NVIDIA is giving away a GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition with a custom Hogwarts Legacy wrap to celebrate DLSS 5 arriving in the game on November 5. To enter, users need to find the official giveaway post on one of NVIDIA GeForce's accounts on X, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok and comment with #RTXON. Only one entry per person is allowed across all four platforms. The giveaway runs until November 12 at 11:59 PM PT, with a single winner drawn at random on or around November 13. NVIDIA values the prize at $2,599, which covers $1,999 for the card and $600 for the wrap. Entrants must be 18 or older and live in an eligible country, a list that includes the US, UK, Canada (excluding Quebec), Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, among others. No purchase is necessary.

The $1,999 figure is NVIDIA's MSRP, though actual retail prices are much higher. TechSpot's October survey put the RTX 5090's normalized global price at $7,240, with the cheapest in-stock US model at $9,400. Supply has also been extremely tight. Reports last month claimed NVIDIA had stopped allocating GB202 GPUs to the RTX 5090, and Jeff Fisher, NVIDIA's senior vice president of personal computing, responded that the card has not been discontinued, while acknowledging constrained supply. NVIDIA has run similar wrapped RTX 5090 giveaways for games like Battlefield 6 and 007 First Light. With prices several times above MSRP and supply this constrained, giveaways like this one seem like the only realistic way for many gamers to have a chance at obtaining an RTX 5090 at the moment.

NVIDIA today released the latest version of GeForce Game Ready drivers. Version 621.14 WHQL comes with optimization for "World of Warcraft: Forever," and the new Slaughter Mode of "DOOM: The Dark Ages Revelations." The drivers also introduce support for DLSS 5 with 3D-guided Neural Rendering for "Hogwarts Legacy" and "War Thunder" on GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs. Among the gaming bugs fixed with this release are incorrect visual colors displayed in "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4." Among the general bugs fixed are an issue seen where video playback freezes or turns black on some GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs or RTX Spark processors after updating to driver version 621.01. Grab the driver from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 621.14 WHQL

NVIDIA is bringing its DLSS 5 neural rendering technology to three more games this month, starting with Hogwarts Legacy on November 5. According to NVIDIA, War Thunder will follow in mid-November, while Where Winds Meet is scheduled to receive support on November 23. NVIDIA is also bringing DLSS 4.5 to several games, and has updated DLSS 4.5 Unreal Engine plugin. NVIDIA was also keen to note that its October 2026 update has significantly reduced the footprint, decreased VRAM usage, and increased performance.

DLSS 5 introduces what NVIDIA calls 3D-Guided Neural Rendering, using AI to enhance lighting, shadows and material details based on information from the game engine. The technology operates as a final rendering stage, using the original frame, geometry, textures and lighting data as its foundation. According to NVIDIA, this approach allows developers to introduce more realistic lighting and material effects without having to explicitly model and render all the additional detail. The company also provides developers with controls to adjust how the technology affects individual scenes, objects and characters, using different AI models, intensity settings and semantic masking to preserve the original artistic direction.

An open-source app called DroidDeck is letting Snapdragon-powered Android devices run Valve's Steam client and Windows PC games on the device itself, with no streaming from a PC or the cloud involved. As VideoCardz reports, YouTuber ETA Prime tested it on a RedMagic 11 Pro with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and 16 GB of memory, where Cyberpunk 2077 ran at around 60 FPS on medium settings. Skyrim Special Edition hit a similar figure at 720p, while Hogwarts Legacy was tougher on the phone and sat around 40 FPS even with lower settings and FSR.

Other solutions like Steam Link stream games from another PC, whereas DroidDeck runs them on the device itself. It loads Valve's ARM64 Linux Steam client in Big Picture mode as a regular Android app, and Windows games go through Valve's ARM64 Proton with x86 translation. Projects like Armada instead replace Android with SteamOS entirely, and DroidDeck needs neither that nor root access. It also handles GPU driver switching, AMD FSR and Snapdragon GSR upscaling, and frame generation through Lossless Scaling.

Denuvo has sued an anonymous game cracker known as "voices38," accusing them of bypassing its Anti-Tamper protection in at least 26 PC games. TorrentFreak first reported on the complaint, filed September 14 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Denuvo wants monetary damages plus an injunction barring further circumvention of its DRM, including in games that haven't even been made yet. Denuvo doesn't own the copyrights to any of the games listed, so this isn't a copyright infringement case. It rests instead on the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, which prohibit bypassing digital locks placed on copyrighted works.

Named titles include Hogwarts Legacy, Black Myth: Wukong, Resident Evil Requiem, and Doom: The Dark Ages, though voices38 has apparently kept cracking games since the filing, with Persona 3 Reload and Star Wars Outlaws reportedly added to the tally. The tricky part is that Denuvo has no idea who voices38 actually is. The complaint names the defendant only as "an unknown individual or entity," alongside ten unnamed Doe defendants, pointing to Reddit, Discord, and Steam accounts it believes may be linked to the activity. Denuvo will likely need to subpoena those platforms to get anywhere close to an identity, and there's no guarantee that works out. The case is still in its early stages, and none of Denuvo's claims have been tested in court yet.

With the ongoing issues seemingly related to the now-ubiquitous 12V-2×6 connectors melting from high power draw—seemingly made worse by power spikes caused by NVIDIA's DLSS 5—it seems prudent to find ways to reduce GPU power draw as much as possible, and one Redditor has conducted testing to prove it's possible to do so without affecting DLSS 5 performance.

In their testing, u/om_the_best found that undervolting an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 managed to reduce power draw by as much as 47 W while maintaining the same FPS and image quality using DLSS 5. According to the modder, the undervolt "can allow you to use DLSS 5 while keeping power consumption roughly the same as when running without DLSS 5 and without an undervolt."

Community testing of leaked DLSS 5 builds suggests the tech may already be hitting a wall on NVIDIA's own flagship GPU. Tom's Hardware ran the neural rendering model through Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, and Control on an RTX 5090 Founders Edition, as well as an MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z. Surprisingly, the results point to power delivery as the potential bottleneck rather than compute horsepower. The test used a community Optiscaler injection method built on the leaked DLSS 5 DLL, not NVIDIA's official Streamline path, though the cost lined up closely with NVIDIA's own published 8 ms-per-frame figure.

The Founders Edition, limited to a single 12V-2x6 connector, dropped framerates by 42 to 49 percent with DLSS 5 enabled and consistently hit its 575 W power limit while doing so. The MSI Lightning Z, with a dual-connector setup and a 1000 W limit, took a smaller hit and held better 1% lows, while pulling far more power. In Hogwarts Legacy, it jumped from 480 W to 720 W with neural rendering active, which is a sizeable 50% increase. That leaves single-connector RTX 5090 cards apparently underprovisioned for a feature this demanding, at least unofficially.

With the latest Arc 101.8626 WHQL graphics driver, Intel has extended its precompiled shader delivery service to Intel Arc B-series GPUs and Intel Core Ultra Series 3 and Series 2 SoCs with built-in Intel Arc GPUs. This enhancement aims to significantly reduce game loading times. Intel's service gathers game shaders in the company's private cloud infrastructure, where they are processed and precompiled. When you install the Intel Graphics Software App, the service identifies the games you play and downloads the precompiled shaders for those games, using the Intel app as a distribution service and creating a folder with the precompiled shaders. This approach allows games to load much faster, reduces stuttering on the first launch, and automatically updates shaders whenever they are revised, with Intel's service pulling the new shaders into the shared folder on your PC. If this sounds familiar—Microsoft is working on a similar mechanism called "Advanced Shader Delivery," for release later this year. Intel's approach is separate and independent. For TechPowerUp, Intel confirmed the following:

IntelIntel Precompiled Shaders is custom built and run by Intel. We are also working with Microsoft's on launching Advanced Shader Delivery later this year. Together, both services will provide users of supported Arc GPUs with more game and game store coverage of technologies that reduce waiting times and in-game stutters due to shader compilation.

Intel has released its latest 101.8626 WHQL Arc GPU graphics drivers, adding day-one support for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and Everwind games, as well as introducing the new Intel Graphics Shader Distribution Service, which should improve first load times by up to 2x on Intel Arc B-series and Intel Core Ultra Series 3 and Series 2 CPUs with Intel Arc GPUs. The Graphics Shader Distribution Service is currently limited to a dozen games, so hopefully Intel will extend the list further with the future driver release. In addition, the new Intel Arc GPU 101.8626 WHQL graphics drivers also improve game performance in the Nioh 3 game on Intel Arc B-series GPUs by up to 9 percent at 1080p resolution with Ultra settings.

The new Intel Arc GPU driver release also fixes a couple of issues seen with previous driver releases, including an application crash with ray tracing enabled in the Naraka Bladepoint game, cinematic corruption in Hogwarts Legacy, and visual corruption in the viewport while resizing the window with HDR enabled in Davinci Resolve Studio. These issues are fixed on Intel Arc B-series GPUs and Ultra Series 3 CPUs with Intel Arc GPUs. Since it is a major WHQL release, Intel is listing all new known issues that are left to be fixed with future driver releases.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc Graphics Driver 101.8626 WHQL

NVIDIA today unveiled NVIDIA DLSS 5, the company's most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing in 2018. DLSS 5 introduces a real-time neural rendering model that infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials. Bridging the divide between rendering and reality, DLSS 5 empowers game developers to deliver a new level of photoreal computer graphics previously only achieved in Hollywood visual effects.

"Twenty-five years after NVIDIA invented the programmable shader, we are reinventing computer graphics once again," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "DLSS 5 is the GPT moment for graphics—blending hand-crafted rendering with generative AI to deliver a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression."

Step out of the vault and into the future of gaming with Fallout: New Vegas streaming on GeForce NOW, just in time to celebrate the newest season of the hit Amazon TV show Fallout. To mark the occasion, GeForce NOW members can claim Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 as special rewards, completing a wasteland-ready trilogy in the cloud. Whether scavenging the ruins of post-apocalyptic America or rebuilding hope in the Wasteland, gamers can experience every choice - and every radroach - even sharper in the cloud. Take a detour from the desert dust to the enchanted halls of Hogwarts in Hogwarts Legacy - and relive Harry's years at school, brick by whimsical brick, in LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-7. This week's GFN Thursday lineup of five games proves adventure comes in every form, from radiation to incantations. Plus, GeForce NOW is joining Ubisoft to celebrate 10 years of Rainbow Six Siege: a decade of clutch plays and tactical showdowns streaming strong in the cloud.

Have Yourself a Merry Little 'Fallout'
Bethesda's Fallout: New Vegas is rolling onto GeForce NOW with a suitcase full of wasteland wit. Set in the Mojave Desert after a bombing, the title follows a courier carrying a valuable chip through a desert full of schemers, gamblers and nuclear scars. The adventure drops players into a three- or more-way tug-of-war for the fate of New Vegas, where every decision can shift who runs the Strip and who ends up buried in the sand. Choices matter at every turn: talk fast, sneak smart or go loud, all while navigating sharp, darkly funny writing and factions that rarely fit cleanly into good or evil.

GeForce NOW is decking the digital halls with 30 new games to keep spirits high all month long. Join the fun with Hogwarts Legacy, the LEGO Harry Potter Collection and a sleighful of new adventures streaming straight from the cloud. The "Half-Price Holiday" sale keeps the savings rolling after Black Friday, with premium GeForce NOW memberships available at 50% off for the first month for a limited time. And GeForce NOW is bringing members a new way to jump into the worlds of some of the most iconic games. Stream popular Activision titles through Ubisoft+ Premium in the cloud for GeForce RTX power - including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy and the Spyro Reignited Trilogy, with more to come.

That's not all: Battle.net single sign-on is now live, making it easier than ever for members to leap into Overwatch 2, Diablo IV and other titles without multiple logins. Link once and play instantly, no matter the device. Plus, the GeForce NOW Community Video Contest is rolling on - creators are decking the halls with epic clips and their merriest cloud gaming moments from all over the world. There's still time to jump in with a clip of a favorite game or a memorable match. Submit a clip and score two Ultimate day passes - one to share with a friend and one to keep - plus a chance to win a one-year Ultimate membership.

Steam has announced the full list of Best of Steam games for this year across several categories. The list does not include a lot of big surprises but it is nice to see that some indie games also made it to the list. Categories include Top Sellers, New Releases, Most Played, Early Access, Steam Deck, Controller, and VR.

The Top Seller list include Baldur's Gate 3 from Larian Studios, which is also the Game of the Year winner, Hogwarts Legacy, which was a big game this year, DOTA 2 and Counter Strike 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Starfield, Lost Ark, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, Apex Legends, PUBG Battlegrounds, Destiny 2, and Sons of the Forest. Some of the Top New Releases category, which is measured by gross revenue, include Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, Cities: Skylines II, Resident Evil 4, Payday 3, Remnant II, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, FC 24, as well as a few titles that are also top sellers like Starfield, Baldur's Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy. and Sons of the Forest.

AMD has released the AMD Software Adrenalin Edition Preview Driver which add support for AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF) technical preview which is available in several games and only works on AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards. AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF) will be available as a part of FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.0 (FSR3), which is expected to launch tomorrow and supported in Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum games.

With the new AMD Software Adrenalin Edition Preview Driver, AMD enables Frame Generation on a driver level as "Fluid Motion Frame" option, which can be enabled via HYPR-X, or individually for each game by using the Global Graphics Settings page. AMD has an extensive list of over 20 titles, including Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Starfield, Hogwarts Legacy, The Last of Us Part 1, Far Cry 6, Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and others. AMD also notes that AFMF can also be manually for any title such as Cyberpunk 2077 using the per-app settings within AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition Preview Driver for AMD Fluid Motion Frames

Hogwarts Legacy has become one of the most popular games ever released and has sold over 15 million copies, making over $1 billion in sales, which earned it a place in the company's earnings call. The numbers will keep growing as the game is launching on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One today, and the Nintendo Switch version is coming in July.

The result does not come as a big surprise considering it sold over 12 million copies and made $850 million in the first two weeks from the launch. The newest result makes it one of the best selling games of 2023, at least so far. The result also makes Hogwarts Legacy the fifth $1 billion-plus gaming franchise from WB Games, joining Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, Lego games, and DC.

Avalanche Software has released quite a big patch for Hogwarts Legacy, improving visual, performance, gameplay, and general stability. In addition to more than 500 bug fixes, it also brings the new Arachnophobia Mode.

Performance-wise, the newest patch resolves general crashes on the PC and various memory leaks, brings plenty of optimizations, fixes ray tracing issues, and more. It also updates minimum driver recommendation for NVIDIA graphics cards, updates NVIDIA DLSS to v3.1.2, AMD FSR to v2.2, and Intel XeSS to v1.1.

In a blog post, AMD has pulled the VRAM card against NVIDIA, telling potential graphics card buyers that they should consider AMD over NVIDIA, because current and future games will require more VRAM, especially at higher resolution. There's no secret that there has been something of a consensus from at least some of the PC gaming crowd that NVIDIA is being too stingy when it comes to VRAM on its graphics cards and AMD is clearly trying to cash in on that sentiment with its latest blog post. AMD is showing the VRAM usage in games such as Resident Evil 4—with and without ray tracing at that—The Last of US Part I and Hogwarts Legacy, all games that use over 11 GB of VRAM or more.

AMD does have a point here, but as the company has as yet to launch anything below the Radeon RX 7900 XT in the 7000-series, AMD is mostly comparing its 6000-series of cards with NVIDIA's 3000-series of cards, most of which are getting hard to purchase and potentially less interesting for those looking to upgrade their system. That said, AMD also compares its two 7000-series cards to the NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti and the RTX 4080, claiming up to a 27 percent lead over NVIDIA in performance. Based on TPU's own tests of some of these games, albeit most likely using different test scenarios, the figures provided by AMD don't seem to reflect real world performance. It's also surprising to see AMD claims its RX 7900 XTX beats NVIDIA's RTX 4080 in ray tracing performance in Resident Evil 4 by 23 percent, where our own tests shows NVIDIA in front by a small margin. Make what you want of this, but one thing is fairly certain and that is that future games will require more VRAM, but most likely the need for a powerful GPU isn't going to go away.

Avalanche Software has released the latest March 8 patch for Hogwarts Legacy, that fixes various bugs and improves gameplay, performance, and stability. The extensive update also includes fixes for online, gameplay, audio, UI, cinematics, ray tracing, save game, display and miscellaneous issues.

The changelog includes major reworks, from patching out memory leaks, improved VRAM usage, to VFX crashes, lighting optimizations with NVIDIA drivers, improved stability and performance with ray tracing, directional light shadows and shadows on trees with ray tracing, various Ansel issues, and plenty of gameplay issues, including missions, broom flight, world events, and characters. The new patch also updates the minimum Nvidia and AMD graphics driver recommendations, which could be directly connected to the improved VRAM usage, as the game was easily going over 14 GB with RT enabled on 1080p, 1440p, and 2160p resolutions.