OptiScaler is a community-driven project that seeks to bring the benefits of upscaling and frame-generation across brands of GPUs, so gamers don't miss out on playability if the game doesn't feature the upscaler/frame-gen tech provided by their GPU vendor. The community successfully modded AMD FSR 4.1.2 to work on Intel Arc GPUs, leveraging the Intel XMX cores (Xe Math Extensions). Current implementations of FSR on Arc relies on a fallback DP4a path that offers significantly lower performance benefit.

DarkerThanLpDark on Reddit put FSR 4.1.2 Lite on Arc B580 to the test in "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33," comparing its performance with the game's native XeSS implementation, and FSR's standard DP4a implementation on Arc GPUs. The latest OptiScaler mod was found offering almost the same levels of performance as XeSS (SR). FSR 4.1.2 Lite logged an upscaling time of 0.59 ms compared to 0.58 ms of XeSS (SR).

There's an ever-growing list of games that have received notable backlash for the use of AI-generated placeholder art in games, from Pearl Abyss's Crimson Desert to The Alters, and even the award-winning Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. When the wildly popular Slay the Spire 2 launched to Early Access earlier in 2026, it was littered with roughly scrawled placeholder art. Mega Crit co-founder, Casey Yano recently explained the decision to shirk AI art in favor of the scribbles in a recent interview with GameSpot, and it mostly seems to come down to both communicating to the players that the game is in an early access state and making it obvious what the cards in the deck-builder do. He argues that generative AI also removes authorial intent, so some of the intended communication would be lost if the studio used generative AI art instead of the hastily scrawled concept sketches.

Yano explains that "If we use art that looks nearly complete, then people would think that that's going to be the final art. It has to look like shit. It's important that it looks like shit." He notes that part of that communication of the game's incomplete state is self-preservation, because "otherwise people would judge the game as if it's a 1.0, fully developed video game." He also notes that the art helps avoid confusion among both players and other artists: "Prioritization was mostly about making sure that our players have an emotional connection to the content and also recognize what content is what," he continues to say "when you draw placeholder art, there's a very high chance that when we pass it on to our artists...so I do want the [placeholder] art to be kind of like a framework, especially-especially-the art that's used in the timeline. They're the narrative beats, and I want to make sure that those kinds of compositions and colors and details [are] communicated through those drawings."

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 made waves when it launched in early 2025, going on to earn numerous Game of the Year awards later on in the year. Now, in a recent announcement, Sandfall Interactive has officially announced that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has sold over 8 million copies since it launched, which is an impressive milestone for a relatively small indie studio, especially for a genre that generally appeals to a smaller subset of the overall gaming audience.

This is yet another indication of the comeback of original single-player games that has been ongoing in the last few years, with other single-player games, like Crimson Desert and Pragmata also hitting it big in the first half of 2026. Sandfall Interactive has also announced a new update for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 that adds fun new cosmetics in celebration of the milestone and of the game's one-year anniversary.

It appears as though the divide between game developers jumping head-first into generative AI and those who oppose it is growing yet again. While brands like EA, Ubisoft, and Xbox are leaning further into the tech, several smaller and indie studios have recently gone on the record to state their displeasure with generative AI and its use in games. In a recent turn Larian Studios, of Baldur's Gate fame, has announced that it will no longer be relying on generative AI for concept art or in-game assets for its upcoming Divinity game. The studio's CEO, however, clarified in a Reddit AMA that he still sees some potential use for AI in optimizing workflows and trying to "improve the speed with which we can try things out."

The development team that worked on Bandai Namco's Code Vein 2 also confirmed in an interview with PCGamesN that there would be no generative AI in Code Vein 2, citing cohesiveness as part of the justification for avoiding the tech. The game's producer, Keita Iizuka, also commented that the team is "creating a very original world" and because they "value art style" and the aesthetic of the game. This extends to publishers, too. In a recent interview with Kotaku, Tim Bender, CEO of Hooded Horse, the publisher behind games like Manor Lords and Endless Legend 2, has officially banned AI from the company as a policy. The CEO said "It is now written into our contracts if we're publishing the game, 'no f**king AI assets.'" Bender also touched on using generative AI in early development or to generate placeholder art, expressing concern that developers could easily fall into the same trap as Sandbox Interactive did with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which ultimately resulted in the game being stripped of its Indie Game Awards Game of the Year award.

The Indie Game Awards has previously taken a stance against the use of generative AI, confirming that games that used generative AI during the development process are not eligible for consideration for any awards. Now, it has upheld that stance, with a new announcement from the IGA's Nomination Committee officially retracting Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's Game of the Year and Debut Game awards after Sandfall Interactive admitted to using generative AI during the production of the game. This is in spite of Sandbox Interactive previously confirming during the deliberation process that it had not used generative AI in the game. The studio later admitted to using generative AI during the development process—and accidentally shipping AI assets at launch—which goes against The Indie Game Awards's stance on the controversial technology.

The Indie Game Awards has instead awarded the Best Debut Game award to Sorry We're Closed, a story-driven survival horror game that mixes top-down navigation and exploration with arcade-style first-person shooting. Meanwhile, the 2025 Game of the Year award was awarded to Blue Prince, a "strategy puzzle adventure" roguelite game. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 still has the multiple awards that it won during the 2025 The Game Awards, although those awards have also been called into question by the gaming community because of the game's budget and its large workforce, which some argue should disqualify it from indie status. An extended statement about the IGA retractions follows.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, made by the independent French video game developer Sandfall Interactive, is the big winner at The Game Awards 2025 in Los Angeles, taking home the coveted "Game of the Year" award, as well as the "Best Game Direction" and "Best Narrative" awards. In case you missed it, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was nominated in a total of twelve categories. Launched in April, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 got some of the best reviews and has sold over 5 million units worldwide.

To celebrate the win, Sandfall Interactive released the Thank You update trailer, as well as the new free game update, bringing new content with a new playable environment, new music tracks, new boss battles in the Endless Tower, new Luminas and Weapons, official Photo Mode, new localizations, new quality of life and performance improvements across all platforms, including certification for Steam Deck and ROG Xbox Ally handhelds, as well as the official AMD FSR 4 Redstone support.

Hunters, saddle up - adventure awaits in the cloud. Journey into the world of Monster Hunter Stories as Capcom's acclaimed role-playing classics join GeForce NOW. Monster Hunter Stories and Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin are soaring into the cloud this week, bringing colorful worlds, charming companions and turn-based monster battles across devices. They lead seven new games joining the cloud this week, on top of an ARC Raiders "Electrician Backpack: Emerald Wave Variant" reward for Ultimate members who want to drop into battle in style.

It's also been a big year for games, and this year's major gaming awards nominees show just how strong gaming is right now - with many of those fan-favorite titles playable on GeForce NOW, no downloads required. Look for the "The Game Awards" row in the GeForce NOW app to dive in instantly.

Fresh from sweeping the Golden Joysticks and poised to do the same at The Game Awards, Sandfall Interactive's phenomenal debut RPG is one of the most buzzed-about releases of the year, so it should surprise no one when we announce that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the biggest new third-party game launch on Xbox Game Pass of 2025. That's based on the number of unique users in the first 30 days of its availability, which means a huge number of Xbox players joined Maelle, Gustave, Esquie, and the gang on their journey right from the beginning.

Sandfall Interactive creative director Guillaume Broche told us how grateful he is for all that love: "This year has been so far beyond what any of us could have imagined, and it's down to how passionate and supportive our fans have been to make that a reality. It's really nerve-wracking to be a new studio releasing our first game, but the support of everyone has really made everything feel like a dream."

Valve has officially opened the nomination process for the Steam Awards 2025. The annual game awards ceremony will be held on January 3, 2026, but nominations will close on December 1, after which voting will commence to decide the winner. As with previous years, there are several categories to nominate games in, totaling 11 for this year: Game of the Year, VR Game of the Year, Labor of Love, Best Game on Steam Deck, Better with Friends, Outstanding Visual Style, Most Innovative Gameplay, Best Game You Suck At, Best Stoundtrack, Outstanding Story-Rich Game, and Sit Back and Relax.

The popular nominees for Game of the Year include some repeat visitors from The Game Awards, like Split Fiction and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but there are also some interesting nominees, like Peak and RV There Yet? Dispatch also makes repeat appearances in the frequent nominees list, as do F1 26 and Marvel Rivals. Although there are some similarities between the recently revealed list of nominees for The Game Awards, the popular nominees featured on the Steam Awards page appear to be quite different to those that appeared in the other yearly game show.

The Game Awards has officially announced the full line-up for the 2025 event, and it looks as though the judges have had a rough time of it, thanks to just how many hotly anticipated games launched in 2025—and matching the hype, no less—alongside some underdogs that surprised fans of various genres. The Game Awards 2025 will once again be hosted by Geoff Keighley on December 11, 2025 at 17:30 PST (01:30 UTC). Some of the stand-out nominees include Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Hades II, and Hollow Knight Silksong, all of which garnered massive amounts of attention at and since launch, although there are also a handful of interesting nominees, like the fresh new fighter from the creators of League of Legends, 2XKO, which has hardly left beta. The Game of the Year nominees for 2025 are Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Donkey Kong Bananza, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Hades II, and Hollow Knight: Silksong.

While The Game Awards is primarily an awards show, it's not uncommon to see developers and publishers show off their upcoming games. Previously, we saw trailers for games like The Witcher IV, The Outer Worlds 2, and Borderlands 4 release during The Game Awards events. The Game Awards nominees announcement has not been without drama, either. The awards show came under fire online in a handful of posts on social media because of the nomination of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as an indie game when, in reality, it had a significantly higher budget and many more artists and developers working on it than many of its competitors.

GeForce NOW Blackwell RTX 5080-class SuperPODs are now rolling out, unlocking a new level of ultra high-performance, cinematic cloud gaming. GeForce NOW Ultimate members will see GeForce RTX 5080 performance arriving to a server near them, enabling even richer experiences in blockbuster titles like DUNE: Awakening, Borderlands 4, Hell Is Us, Dying Light: The Beast, Cronos: The New Dawn, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and more. They all come with breathtaking graphics and lowest-latency gameplay, thanks to NVIDIA DLSS 4 technology and next-generation AI features. Experience the new Cinematic-Quality Streaming mode for stunning color and fidelity across the latest devices.

The new Install-to-Play feature is expanding the cloud library to nearly 4,500 games for Ultimate and Performance members. This week kicks it off with three new games, including the launch of Borderlands 4. GeForce NOW is the ultimate way to play the Borderlands franchise's latest entry - free with the purchase of a new 12-month Ultimate membership bundle. Make sure to follow along on GFN Thursdays for server updates.

More than 800 games and applications feature RTX technologies, and each week new games integrating NVIDIA DLSS, NVIDIA Reflex, and advanced ray-traced effects are released or announced, delivering the definitive PC experience for GeForce RTX players. Last week, DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation was available at launch in Killing Floor 3 and WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers, and was added to The First Descendant Season 3 demo. This week, DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation comes to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Dead Take, and Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma. And 7 Days to Die now features support for DLSS Super Resolution. Plus, you can check out our new EA SPORTS F1 25 video captured with immersive path-traced effects enabled and maxed out, and with performance accelerated by DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation. Read on for all the details.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Adds DLSS 4 With Multi Frame Generation
Once a year, the Paintress wakes to paint a cursed number upon her monolith and everyone of that age instantly turns to smoke and fades away. Year by year, that number ticks down. Tomorrow, she'll wake and paint "33." Join Gustave, and his fellow Expeditioners as they embark on a desperate quest to break the Paintress' cycle of death once and for all in Sandfall Interactive and Kepler Interactive's Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Retracing the steps of dozens of failed Expeditions before them, players will overcome powerful enemies and fight to save the future of their world. Set in a dreamlike world, the story unfolds as fantasy and art converge, backed by an enchanting soundtrack to create a breathtaking story unlike any other.

NVIDIA has released the newest version of its GeForce graphics driver, the GeForce 580.88 WHQL, which comes with Game Ready optimizations for Mafia: The Old Country, which includes DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, DLSS Frame Generation, DLSS Super Resolution, and NVIDIA Reflex support. The new driver also adds DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation support for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. NVIDIA also added support for 62 new G-SYNC Compatible gaming displays. The new driver also fixes some gaming and general bugs.

According to the release notes, the NVIDIA GeForce 580.88 WHQL driver fixes issues in Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered, World of Warcraft, Starcraft Remastered and several other games, including issues with Battlefield 2042, which experienced random squares and flickering artifacts and micro-stutter issues when VSYNC is enabled in Cyberpunk 2077. It also fixes issues in Blender and Cloudflare WARP, issues with GPU video memory after enabling NVIDIA Smooth Motion, and an issue where the GPU scaling option is missing from NVIDIA Control Panel/NVIDIA App when a DSC monitor is connected. The driver also fixes flickering issues during window resize with the Samsung 57-inch Odyssey Neo G9 and blank screen issues in DisplayPort 2.1 mode with HDR on the LGE 27GX790A-B. NVIDIA also announced it will continue supporting Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs with Game Ready drivers until October 2025, after which these will get quarterly security updates for the next three years. NVIDIA is also extending Windows 10 Game Ready Driver support for all GeForce RTX GPUs to October 2026

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 580.88 WHQL

Sandfall Interactive has released the newest Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Patch 1.4.0, adding Frame Generation and Low Latency Mode support for both DLSS and XeSS, as well as bringing some requested quality-of-life (QoL) additions like the Battle Retry Prompt. While the support for DLSS Frame Generation was already available for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 via a mod (behind Patreon), it is great that Sandfall Interactive has now added the official support. In addition, the new 1.4.0 update also fixes some general bugs, improves visuals, and brings some requested QoL updates.

According to the release notes, the biggest update is the Frame Generation and Low Latency Mode support for both DLSS and XeSS (on compatible GPUs), which promises smoother gameplay and lower input lag. In addition, Sandfall Interactive also added the Batter Retry Prompt, which is a new pop-up window that appears after defeat and gives you an option to quickly retry the battle. Apparently, this was one of the most requested additions. Other QoL improvements include Lumina cost display, autoplay dialogue, and separate volume sliders for different phases in the game.

GeForce NOW is supercharging Valve's Steam Deck with a new native app—delivering the high-quality GeForce RTX-powered gameplay members are used to on a portable handheld device. It's perfect to pair with the six new games available this week, including Tokyo Xtreme Racing from Japanese game developer Genki.

Stream Deck
At the CES trade show in January, GeForce NOW announced a native app for the Steam Deck, unlocking the full potential of Valve's handheld device for cloud gaming. The app is now available, and gamers can stream titles on the Steam Deck at up to 4K 60 frames per second—connected to a TV—with HDR10, NVIDIA DLSS 4 and Reflex technologies on supported titles. Plus, members can run these games at settings and performance levels that aren't possible natively on the Steam Deck. To top it off, Steam Deck users can enjoy up to 50% longer battery life when streaming from an RTX gaming rig in the cloud.

Get the controllers ready and clear the calendar—it's a jam-packed GFN Thursday. Time to revisit a timeless classic for a dose of remastered nostalgia. GeForce NOW is bringing members a surprise from Bethesda—The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is now available in the cloud. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the spellbinding turn-based role-playing game, is ready to paint its adventure across GeForce NOW for members to stream in style. Sunderfolk, from Dreamhaven's Secret Door studio, launches on GeForce NOW, following an exclusive First Look Demo for members. And get ready to crack the case with the sharpest minds in the business—Capcom's Ace Attorney Investigations Collection heads to the cloud this week, offering members the thrilling adventures of prosecutor Miles Edgeworth. Stream it all across devices, along with eight other games added to the cloud this week, including Zenless Zone Zero's latest update.

A Legendary Quest
Step back into the world of Cyrodiil in style with the award-winning The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered in the cloud. The revitalization of the iconic 2006 role-playing game offers updated visuals, gameplay and plenty of more content. Explore a meticulously recreated world, navigate story paths as diverse character archetypes and engage in an epic quest to save Tamriel from a Daedric invasion. The remaster includes all previously released expansions—Shivering Isles, Knights of the Nine and additional downloadable content—providing a comprehensive experience for new and returning fans. Rediscover the vast landscape of Cyrodiil like never before with a GeForce NOW membership and stop the forces of Oblivion from overtaking the land. Ultimate and Performance members enjoy higher resolutions and longer gaming sessions for immersive gaming anytime, anywhere.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the highly-anticipated debut by French independent studio Sandfall Interactive, and published by Kepler Interactive (Tchia, Sifu, Pacific Drive), is now available to purchase worldwide on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S (available now with Xbox Game Pass) and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store.

Featuring an original, fantasy world inspired by Belle Époque France, Expedition 33 delivers an emotional, cinematic story brought to life by an incredible voice cast of both video game and cinematic talent in both English and French, including Charlie Cox, Jennifer English, Ben Starr and Andy Serkis. Featuring innovative reactive turn-based battles and deep character build customization, players will embark on a journey across a world of wonder filled with stunning locations, secrets and challenging side content, connected by a fully navigable explorable world map.

MSI is thrilled to partner with Sandfall Interactive and Kepler Interactive for an exclusive limited-time offer! From April 24 to May 24, 2025, purchase select MSI PC Case and Power Supply and receive a FREE PC game key for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Upgrade your rig, unleash unmatched power, and dive into a battle against fate!

Unstoppable Performance, Unrivaled Efficiency!
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