When artificial general intelligence (AGI) eventually arrives, will it be our servant? Our master? Or something else altogether, maybe even something supernatural? As a routine precaution, I for one welcome whatever form our new AI creations take. But Meta maestro Mark Zuckerberg reckons his competition in the AI industry are actually suffering from what you might call a God delusion.

Speaking to YouTube channel Kallaway (via Tech Crunch), El Zuck took aim at what he sees as the competition’s overly messianic approach to AI development.

“I find it a pretty big turnoff when people in the tech industry talk about building this ‘one true AI,’. It’s almost as if they think they’re creating God or something. That’s not what we’re doing, I don’t think that’s how this plays out,” Zuckerberg said.

He also criticised what he saw as a monopolistic approach to AI development. “Some people are saying that there’s going to be the one tr…

We’ve got a lot of extraction shooter aficionados at PC Gamer, but I’ve never really been able to find one to float my boat. Then I got to check out The Forever Winter, an ambitious, improbably gloomy PvE extraction romp with heavy survival vibes and a penchant for ruthlessly murdering players—and it turned out that was exactly what I was looking for.

It hit early access yesterday, and I managed to survive a few scavenging hunts last night. I love it, but like a lot of multiplayer early access ventures, it’s still got plenty of kinks to work out. It’s sitting at a Mixed rating on Steam at the moment, largely because of performance issues. I’ve not actually had to deal with any myself, but I’m also running it on a pretty beefy rig with an RTX 4090 and an Intel i9-13900k.

One particular mechanic has also proven to be divisive, which doesn’t surprise me. A bit of background first: The Forever War is set during an apocalyptic conflict between two heavily mechanised f…

The US Department of Commerce has announced new export restrictions on a range of Nvidia GPUs, with the focus primarily on preventing shipments to China. Predictably, the list of chips acquiring export-contraband status include Nvidia AI-optimized hardware. But a gaming GPU has made the list for the first time, too. Yup, no more GeForce RTX 4090 cards for China.

Along with the RTX 4090, Nvidia’s A100, A800, H100, H800, L40, L40S GPU are all on the no-go list. Strictly speaking, this isn’t a China-only ban. The SEC filing (via Benchlife) states that the new restrictions apply to “China and Country Groups D1, D4, and D5 (including but not limited to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam, but excluding Israel).”

Moreover, the filing doesn’t amount to an automatic and outright ban. Instead, it imposes “additional licensing requirements.” Technically, licenses to sell all of the restricted Nvidia GPUs can still be sought. However, the filing clarifies that no as…

Steam’s latest hardware survey has been released. The key trends for June 2023 show that Nvidia’s RTX 40-series is struggling to gain market share, while Windows 10 remains the most popular gaming OS by far.

Let’s begin with the video card results. Mid range xx50 and xx60 cards continue to dominate the list. The GTX 1650 is the most popular with a 5.50% share followed by the RTX 3060 at 4.50% and a previous list-topper, the GTX 1060 at 4.45%. In fact you have go down a further six spots before you encounter the RTX 3070. The majority of gamers simply cannot or will not spend big dollars on high end graphics cards.

AMD’s first entry is well down the list, and it’s just integrated graphics. AMD’s highest ranked discrete GPU is the venerable RX 580 with just 1% of the overall market share.

What’s interesting is how Nvidia’s RTX 40-series has so far failed to make much of an impression, with the mobile RTX 4060 coming in 29th spot and the RTX 4070 Ti coming in 35…

Handheld gaming PCs are loved by many of us in the PC Gamer hardware office and I especially like the Asus ROG Ally. The only thing I wished it had was a bigger screen, as the 7-inch 1080p panel limits how much you can do in Windows. One creative modder has solved that problem by making a clamshell attachment for an extra touchscreen, doubling the Ally’s amount of screen space.

Using a combination of off-the-shelf parts and 3D printed items designed by herself, modder Kira Patel (via Hot Hardware) has developed an ingenious solution to the ROG Ally’s relative lack of display size. The extra screen is just a cheap portable 7-inch 1024×600 IPS panel that’s normally designed to be used with the likes of a Raspberry Pi.

The first hurdle to overcome is the fact that the Ally can only support external monitors via its USB Type-C port, whereas the little external screen uses an HDMI port. This was solved by the use of a USB-to-HDMI adaptor, that was stripped right down so that …

It feels like the internet’s already made up its mind about Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, to the degree that I can’t imagine it receiving any kind of fair response when it launches on February 2. It’s become a symbol of everything wrong with live-service games, which is a reputation I imagine Rocksteady is eager to get ahead of. 

One way that’s been happening is in Q&As on the official Suicide Squad Discord server, where developers have been answering question about things like its battle pass, seasonal content, endgame, and multiplayer. The answers have been fairly promising. For starters, the battle pass will only hand out cosmetics and premium currency rather than anything game-altering, and it won’t be banished to the Phantom Zone once a season ends.

As studio director Darius Sadeghian said, “you will be able to go back and play previous Battle Passes after a Season ends. We believe that our team has created some of the best looking cosmetic items …

Let’s say you’re in the market for a new gaming PC and your budget is between $1,600 and $2,000. You’re rightly going to have some pretty serious expectations of any PC on offer. It will need to have a modern, fast CPU that’s been paired with plenty of equally fast RAM, to ensure that it’ll cope with all of the latest games. 

Naturally, it must have a decent graphics card, too—one that supports all of the latest graphics technology and will cope with just about any rendering task you ask of it. Lastly, you’d expect to see plenty of storage, options for upgrading, and even things like cooling or lighting will need to pass muster. This ABS Stratos Ruby gaming PC ticks almost all those boxes.

Heading the specs table is the Ryzen 7 7700X CPU, with eight cores, 16 threads of Zen 4 architecture, and a boost clock of 5.4 GHz. It’s pretty light on power consumption, with a TDP of 105 W—20 W lower than equivalent Intel processors. Activate ECO mode and it’ll sip …

In an effort to stifle any public opinion that isn’t fawning or shows viewpoints the Kremlin doesn’t want the average Russian to see, the Russian government is going to try to ban virtual private networks (VPNs). According to a report from Russia’s RIA (H/T to Fudzilla), The regime wants to ban VPNs from March 1. 

As the war in Ukraine shows little sign of ending any time soon, pressure mounts inside Russia. Citizens seek access to information that doesn’t come from Putin and his sycophants. RIA refers to statements made by Russian senator Artem Sheikin as saying that Russia’s telecom regulator Roskomnadzor has been directed to block VPNs that allow access to banned material. 

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are examples of sites banned under Russia’s Extremist law, but still accessible via a VPN. 

VPN bans now appear to be the plan to combat access to these sites, but implementing a ban is easier said than done. Even China, which is fa…