk setup. Made with super-durable PBT material, enjoy a satisfying typing experience with rich acoustics. The keycap set includes macOS F-row and modifier keys. Get your sweet set today for just $59.99.

A memory mod for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 that doubles the amount of VRAM showed some impressive performance gains, especially in the most recent games. While the mod was more complicated than earlier ones, since it required some additional PCB soldering, the one tested game shows incredible performance boost, especially in the 1%, 0.1% lows, and the average frame rate.

Modding the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 to 16 GB VRAM is not a bad idea, since NVIDIA already planned a similar card (RTX 3070 Ti 16 GB), but eventually cancelled it. With today games using more than 8 GB of VRAM, it means that some RTX 30 series graphics card can struggle with pushing playable FPS. The modder benchmarked the new Resident Evil 4 at very high settings, showing that those additional 8 GB of VRAM is the difference between stuttering and smooth gameplay.

The PC port of The Last of Us Part I has gained a lot of attention for its shoddy technical performance at launch, with a flurry of patches issued by developer Naughty Dog to calm down matters following barbed community feedback. An unofficial modification project has been ticking along behind the scenes, with team members and contributors content to tinker with the game, rather than engage in arguments about poor optimization and crashes to desktop. The Voyagers Revenge project has this week revealed footage of a first person perspective mode implemented into the Windows version of The Last of Us Part I.

The mod is still a work in progress, so demonstrations have been captured in the form of gameplay footage and uploaded to YouTube - actual playable code is not available to the public. The modders have implemented a feature that Naughty Dog had previously abandoned, with vice president Neil Druckmann confirming that the development team had experimented with a first person perspective mode in the early days of production, but they ultimately decided to drop it in favor of sticking to an over-the-shoulder viewpoint.

A Half Life 2 modder, Igor Zdrowowicz, has managed to integrate path tracing into the game - with striking results, even at an early stage in development. His project - codenamed "HL2RTX" - has been in-progress for a handful of months, and the modder has managed to integrate a ray tracing system into Valve's classic shooter (sort of) via NVIDIA's RTX Remix SDK. That package has become open source only very recently, so Zdrowowicz stated that a Portal RTX-derived binary was the tool of choice.

NVIDIA's Lightspeed Studios has already created an impressive RTX conversion of Valve's fan favorite puzzle-platform game Portal (2007), and modders have been poring over the underlying technology and update technique processes. A number of old favorites, running on past iterations of the Source Engine (DirectX 8 and 9), are getting the amateur mod community sprucing up treatment. It is posited that Zdrowowicz will have an easier time with his current conversion project, thanks to an official release of NVIDIA's RTX Remix toolkit (albeit in early access).

Gaming communities have been engaged in discussions about Half-Life: Alyx being partly playable without a VR headset for the past month or two. The team behind the NoVR modification project has, as of late week, announced that the game's story experience - from start to finish - is totally VR free. This news should satisfy many excited fans who have been anticipating Half-Life: Alyx's campaign being displayed on the small/medium screen. Previous entries in the long running Half Life series have always been two-dimensional traditional monitor affairs.

The GB_2 Development Team cheerfully introduces its latest iteration of NoVR: "This is our biggest update yet and we have no plans on slowing down! With thousands playing Half-Life: Alyx NoVR we are happy to announce our largest update yet! As the titles state the entire game can now be played from start to finish, with the Gravity Gloves fully implemented along with combine fabricators providing weapon upgrades. Also since we are now updating the final parts of the game there may be spoilers! We will do our best to not spoil anything while ensuring we communicate these late game areas have been updated along with their gameplay mechanics."