Grab a pitchfork and fire up the tractor - the fields of GeForce NOW are about to get a whole lot greener with Farming Simulator 25. Whether looking for a time-traveling adventure, cozy games or epic action, GeForce NOW has something for everyone with over 2,000 games in its cloud library. Nine titles arrive this week, including the new 4X historical grand strategy game Ara: History Untold from Oxide Games and Xbox Game Studios.

And in this season of giving, GeForce NOW will offer members new rewards and more this month. This week, GeForce NOW is spreading cheer with a new reward for members that's sure to delight Throne and Liberty fans. Get ready to add a dash of mischief and a sprinkle of wealth to the epic adventures in the sprawling world of this massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Plus, the NVIDIA app is officially released for download this week. GeForce users can use it to access GeForce NOW to play their games with RTX performance when they're away from their gaming rigs or don't want to wait around for their games to update and patch.

As you may have seen during our latest Developer_Direct, there's no lack of passion for gaming to be found when walking the halls at Oxide Games. The studio is full of game industry veterans who would probably bleed strategy board game pieces if you were to so much as nick them on the arm. This team has been crafting in this space for decades and has no shortage of ideas on what makes a compelling strategy game experience. Now, with Ara, they're looking to carve out their place at the top table with their own take on one of the most beloved genres in PC gaming. Ara: History Untold bills itself as a grand strategy game that's working to evolve the genre of historical grand strategy. But trying to usher in the next chapter of such a well-established space is a daunting task. Where does one even start? That's easy - look at what bothers you, and go from there.

"One of the first things we did when we started (Ara) was to identify key aspects of the [grand strategy] genre space that have always annoyed us, like areas we could improve upon—one of those is optimal strategy," explains Oxide Games Design Director Michelle Menard. "Something that plagues the genre space is that once you've kind of figured out how to win or how the game works, you've mastered it. You stop playing because you solved the problem; it was a binary problem because one of the key drivers of something like a tech tree is a static, solvable problem."

You're about to get an exciting look at some of the incredible games ahead with Xbox, as we present a new edition of Developer_Direct. On Thursday, January 18 at 12pm PT / 3pm ET / 8pm UK, fans will get an inside look at a selection of highly anticipated games coming to Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Game Pass. Shortly after, ZeniMax Online Studios will host The Elder Scrolls Online 2024 Global Reveal at 1pm PT / 4pm ET / 9pm UK to preview 2024's biggest update.

Presented by the game creators themselves, Developer_Direct offers an in-depth look at upcoming titles, how they're being created, and who's creating them. We'll visit MachineGames in Sweden to check in on their Indiana Jones game, swing by Obsidian's Irvine offices to see more from Avowed, head to Oxide Games' Maryland home to learn about Ara: History Untold, and take a trip to Cambridge, England to see Senua's Saga: Hellblade II from Ninja Theory. Please note that while this show won't have updates on games from Activision Blizzard, you can look forward to news from those teams later this year.

AMD and Oxide Games today announced a multi-year partnership to co-develop graphics technologies for the growing cloud gaming market. By combining leadership gaming hardware and graphics expertise from AMD with Oxide's proven development capabilities and innovative Nitrous game engine, the companies plan to create a robust set of tools and technologies for cloud rendering designed from the ground up to embrace the real-time demands of cloud-based gaming.

"At AMD, we pride ourselves on our ability to push the boundaries of what technology can do so it elevates the gaming experience," said Scott Herkelman, corporate vice president and general manager, Graphics Business Unit, AMD. "Oxide shares this passion and is an ideal partner for us as we expand the way gamers play, while delivering the quality experience they demand."

Ashes of the Singularity is one of those games that has always been in the forefront of the latest graphics technologies. One of the first games to support Microsoft's DX12 and async compute, and in receiving a Ryzen-optimized performance patch, the game is routinely used as a benchmark tool not only for graphics solutions, but also CPU benchmarks.

Now, Oxide Games has announced Ashes of The Singularity will feature support for the Vulkan renderer, which will be welcome news for users who don't want to upgrade to Windows 10, but don't want to live without low-level performance optimization in their games. The new Vulkan render path is still a beta feature, which you must enable through your Steam account. Just right click Ashes of the Singularity on your Steam library, hit "Properties", and activate the 2.4 opt-in in the beta features tab.

Some outlets are reporting that Stardock's Ashes of the Singularity is about to receive the much-referred-to patch that allows for improved performance on AMD's Ryzen line of processors. If you remember, rivers of ink flowed regarding AMD's Ryzen performance in gaming, with its monstrous, high-performance 8-core, 16-threaded design sometimes delivering performance below expectations. At the time, AMD clarified how Ryzen is a distinctive CPU architecture, similar yet fundamentally different from Intel's x86 implementation, promising upcoming patches from game developers that would allow Ryzen's architecture to truly deliver.

After Creative Assembly and Oxide Games vouched to improve Ryzen support, Oxide seems to be the first developer with a patch available (from version 25624 to 26118) that improves performance by up to 30%. Reportedly, it took the developers around 400 work-hours to improve the game code in respect to its execution on AMD hardware.