How the technology behind modern games actually works, from engines and GPUs to the innovations pushing gaming forward.
Your plan is sold in megabits per second; Steam shows megabytes. A byte is 8 bits, so a 300 Mbps line running flat out reads 37.5 MB/s — which looks like an eighth of what you pay for and is all of it. How long a 100 GB game should really take, and the five things to check, in order, when your download genuinely is slow.
From November, Game Pass Ultimate includes 15 hours of cloud play a month, Premium 10 and Essential 5 — 30, 20 and 10 minutes a day. Microsoft says 4% of subscribers are affected, and that is probably true; the question is which 4%. What changes, from Microsoft’s own pages, who it lands on, and how GeForce NOW’s 100 hours compares.
Subscription divided by $70 a game gives you a break-even of about four games a year, and it is wrong — almost nothing in these catalogues is a game you would have bought on release day. Divide by what you would actually have paid and the number roughly doubles. Plus two things the platforms say on their own pages: PlayStation Plus has no day-one tier at any price, and Game Pass Ultimate excludes Call of Duty from its day-one promise.
Every comparison is about battery, frame rate and the interface, and SteamOS wins three of the four. None of that is the decision. The decision is a short list of games whose publishers have refused Linux — Fortnite, Valorant, Apex, Siege, Call of Duty, Battlefield 6 — and whether any of them are yours. Two minutes against your library settles it; then the benchmarks matter.
The September firmware was reported as PSSR 2.0 arriving on PS5 Pro. It arrived in March — as an optional setting most owners never found. What changed last week was a default, and that turns out to be the most consequential PS5 Pro graphics decision of the year.
Disclose generative AI on Steam and expect 53% fewer first-month reviews. But the study behind that number found the penalty runs 40–60% for established studios and near zero for unknown developers. The AI label isn't a tax on using AI — it's a tax on having a reputation.
Valve shipped Intel handheld support in the SteamOS 3.8.7 beta. It covers three MSI Claw models, TDP control is incomplete, frame generation is unreliable, and AMD is still the only fully supported vendor. The Nvidia work is the part that matters.