KDE and Gnome are by far two of the most popular Linux desktop environments, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages that may sway users in either direction. Gnome is less customizable but widely recommended to Linux beginners, while KDE goes all-in on GUI-based customization and a smorgasbord of features. However, recent testing by Phoronix reveals that there may be an objectively better desktop environment for gaming on Linux.

In a comparison between Gnome 50.3 (technically Gnome Shell 50.3), KDE Plasma 6.7.2, and Xfce 4.2.0, Gnome surprisingly held a small, but measurable lead over KDE in the performance division. Both Gnome and KDE were running on the Wayland display protocol, while Xfce was running on X11, and that difference alone led to Xfce falling far behind the Wayland alternatives, especially in Vulkan rendering applications. The testing was all conducted on CachyOS and with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 GPU graphics, and each desktop was tested with default configurations.

In May, CD Projekt Red announced the Songs of the Past DLC for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as a last hurrah as Geralt before the launch of The Witcher 4, although it has played its cards close to its chest. Now, it has been revealed by the official The Witcher account on X that players will be able to "catch a glimpse of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Songs of the Past" at Gamescom opening night.

It's unclear how much will be revealed about the upcoming DLC, but it seems likely that we will simply get some gameplay footage or a new trailer, since previous official announcements have slated 2027 as the launch date for the DLC. The studio will reveal whatever new information it has planned about the DLC at Gamescom, on August 25 at 18:00 UTC. It seems likely that we will get a proper release date in addition to whatever preview the studio is planning on showing off.

Wallhack, one of the niche gaming peripherals companies that helped push glass mousepads into the mainstream—as much as they are in the mainstream, as it were—has apparently been working on a new product category: gaming peripherals. Wallhack's social media pages have recently been chock-full of teasers for an upcoming product, with confirmation coming on July 17 that the company has been working on a wireless gaming mouse. There has also been a teaser for an upcoming 65% keyboard with a knob, but not much else has been revealed about that product other than it will have a metal chassis with a polished finish.

On July 20, Wallhack posted a longer video teaser, seemingly revealing clues about the upcoming mouse's features and design. The M-001, as it will apparently be named, will seemingly feature a standard potato shape with an open bottom shell and six spots for skates along the edges. Based on what the brand has shown off so far, the M-001 will also have a unique base station that sort of resembles an analogue camera, and it may have a removable Li-ion battery, like the somewhat recent Glorious Model O3 (read the TechPowerUp review here).

Amid mass layoffs at Xbox and studio closures elsewhere, more bad news emerges from the ailing gaming industry, as Midgar, the Nacon-owned studio behind Edge of Eternity, a turn-based JRPG adventure game, has officially announced that it would be shutting down. Earlier this year, Nacon also shut down Spiders, the studio behind GreedFall, for similar reasons. Similarly, Nacon also went on to publish a GreedFall DLC after the studio shut down.

The closure comes as a result of a court-ordered liquidation, which follows the studio's failure to find a buyer. The announcement comes by way of a LinkedIn post by the studio's co-founder and current Nacon CTO, Jérémy Zeler-Maury, who says that "we worked until the very end to find a solution that could preserve both the company and the team," but after exhausting other alternatives, this is the only way forward.

Since the launch of the Steam Machine, which has been blasted online for its high pricing and middling performance, Valve has been fairly transparent about pricing woes relating to the hybrid console, with engineers previously going so far as to say that pricing before the AI-fuelled RAMpocalypse was as much as 30% cheaper than launch pricing, and that the light at the end of the tunnel is faint.

More recently, in a new interview with Bloomberg, Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat, have once again reiterated that pricing of the Steam Machine, and hardware in general, "is lagging what we're seeing from a bulk supply by at least three to six months." In other words, the pricing for the Steam Machine and other PC components that have been impacted by the RAM crisis in mid-July are, at best, prices from February. If true, it also means that Valve effectively has a bit of clairvoyance when it comes to hardware pricing, as one would when working closely with suppliers, and the engineers only see it getting worse, at least for the next three to six months.

OneXPlayer announced the Ryzen AI Max+ 388-powered X2 Mini Pro in April 2026 shortly before the device launched on Indiegogo. Now, following the Indiegogo launch, the X2 Mini Pro has officially launched as an in-stock product on the OneXPlayer store. Some of the starting prices are currently discounted to celebrate the official launch, but it's unclear how long those discounts will last or if they will be temporary at all, since a lot of OneXPlayer products seem to effectively be perpetually discounted.

The OneXPlayer X2 Mini Pro is a 3-in-1 gaming handheld equipped with AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 388 APU and the powerful Radeon 8060S iGPU, up to 64 GB of RAM, and an 8.8-inch, 144 Hz OLED display. There are three spec variants available on the OneXPlayer online store, starting at $2,499—discounted from $2,699—for the Standard version with 48 GB of memory and 1 TB of storage. All versions of the X2 Mini Pro come with a free controller connector for the detachable controllers, a magnetic keyboard for the laptop mode, and a protective bag. There is also an optional liquid cooling module, which adds $80 to the purchase price of all versions of the X2 Mini Pro.

As we enter the second to last week of July, we have a week full of mid-range game releases. We kick off the week with some dinosaur action in this week's biggest release, where you get to take on the role as a Spinosaurus with a sword. We kick out the Monday blues with a space RTS/RPG, followed by a trip to feudal Japan and samurais and then a quick switch to Scotland for another fight for power. We round off the week with an anime-style RPG and finally a co-op game could see you getting egg on your face. We also have some other new releases this week that might be worth checking out.

Dinoblade / This week's major release / Demo / Thursday 23 July
Dinoblade is an intense action RPG set in a prehistoric world forever changed by a cataclysmic event. Step into the role of a young Spinosaurus, wielding a colossal Great Sword. Confront rival dinosaurs, some armed with weapons of their own, all in a desperate fight to prevent a looming extinction. Steam link

With recent gaming and productivity keyboards alike trending towards more compact designs to make more room for mouse movement, it's almost inevitable that projects like The Behemoth would pop up. The Behemoth V2, the most recent version of the 135% keyboard, has just received its second design progress update, pointing to an imminent launch. The keyboard's layout and features have been finalized, and it will be a full 104-key mechanical keyboard with a built-in 32-key gamepad to the left of the main alpha section of the keyboard.

As you might expect, the Behemoth V2 is comically large, although not quite at the same level as something like the 173% Hyper7 R4, and, according to the latest update on Reddit, the keyboard weighs in at a whopping 9.4 lbs (4.2 kg) and measures 609 × 177 mm, with a 25 mm height without keycaps installed. The weight is largely due to the CNC aluminium case, which was recently adjusted to have more material in order to bring down the cost. Pricing has not yet been finalized, but the designer expects the keyboard to come out around $400-500 when it is eventually complete.

Following recent layoff announcements from Microsoft, which will affect 25% of Bethesda's staff, the game studio has sought fit to address some player concerns surrounding some of its major franchises. In the statement posted to X, Bethesda confirmed that there are currently two Fallout game remakes—Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas—in the works at the studio, with Fallout 5 being the studio's "long-range destination."

After a recent statement from Bethesda CEO, Jill Braff, stating that Bethesda would be working alongside other studios under the ZeniMax umbrella and across Xbox Game Studios, rumors emerged that Obsidian Entertainment was working on its first Fallout game since the 2010. This has been reinforced in this latest statement, with the studio saying that it is working with Obsidian Entertainment on "a new Fallout project," which is likely in reference to that Fallout game that was given preference over Avowed 2 in recent rumors.

Valve recently released Windows drivers for the new Steam Machine living room console, and it turns out the drivers are pretty good, given recent benchmark results from ETA Prime. The notorious YouTuber and gaming hardware reviewer installed Windows 11 on the Steam Machine, noting that the process was fairly painless, and that all the hardware worked flawlessly. It's both notable and somewhat comical that the GPU shows up in both Windows Task Manager and AMD's Radeon Adrenaline driver as an AMD Radeon RX 7600.

The Steam Machine in question has been upgraded to have 64 GB of memory, so there may be slight differences in performance, especially once the Windows installation starts to accrue more and more programs. In terms of actual gaming and productivity performance, SteamOS and Windows mostly trade blows, but Windows does have a few notable performance wins over SteamOS.

There have recently been a slew of details about the upcoming Assassin's Creed Hexe, from positives, like the return of fan-favorite characters, to less positive news like the pared-back combat system, or the recent dev team layoffs that may affect the scope of the game further. Now, recent leaks by @AgaiinTx on X claim to reveal the pricing and some other details of what they call Assassin's Creed: Codename Hexe.

According to the leaker, Hexe will feature a PEGI 18 rating and will release for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Allegedly the game will use Denuvo. The leaker also claims that June 2027 has been set as the game's launch date, but it is suspected that this is likely a placeholder and will change at a later date. The base game will allegedly cost $69.99, but it will also launch with deluxe and collector's edition, both of which will cost more than the former.

Razer, the leading global gaming lifestyle brand for gamers, today unveils the Razer | Pikachu & Eevee Collection, created in collaboration with The Pokémon Company International. The collection is now available on Razer.com, at RazerStores worldwide, and through select retail partners across the United States, Latin America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

Inspired by Pikachu and Eevee's playfulness, the collection brings a light-hearted, approachable touch to everyday gaming setups. Launching in Pokémon's milestone 30th year, the lineup celebrates the enduring appeal of two of the most beloved Pokémon in the franchise by pairing bright detailing with familiar Razer performance, designed to fit naturally into daily play, work, and everything in between.

It seems as though the launch of Valve's Steam Deck has resulted in an almost non-stop slew of comparisons between Linux and Windows as a gaming operating system. In one recent test, Meta PCs sought out to test the two operating systems head-to-head to get some hard numbers and potentially settle the debate, however, the results brought up an interesting debate about what makes one operating system better than another.

Benchmarks were conducted on an all-AMD system running an AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D, an XFX Swift AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16 GB, and 16 GB of RAM, with the AMD Linux drivers effectively making this a best-case scenario for Linux. The benchmarks were run on the latest version of Windows 11 and Fedora Linux 44, games were tested at the same resolution, and results were an average across three runs. All games tested were also the Windows versions running via Valve's Proton compatibility layer.

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."

Meet the all-new Yunzii M2 Dual 8K Custom Wireless Gaming Mouse, designed for gamers, creators, and everyday users who demand speed, accuracy, and customization. Combining a high-performance PAW3395 sensor, dual 8KHz polling rate, lightweight ergonomic design, and flexible connectivity, M2 delivers a smooth and responsive experience from intense gaming sessions to daily productivity. Whether you're chasing every frame in FPS games or building a more efficient workspace, Yunzii M2 is ready to keep up with every move.

Tri-Mode Connection
Yunzii M2 supports three connection modes, including 2.4 GHz wireless, Bluetooth 5.2, and wired connection, allowing you to switch effortlessly between gaming, work, and travel. Enjoy ultra-low latency performance with 2.4 GHz wireless, convenient connectivity with Bluetooth for laptops and daily tasks, or a stable wired connection when every millisecond matters.

After layoffs racked the studio in mid-2025, following the launch of Splitgate: Arena Reloaded, 1047 Games branched off into a Titanfall-inspired movement shooter that would launch into early access as Empulse in late June 2026. Now, three weeks after Empulse hit virtual shelves, the studio has conducted yet another round of layoffs, with news breaking via employees. One employee, Max McCoy, the principal technical sound designer who worked on both Splitgate: Arena Reloaded and Empulse, confirmed the layoffs in a LinkedIn post, stating that "I was caught up in the layoffs at 1047 Games today. It's been rough to see all of the layoffs across the industry, and to have this be my second layoff in under two years is unfortunate." The studio itself has yet to comment on or announce the layoffs publicly.

It's unclear how many employees were caught up in the latest round of 1047 Games layoffs, but it seems as though the launch of Empulse, the studio's latest shooter, has not met expectations. Despite showing promise with positive early reviews, both on Steam and from media, and a development philosophy that seemed to listen to player feedback during the early access period, Empulse peaked at 2,860 concurrent players three days after launch and has not recovered since, with daily peak concurrent players currently sitting at around 1,200-1,400. The original Splitgate, the game that put the studio on the map initially, peaked at 67,724 concurrent players in August 2021, for comparison.

It hasn't been long since Logitech launched the G Pro X2 Superstrike gaming mouse that made waves thanks to its adjustable haptic feedback and actuation distance features, but it already seems as though the peripherals maker is preparing a new iteration of the G Pro X2 Superstrike. According to a recent leak via the Pericord Discord server, shared by @jakeufps on X, Logitech will launch the new mouse at Logitech G Play in September.

It's unknown if there will be any physical changes to the mouse, and obviously, the rumors are unconfirmed, but the supposed leaker says that the mouse will not get a new sensor, at least not a full Hero 3 update, but it will get an upgraded MCU, and tweaks to the HITS haptic feedback and adjustable actuation system. Since Logitech launched the X2 Superstrike, a number of other mouse makers have entered the magnetic mouse switch market, so Logitech will have more competition than last time. At the time of writing, gamers are asking for improved skates and a redesigned shell, mostly to reduce weight and rebalance the weight so that the second-gen Superstrike isn't as front-heavy.

It's no secret that things are in a state of flux at Xbox and all of its in-house game studios, and this appears to extend to Halo Studios. Despite building excitement for Halo: Campaign Evolved, which is slated to launch in late July 2026, it seems as though projects are being cut at Halo Studios all the same. Most recently, news broke via game journalist Rebs Gaming on X that Halo Studios had officially cancelled a new Halo project known internally as Project Ekur. This information was later validated by Windows Central reporter Jez Corden, although the nature of Project Ekur is still unknown.

Currently, it seems as though Project Ekur may have been anything from an add-on for an existing Halo game to an independent extraction shooter in the Halo universe. Rebs confirmed in a reply to a commenter that project Ekur was not the Destiny-like MMORPG that has also been rumored to be in the works at Halo Studios. The news of the canceled Halo project comes amid a shake-up at Xbox that has resulted in mass layoffs, the sale of a number of studios, and the cancelation of a handful of other games and projects at Microsoft. The Xbox layoffs have also resulted in external collateral damage at IO Interactive, where funding cuts resulted in layoffs.

Palworld officially exited Steam Early Access on July 10 with a massive 1.0 update that dropped a host of new game mechanics, new areas, and new pals to collect, raise, train, or put to work. The 1.0 update, which landed on a Friday two and a half years after its Early Access launch, seems to have been very popular, with SteamDB reporting a whopping 855,459 peak concurrent players on launch weekend. Steam reviews following the update have also been immensely positive, with July 10 alone seeing a spike of 1,877 new positive reviews on Steam. Palworld's 1.0 launch success has also placed it in fourth place in the global Steam Top Sellers chart, which measures game success by revenue.

The Palworld 1.0 update addressed many bugs and added plenty of features across both the game's single-player and multiplayer gameplay modes, including new traversal modes, new crafting features, and new pal breeding and base-building options, among many more. These sweeping changes, however, have not all been received positively. Some users in the game's Steam reviews complained about new key binds that can be confusing or inconvenient, while others complained about the increased map size and lack of massive online multiplayer features making the open-world game feel empty. Despite the handful of negative reviews, player counts have remained high, even well into the Monday after the launch weekend, which is when there is usually an observable dip in player retention.

It seems as though Criterion Games has officially addressed the questions about the future of Need for Speed that arose after its 30th anniversary rebranding as "a Battlefield studio." In a recent interview with IGN, Vice President of Battlefield Studios Europe, Rebecka Coutaz, has basically confirmed fans' fears that Need for Speed is all but dead. When asked about the potential future of its racing games following the rebranding, the VP responded that "We are solely focused on Battlefield," indicating that, 2022's Need for Speed Unbound would likely be the last entry into the studio's racing IP. This comment likewise spells doom for the Burnout franchise, which hasn't had a new entry since 2018 with the Burnout Paradise Remaster, if you can even call that a new entry.

The absence of Burnout and Need for Speed leave a notable gap in the racing game market that games like Forza and the DiRT series don't necessarily fill, thanks to the combination of street and track racing and stunt driving. A quick gander at SteamDB reveals that, aside from the live-service push, the reason for moving away from Need for Speed as a franchise may be due to declining player interest. On Steam, Need for Speed Unbound peaked at a disappointing 14,063 concurrent players at launch and has since plateaued at around 1,000-1,500 peak concurrent daily players. Battlefield 6, on the other hand, currently sits at around 50,000 daily concurrent players, previously peaking at an all-time high of over 740,000 concurrent players.

Welcome to the middle of July and we're right back to the slower pace of new game releases. This week's major release brings some Lovecraftian co-op action set in a time of gunpowder and muskets. We kick off the rest of this week's releases with a fast-paced action-rougelike bullet-hell where you can stop the time, followed by an old-timey mystery. Then we take a left turn onto the Japanese metro, but the train is a skateboard, a turn-based strategy game with floating islands and finally you get the chance to drive a train in the fog.

The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu / This week's major release / Wednesday 15 July
In up to four player co-op, form a group of explorers searching for treasure. In this cursed jungle, danger is everywhere and monstrous creatures alter reality. Stay clear-headed and tame the jungle before it devours you. Steam link

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced has seemingly managed to turn things around following a wave of negative reviews on launch day. Not only has its Steam review rating swung from "Mixed" to "Mostly Positive"—with 77% of the game's 3,555 English reviews now positive—Ubisoft has also announced that Black Flag Resynced has sold over 2 million copies in just over 24 hours since its launch. This at least matches but possibly exceeds the day-one performance of 007 First Light, which sold 1.5 million units in 24 hours.

Previously, reviews on Steam frequently complained about the game's microtransactions, which totaled to more than the $69.99 price of the Deluxe Edition. It's not entirely surprising that the game has reached such heights, given that its day-one Steam peak player count, as reported by SteamDB, was 99,451 players, beating out every other Assassin's Creed game to date—the previous record belonged to Assassin's Creed Shadows with 64,825 peak concurrent players.

As promised previously, Palworld 1.0 has officially launched on Steam, bringing with it an absolutely gargantuan list of updates, features, and fixes. The update officially launches the game out of Early Access and adds 72 new pals to the game, bringing the total to 287—over 50 more than in the latest Pokémon Legends Z-A game. Palworld 1.0 also adds a new area, a floating island called The World Tree, and it expands the original world with new points of interest, Ancient Ruins with minigames, new islands with new volcano, desert, and ruin biomes, and new NPC settlements in four regions, each with their own NPCs and quests. There are several other gameplay changes, new mechanics, and systems overhauls that appear to largely be focused on increasing the fun of late-game and high-level gameplay, base building, combat, and life sim activities.

It's also worth noting that anyone running mods on Palworld has been instructed to remove the mods ahead of the 1.0 update in order to avoid game-breaking bugs. However, Pocket Pair explains that this advice is merely a precaution, due to the massive gameplay changes that have come as a result of the Palworld 1.0 update. Pocketpair has expressed its support for modding and its appreciation for the work done by its modding community, but it notes that mods that have been installed on Palworld "since around 2024" may result in crashes at launch or during gameplay, corrupted save data, or quests becoming impossible to complete. The studio advises only reinstalling mods once the mod creator has specifically confirmed that the mods will work on Palworld 1.0. The full release notes, available on Steam, span several pages, but some of the other update highlights follow.

It has been known for a while that, as part of the new Xbox reset strategy under new CEO, Asha Sharma, Xbox would be leaning into Xbox exclusives more and more going forward, with it being understood that "Xbox exclusive" referred to both PC and Xbox Series consoles—given that the upcoming Helix console is a console-PC hybrid. Now, a new report out of Bloomberg claims that Microsoft will take Sony's approach to exclusives by releasing single-player titles, especially its AAA first-party and high-budget games, as Xbox exclusives. Meanwhile, multiplayer games will remain multi-platform, as many of Xbox's games have been for years. When Sony recently made a similar switch, it was widely criticized, even by former Sony execs, because the timed exclusives had little to no impact on console sales.

Allegedly, the goal of the strategy shift is to strengthen Xbox's platform sales, after the gaming giant's focus on Game Pass failed to deliver meaningful results. Reportedly, Game Pass subscriber numbers peaked around 30 million at the end of the 2026 financial year, which is 47 million behind the 77 million goal that was set in 2017 when the subscription was launched. The recent changes at Xbox and Microsoft have also led to mass layoffs, the loss of a number of studios, which will either be bought out or go independent, and cancelling a handful of unannounced games. It was also recently revealed that Xbox Game Pass contracts and negotiations with external studios had been placed on hold, although there's no clear indication whether those negotiations and contracts have since been resumed.

Obsidian has famously been caught up in the recent Xbox reset, with the game studio losing as much as 25% of its staff to layoffs. According to recent insider reports out of Bloomberg, one of the consequences of the headcount reduction appears to be a narrower focus, which in this case has resulted in the effective cancellation of Avowed 2. The publication's sources say that the studio made the decision to cancel Avowed 2 due to the lackluster commercial performance of the first game in the series. The studio had previously hoped to build the Avowed franchise by rapidly developing the game's sequel on top of tech it already had.

In lieu of Avowed 2 and the other canceled projects, Obsidian will now begin development on a new Fallout game led by Josh Sawyer, who previously worked on Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas, which would go on to become a fan-favorite Fallout game. The success of New Vegas is likely the reason that Sawyer and Obsidian have been tasked with developing another Fallout game, and insiders claim that Sawyer had been working on a separate game that was structurally and thematically similar to Fallout.