Month: September 2024

With the US ramping up bans on sending high-performance PC parts to China—and China now returning the favour—you’d think there would be a degree of interest in smuggling high-end PC parts into the country. This is not that. This is the case of a smuggler trying to move 44 AMD Radeon RX 580 graphics cards right under everyone’s noses.

The smuggler’s plan? Walk right out the front door of the airport with boxes full of GPUs. That’s right, walk right on through nothing to declare with an innocent smile on their face and hope Chinese customs won’t sniff him out. Unfortunately for the smuggler, they did.

According to the Mydrivers report (via Tom’s Hardware), the 44 cards were intended to be refurbished and sold for profit. How much profit can you make on seven-year old, second-hand, most likely heavily used graphics cards? My guess would be ‘enough’ but I doubt it’s a massively profitable venture. The 8GB of VRAM on these cards isn’t ideal for working with AI models, either.

Getting just one RTX 4090 could be a very worthwhile trip for a smuggler these days, however. That card’s price has reportedly skyrocketed since the US has halted Nvidia from sellin…

Battlefield 2042 had some problems when it launched a couple years ago, but I said then that it was a fun game, and I say it again now: It’s fun! I feel a little less alone in thinking so lately, because it’s presently sitting at the respectable position of #13 on Steam’s list of top games by daily players, which of course doesn’t include players who own it on console or other PC stores. 

Pretty good for a game that was once being called, in polite and impolite terms, a complete disaster.

It helps that BF2042 just had a free weekend, but that free weekend is over and its daily peak is still hitting 90,000 to 100,000, the highest Steam numbers the game has seen since launch by a lot. The biggest factor here is its currently discounted price of $10, but whatever the reasons, this is the most enthusiasm I’ve seen for DICE’s latest large-scale multiplayer shooter since 2021 (if I’m not including enthusiasm for hating it).

What many thought of as the new worst Battlefield is still recognizable as the game that launched two years ago, but its peculiarities and series firsts have been hammered into more traditional shapes. More cover has been introduced to the bi…

It was way back in 2014 when ambitious multiplayer dinosaur survival game Ark: Survival Evolved entered early access on Steam. It was a complete smash. Despite issues like glitches, bugs, dismal optimization, and no small amount of behind the scenes drama, Ark became one of the most played games on Steam and would remain that way for nearly a decade.

In 2017 Ark finally left early access, and now here we are six years later in 2023 where the remaster of Ark: Survival Evolved… has just entered early access.

Time is a flat circle covered with dinosaurs.

The Unreal 5 Engine remaster is called Ark: Survival Ascended (which has already seen its own share of drama) and is surprisingly due out today. The trailer can be seen above showing off some graphically improved dinosaurs and survivors running around and blowing each other up. 

It looks nice! It’s just a little hard to get excited about because it seems like a better idea to just keep playing the original game and wait for the sequel, Ark 2, which is due out in 2024.  

How much does the Ark remaster cost? I genuinely don’t know! Despite it coming out today there’s no pricing on its Steam p…