Get ready to dive deeper into the criminal underworld of a galaxy far, far away as GeForce NOW brings the first major story pack for Star Wars Outlaws to the cloud this week. The season of giving continues - GeForce NOW members can access a new free reward: a special in-game Star Wars Outlaws enhancement.

It's all part of an exciting GFN Thursday, topped with five new games joining the more than 2,000 titles supported in the GeForce NOW library, including the launch of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl and Xbox Gaming Studios fan favorites Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. And make sure not to pass this opportunity up - gamers who want to take the Performance and Ultimate memberships for a spin can do so with 25% off Day Passes, now through Friday, Nov. 22. Day Passes give access to 24 continuous hours of powerful cloud gaming.

Welcome to the first week of summer, at least in the northern hemisphere. There are no AAA releases this week, which gives you all plenty of time to focus on our Computex content instead of playing a new blockbuster game. This week's major release involves aliens, but not as you know them and they're out to kill. The rest of this week's new releases involves a DLC for a major MMORPG, a politics, religion and war game, some really old stuff, a nuclear plant meltdown cleanup and a dead dragon.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space: The Game / This week's major release / Tuesday 4 June
Killer Klowns from Outer Space: The Game is an asymmetrical multiplayer horror based on the iconic '80s film. In the battle between Killer Klowns and citizens of Crescent Cove, team up and use your wits to harvest humans or save them from the alien invasion! Crescent Cove is a sprawling arena for unique 3v7 fights between Klowns and humans—boasting various locations and a multitude of tactical opportunities for both teams. Steam link

World of Warcraft comes to the cloud this week, part of the 17 games joining the GeForce NOW library, with seven available to stream this week. Plus, it's time to get rewarded. Get a free in-game mount in Elder Scrolls Online starting today by opting into GeForce NOW's Rewards program.

Heroes Rise to the Cloud
Dive into the immersive realms of World of Warcraft, including the latest expansion Dragonflight, the nostalgic journey of World of Warcraft Classic and the recently launched World of Warcraft Cataclysm Classic. These popular, massively multiplayer, online role-playing experiences from Blizzard Entertainment immerse players in legendary battles.

Starfield is the first new universe in over 25 years from the award-winning creators behind Skyrim and Fallout 4, Bethesda Game Studios. Gamers from around the world were excited to jump into this interstellar universe rich with adventure, peril, and excitement. But before anyone hops into space, they need something critical: a spacesuit. So, Xbox has partnered up with the European Space Agency (ESA) to give Starfield fans around the world a chance to win the spacesuit of their dreams, in real life, in addition to other incredible Xbox prizes. This is a physical, wearable, one-of-a-kind garment, fabricated for the most intrepid explorers.

Whether using a provided template as a base, or pushing their imagination to the limit with any creative format of their choice, fans will be asked to provide both a visual illustration of the suit from all sides—hand-drawn, 3D-rendered, or however their vision sees fit—as well as a description of the inspiration of the suit. More specifically, Xbox, Bethesda and the ESA want to know what you would wear in outer space - how would your spacesuit reflect your personal style, individuality and vision for space travel?

We're excited to finally share The Elder Scrolls: Castles, our new mobile game from the team behind Fallout Shelter. The team has been hard at work on it for the last few years and we absolutely adore it. In Castles, you'll build your own dynasty where every day in our world is a year in the game's world. Citizens are born, they die, rulers change, and can be betrayed. This soft launch is one of the first steps as we get your feedback and make changes before it launches worldwide.

Let us know what you think and preregister at elderscrolls.bethesda.net/castles to be among the first to play! The Elder Scrolls: Castles is currently available in the Philippines and will be available to more countries in the coming months. For any questions, see our Customer Support page here.

Steam's Spring 2023 sale has kicked off, offering a bunch of PC games at discount. To celebrate its first year anniversary, Valve is also giving a 10 percent discount for the Steam Deck during the Spring sale. There are plenty of great titles on sale, and some of the popular include Forza Horizon 5, God of War, Battlefield 2042, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Total War Warhammer, Red Dead Redemption 2, and more.

There are several franchises on discount as well, including The Witcher, Battlefield, Borderlands, Fallout, Resident Evil, The Elder Scrolls, Civilization, Hitman, Doom, Far Cry, and others. As noted, the Steam Deck is also on sale with 10 percent discount. This means that if you are in the US, you can get the base version for just $359 while the 512 GB version is down to $584.

Today, noblechairs release their latest product to celebrate the 10th anniversary of one of the most popular and endearing games on the market by introducing the officially licensed noblechairs HERO - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 10th Anniversary Edition gaming chair. Designed to take distinctive elements from the game, this is a must-have for Skyrim enthusiasts. Featuring a premium all-black base, with the Seal of Akatosh on the headrest and the exquisite 10th Anniversary logo embroidered on the rear of the chair, the bolster of the chair also features words of power and dragon leather accents - but don't worry, no dragons were harmed in the making of this chair!

Winning over 250 product awards, noblechairs is the proud bearer of a long and stellar line of positive feedback from its many wonderful customers. As a company dedicated to providing a premium range of comfortable gaming chairs, all with durability and ergonomics in mind, noblechairs is a German brand that takes pride in being seen as one of the best on the market. Including award-winning features such as the adjustable backrest with an internal lumbar support mechanism, 4D armrests, and a rocking mechanism, the Skyrim 10th Anniversary Edition is fully ergonomic with additional lumbar support.

Encoding video is one of the significant tasks that modern hardware performs. Today, we have some data of AMD and NVIDIA solutions for the problem that shows how good GPU hardware encoders are. Thanks to Chips and Cheese tech media, we have information about AMD's Video Core Next (VCN) encoder found in RDNA2 GPUs and NVIDIA's NVENC (short for NVIDIA Encoder). The site managed to benchmark AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 GPUs. The AMD card features VCN 3.0, while the NVIDIA Turing card features a 6th generation NVENC design. Team red is represented by the latest work, while there exists a 7th generation of NVENC. C&C tested this because it means all that the reviewer possesses.

The metric used for video encoding was Netflix's Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) metric composed by the media giant. In addition to hardware acceleration, the site also tested software acceleration done by libx264, a software library used for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression format. The libx264 software acceleration was running on AMD Ryzen 9 3950X. Benchmark runs included streaming, recording, and transcoding in Overwatch and Elder Scrolls Online.Below, you can find benchmarks of streaming, recording, transcoding, and transcoding speed.

Some time ago, NVIDIA launched its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology to deliver AI-enhanced upscaling images to your favorite AAA titles. It uses proprietary algorithms developed by NVIDIA and relies on the computational power of Tensor cores found in GeForce graphics cards. In the early days of DLSS, NVIDIA talked about an additional technology called DLSS2X, which was supposed to be based on the same underlying techniques as DLSS, however, just to do image sharpening and not any upscaling. That technology got its official name today: Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing or DLAA shortly.

DLAA uses technology similar to DLSS, and it aims to bring NVIDIA's image-sharpening tech to video games. It aims to use the Tensor cores found in GeForce graphics cards, and provide much better visual quality, without sacrificing the performance, as it runs on dedicated cores. It is said that the technology will be offered alongside DLSS and other additional anti-aliasing technologies in in-game settings. The first game to support it is The Elder Scrolls Online, which now has it in the public beta test server, and will be available to the general public later on.

Microsoft today dropped a giant bomb on the balance of game development: the company announced the acquisition of ZeniMax Media, parent company of Bethesda Softworks, and all its related IP. The purchase, which is expected to close for a tidy $7.5 billion, will carry over all ZeniMax Media subsidiaries. This includes Bethesda (The Elder Scrolls, Fallout), id Software (DOOM), Arkane Studios (Prey, Dishonored, upcoming Deathloop), MachineGames (Wolfenstein), among others.

The deal is the costliest acquisition for Microsoft (to date) in its push to increase the number of in-house development studios (up to 23 from 15 prior to this deal). Microsoft has announced that as part of the deal, games published by ZeniMax Media and subsidiaries (and in the future, by Microsoft) will be available on its Xbox Games Pass subscription service for Xbox and PC gaming. Microsoft is acquiring some of the most iconic gaming franchises ever with this deal, including all in-development IP. It's a huge boon for the company; it remains to be seen exactly how will this evolve over the years. But one thing is for certain: Microsoft isn't slowing down on its doubling down on game development.

Chromebook owners may be eligible to receive free copies of Doom, Doom II, and The Elder Scrolls: Legends Fall of the Dark Brotherhood expansion. These are android ports of the original Doom and Doom II, not the updated 2016 game however they are still great games and will run on anything including your old Chromebook given it has Android support. The games normally cost 4.99 USD and 19.99 USD for The Elder Scrolls: Legends Fall of the Dark Brotherhood expansion, so you're getting some good value. These perks are only available for a limited time and may not be available for all Chromebooks or regions.

You can check if your Chromebook is eligible: here

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.

Attention to all of you who enjoy your games to be free of charge (and don't we all?). Bethesda has announced that The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is available for free download, today only. Yes, the game is an old one, but a free game is certainly worth the admission price, whether you've already played it and have your trusty, physical CD edition laying around (it's good for a frisbee nowadays), or just want to get your hands on something Elder Scrolls that you've never touched before.

Like any Bethesda game, there are a number of mods that you can apply here to fix bugs (ah trusty old Bethesda), improve mechanics, game systems, gameplay, and graphics, so you can always dive in a little deeper if that is your wish. You'll have to sign-up for a Bethesda account, and enter the code TES25TH-MORROWIND for the price to become a big, fat, submissive zero.

Bethesda Softworks has been betting hard on its Creation Engine to take them through multiple installments in some of the biggest AAA game releases players usually see, in the form of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. And even as the company has announced their intention to explore another new universe in the still mysterious Starfield, it seems the company only knows of one way to do so: their Creation engine. The Creation engine is in itself a heavily upgraded and revised version of Bethesda's own Gamebryo engine, which was deployed in The Elder Scrolls III - Morrowind... back in 2002. It has since been heavily upgraded, but it's looking slightly long in the tooth, at least from a visual perspective.

NVIDIA released its first GeForce software suite since Windows 10 October 2018 went official. The new GeForce 416.16 WHQL drivers add full support for the new operating system, including WDDM 2.5, and DirectX Ray-Tracing (DXR), which are essential for NVIDIA RTX to work. The drivers also add SLI profiles for a large number of games, including "Battlefield V," "Basingstroke," "Divinity: Original Sin II," "Immortal: Unchained," "Jurassic World Evolution," "Phoenix Point," and "Seven: The Days Long Gone." 3DVision profiles are added for "The Elder Scrolls: Online."

A small number of bugs are also fixed with this release. "Pascal" GPUs running "Quake HD remix" no longer experience black square glitches. Temporal AA sharp drops in performance with GeForce GTX 1060 running "Rainbow 6: Siege" has been fixed. Driver errors on TITAN Xp when waking up from S4 sleep have been fixed. Lastly, an issue found with "Turing" GPUs not exposing Netflix 4K mode to displays connected over USB-C, has been fixed. Grab the driver from the link below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 416.16 WHQL

The change-log follows.

We're pleased to announce that Bethesda Game Studios' critically-acclaimed The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is expanding its frontier and is now available on PC through SteamVR. The release includes the complete legendary open-world core game as well as its official add-ons - Dawnguard, Hearthfire and Dragonborn - all in one package for PC users.

After a successful launch onto PlayStation VR, PC players can now experience the genre-defining epic fantasy masterpiece on SteamVR on all supported devices. Skyrim VR reimagines battling cursed Draugr, exploring rugged mountainsides and hunting fearsome, ancient dragons to be more immersive than ever before. Aided by made-for-VR control schemes allowing players to move, hack and slash at foes, and cast powerful magic with real-life movements, adventurers now have the control to explore the world of Skyrim any way they choose.

Building on the success made with Doom's implementation of Vulkan, and the overall through-the-roof performance levels for that title considering its graphical quality, AMD today announced a long term strategic partnership with Bethesda, a major game publisher ("The Elder Scrolls" series, "Doom," and "Dishonored," etc.) This, according to AMD's Raja Koduri, will see Bethesda optimize its entire library of games (at least the recent ones), for AMD Ryzen 8-core processors, and the upcoming Radeon "Vega" GPU architecture. The first product of this new partnership will be the 2017 release of "Prey," the hotly anticipated survival-horror game.

We at TechPowerUp share one thing in common with the folks at MSI Gaming, our love for The Elder Scrolls Online. To celebrate the season's hottest MMO, we're coming together in bringing you the "Fight Fire with Fire" Giveaway. Just answer two questions about what you plan to do with an Intel X99 Haswell-E HEDT build, if you ever build one, and you could stand a chance to win a ravishing MSI X99S Gaming 7 motherboard, that makes up one of three parts you'll need to complete such a build - a high-performance motherboard that's armed to the teeth with every feature a serious PC gamer could ever need. To participate, simply "like" our Facebook page (if you haven't already), fill in your details (or have Facebook do it for you), and answer two questions to which there are no right answers. The winner will be randomly picked. The contest is open between today and the 29th of October, 2014. Good Hunting!Fore information, and to participate, visit this page.

AMD just released the AMD Catalyst 12.6 Beta. With the release of the Catalyst 12.6 Beta driver, AMD would also like to announce that we are moving away from our Monthly Catalyst release plan. Our goal is to ensure that every Catalyst release delivers a substantial benefit to our end users; as we have today with the release of the Catalyst 12.6a Beta. We will still continue with the Catalyst naming convention; Catalyst: Year.Month., You just won't see a new driver every single month. We are confident that this will only benefit the end user; you'll only need to upgrade to a new Catalyst driver, when it makes sense.

We would also like announce the introduction of our new AMD Issue Reporting Form. We made a number of improvements to the older Catalyst Crew Feedback form, making it more comprehensive, ensuring we get the best feedback possible. Feedback is very important in every product company's life, especially in our fast paced environment. This is not just a check-box for us - we take these reports very seriously. We will review every report posted here and investigate every issue encountered. Please use this form whenever you encounter something worth mentioning.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 12.6 BETA | AMD Catalyst Windows 8 Feature Preview Driver

Bethesda Softworks, a ZeniMax Media company, today announced The Elder Scrolls Online, an MMO in development at ZeniMax Online Studios. The Elder Scrolls Online will be the first Elder Scrolls game to allow gamers to explore the legendary Elder Scrolls world with others.

The Elder Scrolls Online is being developed for PC and Mac under the leadership of industry veteran Matt Firor, who has spent the last two decades working in online game development. Details about the game are revealed in an exclusive cover story in Game Informer's June issue, which ships to subscribers and newsstands this month.

Portal 2 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim won big at the Game Developers Choice. Bethesda's smash-hit title bagged the coveted "Game of the Year" (GOTY) title, while Portal 2 bagged three top honors, winning "Best Narrative", "Best Game Design", and "Best Audio".

The year 2011 also saw the raising of the technology bar with two new game engines, CryEngine 3 from Crytek, and Frostbite 2 from EA-DICE. The two were implemented in flagship titles, Crysis 2 and Battlefield 3, respectively; both of which were published by EA. In the end, Battlefield 3 won "Best Technology". "Best Visual Arts", however, went to Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception.A list of top honors follows.

Welcome to the TechPowerUp 2011 PC technology Christmas special. We hope that you will enjoy reading it while tucking into your turkey, Christmas presents and a little too much wine... In this article, we go through the technology of 2011 that has had the most significance, the most impact and was generally the most talked about. It's not necessarily the best tech of 2011 which is the most significant though, since lemons can be just as significant as the ground-breakers in how they fail to deliver - and the backlash that goes with it.

January: Intel Sandy Bridge i5 & i7

Released on January 9th, the new Intel Core i5 & i7 processors were based on Intel's second generation Core architecture built on a 32 nm production process (HEXUS review). They included an IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor) physically on the same piece of silicon along with HyperThreading. These new dual and quad core processors soundly beat all previous generations of Intel processors in terms of processing performance, heat, power use, features and left AMD in the dust. Therefore, Intel badly needed some competition from AMD and unless you have been living under a rock, you will know how that turned out in October with the launch of Bulldozer. Sandy Bridge was a sound win and is generally considered to be the only architecture worth considering at this point. The i5-2500K is currently at the sweet spot of price/performance. It comes at a stock speed of 3.3 GHz, but typically overclocks to an amazing 4.5 - 5 GHz with a decent air cooler and without too much difficulty in getting there. Models in the budget i3 range were released at various times later. See this Wikipedia article for details.

AMD published the third performance driver based on Catalyst 11.11, the Catalyst 11.11c. The driver addresses some glaring issues ahead of the upcoming Catalyst WHQL monthly update. The new performance driver addresses the following issue:

Elder Scrolls Skyrim

• Delivers AMD CrossfireX performance scaling for the AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series

Apart from the applied changes, the new Catalyst 11.11c includes all the changes brought about by previous Catalyst 11.11 performance drivers.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 11.11c Performance Driver for Windows 7 and Vista | Windows XP

The latest beta drivers and the first in the 290 series have been released by NVIDIA today, supporting all graphics cards since the venerable 6-series. Their main new feature are official support for enabling ambient occlusion settings in the control panel separately for specific games and enabling NVIDIA Surround on the new X79 SLI-certified motherboards. Ambient occlusion (AO) is settable for uber-popular games The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. So, what does AO do? We'll let Andrew Burns of NVIDIA explain:

If you're unfamiliar with Ambient Occlusion, it is most easily described as a way to make in-game shadowing more realistic, and therefore better.

What he doesn't say of course, is how it kills your frame rate, especially on lower end hardware. Anyway, there's all the usual goodies in this release: 3D Vision game profiles for games such as MW3, Diablo 3 & LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 (yes really). There's a HD audio update and nine fixes too, including one for random flickering of the Windows boot logo as it's loading or fading away and a fix for the mouse cursor flickering and shaking in games such as Crysis 2 & Deus Ex when SLI is enabled when using 3DTV Play. The NVIDIA product release page is here and they have a snazzy-looking driver selector here. The release notes follow.

AMD rolled out its second Catalyst performance driver update in a week, with the Catalyst 11.11b. It follows Catalyst 11.11a, which was released earlier this week. A performance driver update is what AMD used to call "Hotfixes", they are updates for recently-released WHQL-signed drivers, featuring some performance improvements fresh from the Catalyst developer team. In includes all the changes 11.11a brings to the table, plus the ones listed below:
Elder Scrolls Skyrim

• New in Catalyst 11.11b: Delivers AMD CrossFire performance scaling for AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series
  o AMD Radeon HD 5000 CrossFire support will be supported soon in an updated driver

Assassin's Creed: Revelations

• New in Catalyst 11.11b: Delivers AMD CrossFire performance scaling

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 11.11b Performance Driver for Windows 7 and Vista | Windows XP