ReSpec

Digital Trends “That’s just too dim.” It’s the same feedback I always get when reviewing OLED gaming monitors, which have made waves throughout this year. The criticism puts a damper on the otherwise jaw-dropping color and perfect contrast. The brightness measurements certainly seem to affirm that suspicion, showing they sometimes provide more than half as much brightness of a traditional LCD display. But are they really too dim? To better understand how OLED differs, I talked with Jacky Qiu, vice president and…

Digital Trends “Frames win games.” That’s been Nvidia’s marketing campaign targeted at esports players since the introduction of Nvidia Reflex. It’s a great slogan, catchy with the right amount of truth, and the perfect pairing for Nvidia’s RTX technologies. In a new era of generated frames, though, it requires a bit of context. Nvidia’s DLSS 3 generates frames on RTX 40-series graphics cards, massively improving your performance. The trade-off, however, is an increase in latency, which hasn’t been a big deal up to…

We’ve had a dancing game and musou spinoff, but now the Persona 5 cast has entered the realm of tactics with Persona 5 Tactica. The translation feels obvious when you think about it, but naturally, there have to be some changes to make it fit. For fans of the original JRPG, experimenting with the new combat system will take a little getting used to, especially relearning what skills are best. This game is quite friendly to those who are not as well-versed in the genre and allows you to try out your build and…

Jacob Roach / Digital Trends There’s something so viscerally wrong about seeing Halo on a Mac. Apple’s computers aren’t known for gaming, sure, but Halo, in particular, looks out of place. It’s Microsoft’s star child, and it’s the franchise Microsoft has hung its hat on for 22 years. But the game was originally designed for the Mac, and now, you can play it right on your MacBook. Apple’s recent Game Porting Toolkit makes all kinds of Windows games playable on the Mac — in theory. Considering the franchise’s storied…

I’m worried. This past week, AMD announced it was the “exclusive PC partner” for the upcoming Starfield, working directly with Bethesda Game Studios to optimize the game for AMD hardware and getting AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) up and running in the game (the second, much better version, to be exact). That’s not a problem. It’s a good thing. Nvidia and AMD routinely enter co-marketing arrangements with upcoming games. The company promotes the game or bundles a code with a new hardware purchase, and it…

Final Fantasy 16 tells an intriguing story that is overflowing with incredible set-piece moments and lovable characters, but the meat and potatoes of any good action RPG is its combat. Luckily, the newest entry in Square-Enix’s long-running franchise packs quite a versatile and flashy set of abilities to use while fighting main character Clive’s many foes, giving you the opportunity to fine-tune your combat style and ensure you’re prepared for anything the game throws at you. However, it’s perfectly normal to want to…

When looking at the state of PC releases in 2023, it’s easy to start pointing fingers. The game isn’t optimized (whatever that means), or the publisher rushed it out too quickly, or the graphics cards Nvidia has been selling us come with too little VRAM. But these accusations, in most cases, are half-baked and presumptuous, and although they hint at reality, they don’t tell the full story. I wanted to know what was actually going on, so I sat down with a few developers to understand the state of PC games and why…

Discovering and perfecting the build you want for your character is basically the whole point of Diablo 4, and it can take quite a lot of time and effort to nail down all of the specifics. As such, you’re likely to want to mess around with a wide variety of skills in an effort to figure out what works best for you and your endgame goals. Luckily, Diablo 4 makes this pretty easy, allowing you to respec more or less whenever you’d like and as often as you’d like – provided you’ve got the coin available to do so. Let’s…

It’s been a bad year for PC ports so far, but it’s easy to forget that PCs have never been the premier platform for game releases. There’s a storied history of terrible PC ports, and although we’re still seeing some big problems today, the games releasing now are a far cry from what we’ve seen in years past. I figured it was a good time to look back at some of the worst PC ports we’ve seen. This isn’t an exhaustive list — there are dozens of games that have released broken on PC — but these are the worst offenders.…

The death of PC gaming. That’s been the topic at hand for the past several weeks, with port after port after port arriving on PC in disastrous states. PC gaming isn’t dead, but if this trend continues, it’s hard to recommend picking up any new release on PC, at least before it receives a string of inevitable patches. I wish I could provide a single solution for the problems PC games face, but I can’t. The list is massive. But there’s one area of focus that could help the situation a lot, and it’s where consoles…