Today, SteelSeries is proud to announce its official partnership with leading battle royale game, PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS (PUBG). With the announcement of the partnership, SteelSeries is announcing a PUBG QcK+ mousepad, with additional PUBG-branded peripherals and accessories coming later this summer. Today, SteelSeries and PUBG will also kick off the one-year Anniversary Celebration with a global campaign, giving away tons of SteelSeries gear as well as PUBG swag, codes and more.

"This partnership signals the coming of incredible products, meaningful integrations along with creative activities among the PUBG influencer and streamer communities," said SteelSeries CEO, Ehtisham Rabbani. "Together our brands are creating an opportunity for the battle royal community to connect their PUBG obsession with premium gear that is both innovative and designed for competitive esports."

After being crowned as Steam's third best-selling game ever, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) is on its way to conquer the mobile world. Developed by LightSpeed & Quantum Studio and published by Chinese tech giant Tencent, PUBG Mobile has been soft launched in Canada. The game is now available for download at the Google Play Store. PUBG Mobile stays true to the PC version. It was developed on the Unreal Engine 4 and supports features that include 7.1 surround sound and in-game voice chat. For the time being, only the original Erangel map is in the mobile version. The minimum requirements consist of a smartphone with Android 5.1.1 and 2 GB of RAM. Although there is no mention of a minimum processor requirement, the developer states that the game is supported on more than 500 Android devices.

NVIDIA today released the latest version of their Game Ready driver suite, which aims to bring users' systems up to scratch towards playing the latest games with as much performance and stability as possible. The new 391.01 version of NVIDIA's driver suite brings GameReady improvements that pave the way towards Final Fantasy XV - Windows Edition's release. This driver release packs a bigger punch than just Final Fantasy XV, though; it's also a Game Ready driver release for the upcoming Warhammer: Vermintide 2, and for the upcoming World of Tanks' graphics engine upgrade, which will bring tons of graphics features, updates and improvements to the base World of Tanks experience.

On a second, still important note, this driver release also packs performance improvements for the majority of NVIDIA's series 10 graphics cards in Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. These performance improvements range between the 3% and 7%. For a list of fixed and outstanding issues, as well as trailers for the most relevant additions to this driver release, look after the break. As always, you can download these drivers right here on TPU. Just follow the link below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 391.01 Game Ready Drivers

AMD today released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition. Version 18.2.2 Beta introduces much welcome performance uplifts for Player Unknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG), with up to 5 percent gains over 17.12.1 at 1440p, and up to 7 percent gains over it at 1080p. It also includes optimization for "Kingdom Come: Deliverance" and "Fortnite." You can expect up to 3 percent performance uplift at 1440p, and up to 4 percent at 1080p with "Kingdom Come: Deliverance," and up to 3 percent at 1440 and up to 6 percent at 1080p with "Fortnite." Grab the driver from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.2.2 Beta

Colorful Technology Company Limited, professional manufacturer of graphics cards, motherboards and high-performance storage solutions announces that its line-up of graphics cards are highly recommended for the worldwide sensation game PUBG or PlayerUnknown's BattleGrounds. With almost 3 million concurrent active players at any given time, it has become a must for almost any PC to be able to play PUBG. COLORFUL's history has been one created by its fans and users and the overwhelming demand for PUBG has left gamers asking if their graphics card can play PUBG in Ultra. COLORFUL has always stood by its commitment to gamers in delivering high-quality, high-performance products that meets their needs.

The chart below shows the performance of COLORFUL graphics cards in PUBG demonstrating that even in Ultra settings, COLORFUL VGAs are capable of delivering incredible performance even from the value segment all the way to the extreme enthusiast segment.

Sapphire quietly introduced a slightly bolstered Radeon RX 550 graphics card that's based on the "Polaris 21" silicon, rather than the Polaris 20 "Lexa" silicon, called simply the Pulse Radeon RX 550 2GD5/4GD5 (model: 11268-16 for 2 GB and 11268-15 for 4 GB). Consumers should pay attention to the model number. "Polaris 21" is the same chip AMD bases the RX 560 on. This particular card has 10 out of 16 compute units physically present on the chip, which translates to 640 stream processors, higher than the 512 stream processors the RX 550 is originally endowed with. Other vital specs include 40 TMUs, and 2 GB or 4 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 6.00 GHz, over a 128-bit wide memory interface (96 GB/s memory bandwidth). The GPU is clocked at 1071 MHz. The card relies on the PCI-Express slot for power, its display outputs include one each of DVI, HDMI 2.0, and DisplayPort 1.4. Sapphire could be going after the sweltering PUBG crowd.

One thing that phenomenon games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds can boast of is an extraordinary number of active players at any given time (there's been in excess of 3 million active players at one point in time already). This is mostly due to the multiplayer, competitive nature of the game; and where there's competition, there's ways (and ways) of trying to trump it. In a blog post, PUBG developers have taken an open stance on the issue of cheaters, which continues to be one of the most harrowing plagues in PUBG. And the results are in: PUBG has detected "over 100,000 instances of the new pattern related to use of cheat and now we have confirmed that it was clearly an attempt of compromising our game." And for those, players, there's only one solution: "these players will be permanently banned in a single wave."

That more players will be banned than many games have players at any one point in their longevity is already impressive enough. However, PUBG's dedication to maintain its game in a fun, fair state has become a torch of sorts for the company: "We will continue to check the data logs like this even if it means the anti-cheat team has to filter through hundreds of billions of data logs manually. In addition, we are looking into adopting a new solution to detect and ban more cheaters and we have been continuously strengthening our security systems. We have also liaised with investigative authorities in some countries to take legal actions against developers and distributors of cheats. We are determined to take strong measures against them going forward." Et tu, cheaters? Ready to feel the banhammer of righteousness?

AMD late Thursday released Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.1.1 Beta drivers to the public. Bearing the same version numbering as the early-January 18.1.1 Alpha release, these drivers have a more detailed change-log, which includes the game crash fix for DirectX 9 games; freezing experienced in DRM-protected video playback, a stability issue affecting Windows 10 "Movies & TV" app, color corruption on Radeon Overlay when running multiple game and 3D applications, PUBG menu flickering in multi-GPU systems, and more. Grab the drivers from the link below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.1.1 Beta

The complete change-log follows.

Varmilo, a renowned Chinese keyboard manufacturer, is adding a PUBG-inspired keyboard to their already exotic lineup. The new Chicken Dinner mechanical keyboard certainly upholds the company's reputation for uniqueness. It features a distinctive multi-colored theme and high-quality dye-sublimated PBT keycaps. And just to put the icing on the cake, Varmilo replaced the number keys and some of the function keys with the corresponding PUBG in-game key bindings. The spacebar even carries the iconic "WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER!" phrase. It's safe to say that the Chicken Dinner mechanical keyboard is fit for all tastes. Consumers who prefer compactness can opt for the tenkeyless model (VA87M) and those who need the number pad can grab the full-size model (VA108M). The wide selection of switches includes the Cherry MX Red, Blue, Brown, and Silver.

Minkonet, a prominent Seoul-based gaming technology company, today announced its partnership with PUBG Corp. to deliver 3D replay functionality in the online gaming phenomenon, "PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS" (PUBG). The robust 360-degree data capture technology powers the 3D Replay and Killcam features that will debut in PUBG's upcoming PC 1.0 release.

"Building replay systems for battle royale, open world and massively multiplayer online games that typically feature huge maps and many objects interacting in real time presents many technical challenges," said Peter Kim, co-founder and CEO of Minkonet. "We know expectations from the community are high and our team worked side-by-side with the PUBG developers to design and deliver a never-before-seen, immersive replay experience that is sure to deliver countless hours of 'wow-factor' moments and shareable content."

The PUBG Development and Community Team has shared the name of the game's upcoming desert map along with some additional details on its regions. The map is called Miramar, and according to the developers, it deviates a lot from the existing Erangel map in terms of terrain and overall setting. Miramar is located in a harsh desert environment populated by different urban areas. Therefore, players are encouraged to develop new tactics to get the upper-hand on their opponents. The PUBG team also revealed some of the more noteworthy landmarks that are located in Miramar. The map will be available with the 1.0 update.

Player Unknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) is 2017's unexpected gaming success. The hero-arena shooter sold 20 million copies, earning its developer Bluehole an impressive $600 million in sales. Earlier this week, PUBG achieved the rare feat of the highest number of live gaming sessions, with 2.5 million concurrent players. That's 2.5 million people playing the game online at the same time.

This sets the record for most concurrent players for Steam, the DRM service distributing PUBG. Adding to that, PUBG is a PC-exclusive, with ports of the game to consoles only hitting the shelves in December. The Xbox One version will be released on December 12. The game is such a big commercial success that its developer Bluehole reincorporated itself as PUBG Corp.

Steam's October survey has brought with it some interesting tidbits and reversals regarding the state of the world's OS shares. The latest such survey from the company shows Windows 10 lose its crown as the most popular OS for gamers, shadowed by a resurgence of Windows 7. Microsoft may be looking for increased Windows 10 market share throughout the world, but there's one country that has been the most troubling for the company's efforts: China. Remember that Microsoft had to introduce its own China Government edition of Windows 10 to the Chinese government, or otherwise risk the country not to transition to its new OS. However, it seems that that fact has led Chinese people's trust in the Microsoft OS to decrease even more; and absent of access to the China Government edition for regular customers, they're simply choosing to stay within the confines of Windows 7.

All of this seems pretty academic, so let's get some numbers here: Windows 10 shed 17.38% points in October, down to a 28.6 percent share, with the 64-bit version accounting for 28.23% of that share. At the same time, Windows 7 has gained 21.47% points in the same month, climbing to 65.46% of share (63.60 percent for the 64-bit build, and 1.86 percent for the 32-bit edition). Where's the connection to Chinese users here though? Well, take a look at the Steam OS language stats for the same month: simplified Chinese rose by 26.83% up to 56.37%, against a decrease in practically all other languages, and a very considerable 13.4% drop in English.

Earlier this year, Bluehole confirmed their partnership with Microsoft to bring the popular PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) title to the Xbox One console. However, their relationship didn't end there. During a recent Microsoft quarterly earnings conference call, the company's CEO Satya Nadella stated the following:

"Gaming pushes the boundaries of hardware and software innovation, with some of the most CPU and GPU-intensive applications and content, giving us a huge opportunity in the cloud. As one example, PUBG Corp., with the hit game PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, is not only partnering to make Xbox the exclusive console at launch, but is also running on Azure."

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) is a game that has been in the limelight mainly for the unexpected success it achieved in the Steam platform, passing unexpected milestones in the sales department (around 10 million copies sold) and in maximum concurrent players (1,645,460). However, the game has also seen its fair share of problems due to technical or balancing reasons. If there is one circumstance of public outcry that could have been avoided, though, it's the latest: Chinese players have review-bombed PUBG due to the addition of in-game ads. On which we had a more in-depth editorial sometime ago, if you want to take a look.

Review bombing isn't new, and started even before the latest high-profile event of the sort, around Campo Santo's Firewatch. The in-game ads are only present in loading screens, and point towards a third-party VPN service, which promises better internet connections to thousands of Chinese players when connecting to non-asian servers. For now, the ads seem to be limited to the Chinese crowd; there's a chance these ads could expand to other, non-China based players, although that is looking increasingly likely, considering the overall response from the affected portion of PUBG's player-base - the game now counts with more than 26 thousand negative reviews, with the vast majority of those hitting the game since September 29th (not exclusively due to the in-game ads, but those are the most pervasive argument in the reviews.)