Microsoft's latest Flight Simulator 2024 just launched, and it already appears to be riddled with problems. When internally testing, we ran into some issues regarding long loading times and eventual errors without getting to the game. Additionally, many others confirmed that they were experiencing problems. Launched on 08:00 am PT on November 19, the simulator has faced widespread server infrastructure issues affecting player access. CEO of Asobo, maker of this Flight Simulator franchise, Sebastian Wloch, has released a public statement via video addressing the widespread technical issues that plagued their latest game release. According to Wloch, while pre-launch testing had successfully simulated concurrent player counts of 200,000 users, the actual launch revealed critical weaknesses in the database cache system that weren't apparent during testing.

Additionally, the negative reviews stemming from these issues have piled up. On Steam, the game currently has 2,865 reviews, only 500 of which are positive. The remaining 2,000+ are overwhelmingly negative, with many users not being satisfied with the gameplay and quality of the release. The game's infrastructure is powered by Microsoft's Azure cloud, which is also not good marketing for Microsoft as the Azure platforms should signal better infrastructure scaling and stability. While these issues should be cleared in the long run, the short-term consequences are turning the launch into a colossal failure, as gamers expected more from this release. Lastly, the alpha version of the game was notorious for the massive internet bandwidth hog, causing up to 180 Mbit/s load.

Starfield's Shattered Space DLC launched on September 30, and it was meant to address many of the base game's major issues, with a more hand-crafted feel, more intimate encounters, and a more narrative-driven gameplay experience. Instead, Steam gamers and critics alike have lambasted the expansion online for boring and underwhelming, repetitive gameplay, calling it "more Starfield," essentially repeating the story of Starfield's initial launch. At the time of writing, the Shattered Space DLC has 1,601 reviews on Steam, with only just over 34% of those reviews rating the expansion positively—placing it squarely in the "Mostly Negative" category on Steam.

Likely the biggest disappointment when it comes to Shattered Space's poor reception is that the Starfield player base actually seemed quite optimistic about the expansion, thanks to previous gameplay and interviews about the intention behind the expansion. Critically, however, Starfield developer, Bethesda, deliberately didn't send out game keys to the press for review prior to the launch of the game, so there was no real way for players to know whether they would enjoy the $29.99 expansion before buying it.

Starfield's next DLC will be called Shattered Space, and it is set to launch on 30 September 2024 at $29.99 on PC, and Xbox. However, if you're a gamer that wants to know more about what you're getting into before you spend your money, you will seemingly need to wait, since gaming media won't have access to the expansion ahead of its launch.

The news was revealed by IGN journalist Dan Stapleton in a post on Bluesky that reads: "Aw dang, I'm told no Starfield: Shattered Space review copies are going out ahead of launch. We'll have something up on it ASAP but I imagine that's gonna be a few days at least." Stapleton doesn't seem to have been told why Bethesda won't be sending out review samples, but he does note that it will make reviewing the expansion while it is relevant more challenging.

A video review has highlighted some curious internal changes on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition graphics card—Geekerwan has discovered that the board design has been "updated" to a small degree, when cross examined with the non-SUPER variant. Team Green engineers have chosen to decrease the number of phases from 13 to 11, while the memory phase count goes from 3 down to 2. HXL (@9550pro) TLDR-ed the situation on social media: "4080 Super FE vs 4080 FE: Core: -2 phase & VRAM: -1 phase." Tech experts have also noticed that the new SUPER FE's board does not have a phase near to its power connector. VideoCardz found these changes to be a little bit odd, considering that the card arrives with faster memory and a increased core count.

Geekerwan reckons that NVIDIA has implemented these internal adjustments in an effort to reduce power consumption in gaming scenarios. The official comparison table confirms this ambition—in the "Average Gaming Power" category we see the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER target 246 W, and GeForce RTX 4080 (non-SUPER) aim for 251 W. The reviewer notes that their ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 4080 SUPER GAMING sample card features the same power layout as its non-SUPER sibling. They believe that NVIDIA's Founders Edition is the only model bearing an adjusted phase tally—while Team Green's board partners have simply rolled out the previous RTX 4080 layout.

According to a VideoCardz report, NVIDIA is implementing a very last minute time shift with its GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER review program—embargo conditions have been delayed by a day to January 31, which coincides with the official retail launch day. We already know about non-specific sample units reaching reviewers a week (or more) in advance of Team Green's embargo date—thanks to various graphical benchmarks appearing prematurely on the Geekbench Browser database. VideoCardz states the Founders Edition GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER model was not received in a timely manner by a number of media outlets, thus dismissing rumors about driver issues being a main factor behind the sudden rescheduling. Hardware evaluators have been busy this month with trade event coverage, and spending analytical time with Team Green's previous batches of RTX 40 SUPER cards.

Greetings, Flameborn! What a week it's been for Enshrouded! We've actually been quite overwhelmed with the amount of support we've seen. The realm of Embervale is lost. In their greed for magical power, your ancestors unleashed a pestilence that consumed the world. Enshrouded is a game of survival, crafting, and Action RPG combat, set within a sprawling voxel-based continent. As you journey across the mountains and deserts of an open world, you are free to choose your path and shape your destiny. Ignite the Ancient power of the Flame, and piece together the fragments of a story that unfolds below the surface...After nearly choking on our celebratory drinks, we got back to work. But before we talk about what's ahead, allow us to share a couple of reviews we liked: IGN 8/10, RPG Site 8/10, and God is a Geek—they're utterly hooked!

Now onto the work part!
We've released 5 hotfixes for the game since Wednesday's release. You can find the specifics here. There are a few issues we are aware of but need more time to fix—our outstanding tasks list is here. We will be taking some much needed rest this weekend, and are coming back ready to kick some bug ass next week. You've helped us make sure Enshrouded is off to a great start. We'll be back next week for the next step of the journey! Thanks, The Keen Team.

Remnant 2 sold more than one million units in just four days across PC, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 Gearbox Publishing announced today. Gamers and media around the globe showered praise on Remnant 2 as the breakout hit of 2023. Remnant 2, the follow-up to the best-selling Remnant: From the Ashes, also more than doubled the number of concurrent players at launch, breaking its own franchise record.

"To everyone who helped us achieve this amazing milestone, thank you for your unwavering support," said David Adams of Gunfire Games. "This was a multi-year journey for us and we couldn't be happier to see fans having such a great time with a game we put our heart and soul into."

July 27th, 2023: Two weeks ago, Jagged Alliance 3 burst onto the gaming scene, captivating the hearts of thousands of players eager to embark on the mission to free Grand Chien. Haemimont Games and THQ Nordic are beaming with pride and relief as it seems we have struck the perfect chord. An impressive 86% of Steam-Reviews as of July 27th reflect the positive reception, and the game has garnered critical acclaim with an outstanding 81 on Metacritic.

We've been absolutely delighted to witness hundreds of content creators taking on the challenge of mastering the game and are overwhelmed by the positive feedback pouring in from players across various channels. We want to take a moment to express our sincere gratitude: Thank you to everyone who has already delved into the world of Jagged Alliance 3! For those who haven't yet, we're excited to announce the availability of a free playable demo. This demo will allow players to explore Ernie Island, the starting region of the game.

Rulers! We are thrilled to announce the release of Age of Wonders 4! It's time to embark on a journey through a fantastical world filled with magic, monsters, and mythical creatures. Reviews are in! Join us in celebrating the release of a brand new Age of Wonders! The newest installment in the iconic fantasy strategy game series from Triumph Studios is available now for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S.

We can't wait for you to experience the world of Age of Wonders 4 and hope you enjoy playing it as much as we enjoyed creating it. In the "Release Dev Journal" our dev team wanted to celebrate the occasion and share their excitement and gratitude with each of you. Thank you and welcome to the world of Age of Wonders 4!

The major GPU releases in 2020 are all plagued by the same problem: good product, not enough stock. This has led to a perverse situation on the market: you can't just walk into your favorite store and purchase the product you want. This is a consequence of NVIDIA and AMD going to market with tiny volumes, and extremely optimistic MSRPs which opened up the market to the phenomenon of scalping. Scalpers are individuals, or groups, who buy up whatever little volume is available, often using sophisticated online shopping bots, and resell them at exorbitant premiums on marketplaces like eBay, for profit.

This system only works because there is zero retail stock available anywhere on the planet, and whatever volume comes in, is so low that it evaporates, often before hitting retailer shelves. The only way scalping can be defeated is for manufacturers to flood the market with large volumes of product that the scalpers cannot scale their purchases up to, and possibly for crypto-currency mining to become not worth it on the latest generations of graphics cards. Until these happen, marked-up pricing is an inescapable reality for consumers.

NVIDIA's embargo on their Turing-based RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti ended Wednesday, September 19 and it appears that enthusiasts were not the only ones left wanting more from these graphics cards. In particular, Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore shared a note today (Thursday, September 20) with company clients saying "As review embargos broke for the new gaming products, performance improvements in older games is not the leap we had initially hoped for. Performance boost on older games that do not incorporate advanced features is somewhat below our initial expectations, and review recommendations are mixed given higher price points." The NVIDIA Corporation share value on the NASDAQ exchange had closed at $271.98 (USD) Wednesday and immediately tumbled down to a low of $264.10 opening today before recovering to close at $266.28, down 2.1% over the previous closure.

The Morgan Stanley report further mentioned that "We are surprised that the 2080 is only slightly better than the 1080ti, which has been available for over a year and is slightly less expensive. With higher clock speeds, higher core count, and 40% higher memory bandwidth, we had expected a bigger boost." Accordingly, the market analyst expects a slower adoption of these new GPUs as well as no expectation of "much upside" from NVIDIA's gaming business unit for the next two quarters. Despite all this, Morgan Stanley remains bullish on NVIDIA and expects a $273 price point in the long term.

Videocardz is reporting that NVIDIA has moved their NDA dates for reviews on their RTX 2080 graphics cards to be published. They cite difficulties for review websites in securing samples, delays in shipment, and even unavailable driver stacks that would allow for reviewers to conduct their jobs with the usual professionalism. Remember that the original NDA timeframe for reviews, as reported by Videocardz, was set at September 17th, which would leave reviewers from today with less than a full week to conduct their testing.

The website reports that "only a handful" of reviewers have gotten their cards already, and that reviews for NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080 have now lined up with the NDA set for the RTX 2080 Ti, on September 19th, leaving reviewers with two huge card launches and a single deadline, just before the cards' general availability on September 20th.

Metacritic has been invaded by a veritable flood of what appear to be semi-sentient robots, spamming the website with favorable Assassin's Creed Origins reviews. This isn't a common occurrence, but isn't unheard of either - there have been a number of scandals regarding fake reviews on Metacritic and other review score aggregators, with some publishers having even been brought to the center of the discussion.

The semi-sentient part derives from the fact that usernames are obviously a mashing-up of keyboard keys, and no amount of effort has been put towards hiding the fact that these are fake scores. The wording is practically the same, as sometimes even the English in these is of dubious quality. This type of actions usually hurt more a games' reception than help it, if done badly, as these reviews are. So if the idea is to improves Assassin's Creed Origins in the eyes of potential buyers, certainly the fact that these are clearly fake reviews will affect perception negatively. This reminds this editor of those Chinese review farms that were reported some time ago, where entire companies were created that devoted employees towards simply posting positive reviews for apps and programs, while being paid to do so.

Grand Theft Auto V's Steam entry has been swarmed with negative reviews following Take Two Interactive's decision to shutdown the popular modding tool OpenIV with a legal cease and desist letter. In just a weeks time, over 42,000 reviews have been published on the Grand Theft Auto V steam page, the overwhelming majority of them negative (only 13 percent were positive). This is in stark contrast to the games usual rating, which is generally positive. It appears to have had such an impact as to actually make the game's overall rating fall into steams "mixed" rating territory.

A post is making the rounds on Reddit that calls readers' attention towards the fact that ASRock is giving additional rebates to customers who purchase a qualifying motherboard on Newegg. The fact that a given ASRock motherboard rose from around 10 to upwards of 50 customer reviews in almost no time gave the first warning bell; however, is there really something to be alarmed about?

Mail-in-rebates are something of a given in US stores, and companies can choose what kind of conditions must be met towards a customer being eligible for a mail-in rebate. Sometimes, these are product-oriented. Other times, a minimum expense threshold is defined, after which the customer is entitled to a rebate. ASRock is now adding a rebate solely on the condition that a verified purchaser of one of their motherboards on Newegg comes back to the site to put up a review. A detail that makes or breaks this action: the customers are in no way encouraged to post a positive review. In no way a positive or negative review affects a customer's eligibility. Only whether or not you made a verified purchase, and came back to leave feedback. Whether that is a 1-star rating or a 5-star one doesn't affect your eligibility. I for one think that this is a sound business practice, and that more companies should be doing this, as a way to demonstrate confidence on their products, and attract customer interaction. But don't take my opinion; just give us our own. What do you think of this strategy?

I should break down the bad news first: we here at TechPowerUp won't be able to provide you with a timely, straight-from-the-oven Ryzen review. Like some other publications, our Ryzen review sample failed to arrive on time. And trust us - we did will it to do so as much as we could, risking a Stranger-Things-esque nosebleed. Alas, to no avail.

The good news is that while we won't be able to offer you our own review of AMD and Jim Kellers' latest high-performance x86 brainchild, we will still strive to bring you meaningful coverage on it. This article aims to make an overall aggregation on review consensus, benchmarks and capabilities of the newest AMD CPU. Trying to add something, we'll also try and evaluate whether AMD learned - or didn't learn - something from its Bulldozer launch fiasco, in a pure marketing perspective. This will justify the editorialized nature of this article, but only after we dive straight to the numbers. Without further ado, follow on to the numbers.

With the official launch of the AMD Dragon platform, AMD lifed whatever NDA restrictions it had over the media to publish reviews of its Phenom II X4 processor, letting proper and final reviews make to the internet. Several tech-enthusiast websites have taken the opportunity. Reviewers put the Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition to test.

The Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition is AMD's flagship desktop CPU. With four processing cores clocked at 3.00 GHz, it embeds 2 MB L2 and 6 MB of L3 cache. Based on the AM2+ socket, it supports the DDR2-1066 standard. This processor is especially overclocker friendly with its unlocked FSB multiplier and the overall positive response from the reviewers on its overclocking headroom. Here are some of the reviews at:

bit-tech | Elite Bastards | ExtremeTech | [H] Enthusiast | Hexus | HotHardware | NeoSeeker | TechReport | TweakTown | The Guru of 3D | Tom's Hardware

Previews, reviews and all kind of write-ups about the new Intel Core i7/X58 platform flooded the network this morning. I'll use this post to add all the links I can find, you can also post your comments here until the official press release statement.

[H]ard|OCP1 | [H]ard|OCP2 | TweakTown | Guru3D | Techgage | Legion Hardware | Benchmark Reviews | HotHardware | PC Perspective | TechSpot | Neoseeker | t-break | OCAU | ExtremeTech | Lost Circuits

Today NVIDIA introduced the world's fastest graphics processing unit (GPU), the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra. The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra performs an average of between 10 and 15% faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX GPU. Here is a preliminary list of NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra reviews currently on the net.

PC Perspective | Legit Reviews | bit-tech.net | [H] Enthusiast | HotHardware | Guru 3D | iXBT(Russian) | HardwareZone | HEXUS.net | AnandTech

As we reported before, the NDA for NVIDIA's latest GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics will expire on the 2nd of May. HardSpell has pulled out today the first official board pictures and real performance benchmark scores. The review confirms that the 8800 Ultra card is clocked at 612MHz core and uses 384bit/768MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 2160MHz. Follow this link and read the full article.

What is the difference between a normal hardware enthusiast and a true one? A real one is known to break world records with the help of liquid nitrogen, has a ton of spare cash to blow, and now, has enough spare time to thoroughly review 105 individual power supplies. Stephane Charpentier is the man who is responsible for that little 105 power supply review. And by little, I mean 140 pages. His work should seriously be published like a very nerdy version of Kelly Blue Book breaks records for being the longest hardware round-up ever. If you're bored out of your mind, need a new power supply, or want to appreciate Mr.Charpentier's effort, please read his 140 page review.

The article is in French, so you might want to run the individual pages through Google translator.

First things first: It's a german article I want to point out.
But don't let the unpronounceable cluster of letters fool or even hesitate you. You are looking for a comprehensive comparison of some of the best air cpu coolers like the Scythe Infinity, Thermalright Ultra 120, Zalman CNPS 9700, just to name a few? Then head on, it's only a simple click away.

You are still puzzled and prefer an english translation? Here you go! But I have to warn you, the translation is somewhat messed up...

If you haven't noticed, lots of NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTS 320MB reviews have surfaced on top tech and hardware sites. Here's a list of all the major reviewers showing results from NVIDIA's new "budget" DX10 graphics card equipped with 320MB 320bit DDR3 memory.

[H]ard|OCP | Guru3D | Legit Reviews | MadShrimps | PcPerspective | iXBT (Russian) | AnandTech