In the first two days or so of the drive, over 200 readers have contributed over $11,000 to either the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Child’s Play as part of the charity drive (Child’s Play has a roughly 60/40 donation lead at the moment). That’s still a long way off from 2020’s record haul of over $58,000, but there’s still plenty of time until the Charity Drive wraps up on Friday, January 2, 2026.
That doesn’t mean you should put your donation off, though. Do yourself and the charities involved a favor and give now while you’re thinking about it.
Back in April, District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers delivered a scathing judgment finding that Apple was in “willful violation” of her 2021 injunction intended to open up iOS App Store payments. That contempt of court finding has now been almost entirely upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a development that Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney tells Ars he hopes will “do a lot of good for developers and start to really change the App Store situation worldwide, I think.”
The ruling, signed by a panel of three appellate court judges, affirmed that Apple’s initial attempts to charge a 27 percent fee to iOS developers using outside payment options “had a prohibitive effect, in violation of the injunction.” Similarly, Apple’s restrictions on how those outside links had to be designed were overly broad; the appeals court suggests that Apple can only ensure that internal and external payment options are presented in a similar fashion.
The appeals court also agreed that Apple acted in “bad faith” by refusing to comply with the injunction, rejecting viable, compliant alternatives in internal discussions. And the appeals court was also not convinced by Apple’s process-focused arguments, saying the district court properly evaluated materials Apple argued were protected by attorney-client privilege.
Over two decades after the release of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, a new project described as a “spiritual successor” to that seminal RPG series was announced at The Game Awards Thursday night. Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic will be a collaboration between Lucasfilm Games and Arcanaut Studios, a new development house being launched by original KOTOR director Casey Hudson.
Hudson, who will serve as director on the new game, said in an interview with StarWars.com that he has remained in contact with Lucasfilm since the KOTOR days, in the hopes of being able to collaborate in the Star Wars universe again. “It took the right conditions to get everything to line up,” he told the site.
Calling KOTOR “one of the defining experiences of my career,” Hudson said he wants to “explore a contemporary vision” of the Star Wars universe and “deliver on the combination of player agency and immersion in Star Wars” that defined the original games. As director on the upcoming game, Hudson said he sees his role as “to gather and shape a cohesive vision that the entire team contributes to. Ensuring that everyone shares that vision and understands their part in creating it is critical to the success of a project.”
Back in 2016, after six-and-a-half years spent working on puzzle-adventure opus The Witness, Jonathan Blow says he needed a break. He tells Ars that the project he started in The Witness’ wake was meant to serve as a quick proof of concept for a new engine and programming language he was working on. “It was supposed to be a short game,” that could be finished in “like a year and a half or two years,” he said.
Now, after nine years of development—and his fair share of outspoken, controversial statements—Blow is finally approaching the finish line on that “short game.” He said Order of the Sinking Star—which was announced Thursday via a Game Awards trailer ahead of a planned 2026 release—now encompasses around 1,400 individual puzzles that could take completionists 400 to 500 hours to fully conquer.
Jonathan Blow, seen here probably thinking about puzzles.
Credit:
Thekla, Inc.
“I don’t know why I convinced myself it was going to be a small game,” Blow told me while demonstrating a preview build to Ars last week. “But once we start things, I just want to do the good version of the thing, right? I always make it as good as it can be.”
Now, Blizzard says that the overwhelming response to that accidental house hovering has been so strong that it’s pivoting to integrate it as an official part of the game.
“We were going to fix flying houses to bring them back to terra firma, but you all made such awesome stuff, so we made it possible with the base UI instead,” WoW Principal Designer Jesse Kurlancheek posted on social media Tuesday. Lead Producer Kyle Hartline followed up on that announcement with some behind-the-scenes gossip: “Like no joke we had an ops channel about how to roll out the float fix but folks shared like 5 of the dopest houses and we all kinda immediately agreed this was way too cool to change,” he wrote.
Nvidia, AMD, and Intel have all made high-quality image upscaling a cornerstone feature of their new GPUs this decade. Upscaling technologies like Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), and Intel’s Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) are all ways to transform a lower-resolution source image into a higher-resolution image, delivering better-looking games without requiring as much graphics hardware as you’d need to render the higher-resolution image natively. Later additions have focused on improving ray-tracing performance and “frame generation” technologies that boost frame rates by creating new AI-generated frames to insert between natively rendered frames.
Generally speaking, Nvidia’s DLSS technologies have provided better image quality than AMD’s FSR, but they have only been available on newer Nvidia hardware—the GeForce RTX 20-series or newer for most features, with frame-generation features locked to the RTX 40- and 50-series. FSR’s results don’t look as good, but they have benefited from running on just about anything, including older GPUs, Nvidia GPUs, and even integrated Intel and AMD GPUs.
Today, AMD is trying to shift that dynamic with something called “FSR Redstone,” a collection of ray-tracing and frame-generation features all intended to boost AMD’s image quality while being relatively easy to implement for game developers who are already using FSR 3.1 or FSR 4.
It’s once again that special time of year when we give you a chance to do well by doing good. That’s right—it’s the 2025 edition of our annual Charity Drive!
Every year since 2007, we’ve encouraged readers to give to Penny Arcade’s Child’s Play charity, which provides toys and games to kids being treated in hospitals around the world. In recent years, we’ve added the Electronic Frontier Foundation to our charity push, aiding in their efforts to defend Internet freedom. This year, as always, we’re providing some extra incentive for those donations by offering donors a chance to win pieces of our big pile of vendor-provided swag. We can’t keep it, and we don’t want it clogging up our offices, so it’s now yours to win.
This year’s swag pile is full of high-value geek goodies. We have over a dozen prizes valued at nearly $5,000 total, including gaming hardware and collectibles, apparel, and more. In 2023, Ars readers raised nearly $40,000 for charity, contributing to a total haul of more than $542,000 since 2007. We want to raise even more this year, and we can do it if readers dig deep.
It’s time to admit, before God and the good readers of Ars Technica, that I have a problem. I love roguelikes. Reader, I can’t get enough of them. If there’s even a whisper of a hot new roguelike on Steam, I’m there. You may call them arcane, repetitive, or maddeningly difficult; I call them heaven.
The second best part of video games is taking a puny little character and, over 100 hours, transforming that adventurer into a god of destruction. The best thing about video games is doing the same thing in under an hour. Beat a combat encounter, get an upgrade. Enter a new area, choose a new item. Put together a build and watch it sing.
If you die—immediately ending your ascent and returning you to the beginning of the game—you’ll often make a pit stop at a home base to unlock new goodies to help you on your next run. (Some people distiguish between roguelikes and “roguelites,” with the latter including permanent, between-run upgrades. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll use “roguelike” as an umbrella term).
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my personal homebrew Steam Machine, a self-built desktop under my TV featuring an AMD Ryzen 7 8700G processor and a Radeon 780M integrated GPU. I wouldn’t recommend making your own version of this build, especially with RAM prices as they currently are, but there are all kinds of inexpensive mini PCs on Amazon with the same GPU, and they’ll all be pretty good at playing the kinds of games that already run well on the less-powerful Steam Deck.
But this kind of hardware is an imperfect proxy for the Steam Machine that Valve plans to launch sometime next year—that box will include a dedicated GPU with 8GB of dedicated video memory, presenting both benefits and possible pitfalls compared to a system with an integrated GPU.
As a last pre-Steam Machine follow-up to our coverage so far, we’ve run tests on several games we test regularly in our GPU reviews to get a sense of how current versions of SteamOS stack up to Windows running on the same hardware. What we’ve found so far is basically the inverse of what we found when comparing handhelds: Windows usually has an edge on SteamOS’s performance, and sometimes that gap is quite large. And SteamOS also exacerbates problems with 8GB GPUs, hitting apparent RAM limits in more games and at lower resolutions compared to Windows.
When Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine hardware last month, some eagle-eyed gamers may have been surprised to see that the official spec sheet lists support for HDMI 2.0 output, rather than the updated, higher-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 standard introduced in 2017. Now, Valve tells Ars that, while the hardware itself actually supports HDMI 2.1, the company is struggling to offer full support for that standard due to Linux drivers that are “still a work-in-progress on the software side.”
As we noted last year, the HDMI Forum (which manages the official specifications for HDMI standards) has officially blocked any open source implementation of HDMI 2.1. That means the open source AMD drivers used by SteamOS can’t fully implement certain features that are specific to the updated output standard.
“At this time an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation is not possible without running afoul of the HDMI Forum requirements,” AMD engineer Alex Deucher said at the time.
By Valve’s admission, its upcoming Steam Machine desktop isn’t swinging for the fences with its graphical performance. The specs promise decent 1080p-to-1440p performance in most games, with 4K occasionally reachable with assistance from FSR upscaling—about what you’d expect from a box with a modern midrange graphics card in it.
But there’s one spec that has caused some concern among Ars staffers and others with their eyes on the Steam Machine: The GPU comes with just 8GB of dedicated graphics RAM, an amount that is steadily becoming more of a bottleneck for midrange GPUs like AMD’s Radeon RX 7060 and 9060, or Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 or 5060.
In our reviews of these GPUs, we’ve already run into some games where the RAM ceiling limits performance in Windows, especially at 1440p. But we’ve been doing more extensive testing of various GPUs with SteamOS, and we can confirm that in current betas, 8GB GPUs struggle even more on SteamOS than they do running the same games at the same settings in Windows 11.
People often ask creatives—especially those in careers some dream of entering—”how did you get started?” Video game designers are no exception, and Avellone says that one of the most important keys to his success was one he learned early in his origin story.
“Players are selfish,” Avellone said, reflecting on his time designing the seminal computer roleplaying game Planescape: Torment. “The more you can make the experience all about them, the better. So Torment became that. Almost every single thing in the game is about you, the player.”
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Arguably the best Cyber Monday deal I didn't see coming is still live: The new Nintendo Switch 2 with Mario Kart World bundle is still discounted today, which is surprising—there's no real incentive to knock money off a brand-new system, and it wasn't discounted at all during Black Friday.
But yes, at the moment, you can still get the game and system for $449 (down from $499) at Walmart (Amazon's stock is completely out)—the lowest price it has reached yet, according to price tracking tools. (Note that you can only see the price once you've signed in and it's in your cart, as Nintendo restricts retailers from promoting anything below the "minimum advertised price" of $499.) With Christmas on the way, this deal is likely to sell out fast, so I'd advise ordering it sooner rather than later if you're considering it.
To put into perspective how good this deal is, the OLED edition of the original Nintendo Switch is $400 right now, meaning you can get the new system and a great game for only $50 more—and the Switch 2 is an upgrade in every way, according to Lifehacker's review. You can play your old Switch games on the Switch 2, since it's backwards compatible. The ergonomics and design have improved, making it much better to hold and look at. The battery life has also improved, now with about 180 minutes of handheld playtime before the juice runs out.
The biggest thing to consider when deciding whether you should buy a Switch 2 right now is that the library is currently on the smaller side, with few absolute must-play titles yet released (and the ones that are out may cost more, going up to $80). But being able to play your older games does make the transition easier, especially considering some games, like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, will look better on the Switch 2.
It’s been over 10 years since the launch of the excellent The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and nearly four years since the announcement of “the next installment in The Witcher series of video games.” Despite those long waits, developer CD Projekt Red is still insisting it will deliver the next three complete Witcher games in a short six-year window.
In a recent earnings call, CDPR VP of Business Development Michał Nowakowski suggested that a rapid release schedule would be enabled in no small part by the team’s transition away from its proprietary REDEngine to the popular Unreal Engine in 2022. At the time, CDPR said the transition to Unreal Engine would “elevate development predictability and efficiency, while simultaneously granting us access to cutting-edge game development tools.” Those considerations seemed especially important in the wake of widespread technical issues with the console versions of Cyberpunk 2077, which CDPR later blamed on REDEngine’s “in-game streaming system.”
“We’re happy with how [Unreal Engine] is evolving through the Epic team’s efforts, and how we are learning how to make it work within a huge open-world game, as [The Witcher 4] is meant to be,” Nowakowski said in the recent earnings call. “In a way, yes, I do believe that further games should be delivered in a shorter period of time—as we had stated before, our plan still is to launch the whole trilogy within a six-year period, so yes, that would mean we would plan to have a shorter development time between TW4 and TW5, between TW5 and TW6 and so on.”
If you know the name Ron Gilbert, it’s probably for his decades of work on classic point-and-click adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Monkey Island series, and Thimbleweed Park. Given that pedigree, October’s release of the Gilbert-designed Death by Scrolling—a rogue-lite action-survival pseudo-shoot-em-up—might have come as a bit of a surprise.
In an interview from his New Zealand home, though, Gilbert noted that his catalog also includes some reflex-based games—Humungous Entertainment’s Backyard Sports titles and 2010’s Deathspank, for instance. And Gilbert said his return to action-oriented game design today stemmed from his love for modern classics like Binding of Isaac, Nuclear Throne, and Dead Cells.
“I mean, I’m certainly mostly known for adventure games, and I have done other stuff, [but] it probably is a little bit of a departure for me,” he told Ars. “While I do enjoy playing narrative games as well, it’s not the only thing I enjoy, and just the idea of making one of these kind of started out as a whim.”
Boy, was 1992 a different time for computer games. Epic MegaGames’ Jill of the Jungle illustrates that as well as any other title from the era. Designed and programmed by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, the game was meant to prove that console-style games of the original Nintendo era could work just as well on PCs. (Later, the onus of proof would often be in the reverse direction.)
Also, it had a female protagonist, which Sweeney saw as a notable differentiator at the time. That’s pretty wild to think about in an era of Tomb Raider‘s Lara Croft, Horizon Forbidden West‘s Aloy, Life is Strange‘s Max Caulfield, Returnal‘s Selene Vassos, Control‘s Jesse Faden, The Last of Us‘ Ellie Williams, and a seemingly endless list of others—to say nothing of the fact that many players of all genders who played the games Mass Effect and Cyberpunk 2077 seem to agree that the female protagonist options in those are more compelling than their male alternatives.
As wacky as it is to remember that the idea of a female character was seen as exceptional at any point (and with the acknowledgement that this game was nonetheless not the first to do that), it’s still neat to see how forward-thinking Sweeney was in many respects—and not just in terms of cultural norms in gaming.
It’s not a bad time to upgrade your gaming PC. Graphics card prices in the 2020s have undulated continuously as the industry has dealt with pandemic and AI-related shortages, but it’s actually possible to get respectable mainstream- to high-end GPUs like AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT and 9070 series or Nvidia’s RTX 5060, 5070, and 5080 series for at or slightly under their suggested retail prices right now. This was close to impossible through the spring and summer.
But it’s not a good time to build a new PC or swap your older motherboard out for a new one that needs DDR5 RAM. And the culprit is a shortage of RAM and flash memory chips that has suddenly sent SSD and (especially) memory prices into the stratosphere, caused primarily by the ongoing AI boom and exacerbated by panic-fueled buying by end users and device manufacturers.
To illustrate just how high things have jumped in a short amount of time, let’s compare some of the RAM and storage prices listed in our system guide from three months ago to the pricing for the exact same components today. Note that several of these are based on the last available price and are currently sold out; we also haven’t looked into things like microSD or microSD Express cards, which could also be affected.
Video games aren't just a leisurely pastime. For some, they're a way to connect with loved ones and relive nostalgic memories from childhood. I am one of those people.
I pounced on the Nintendo Switch 2 when it came out earlier this year because I wanted something that felt familiar while living abroad. I've been a digital nomad for nearly ten years and currently live in Bangkok, Thailand, nearly 8,500 miles away from my six children and two grandchildren.
The Switch 2 lets me play the latest games with my kids, which I love to do, even when the time change makes schedules wonky. It reminds me of when I bought them a Wii many years ago and the hours of fun we had as a family playing Wii Sports in the living room. It also reminds me of a deeper, older memory – one that's been on my mind more than ever before.
The gift that changed my life
I'm a first-generation American with a Kenyan mom and a stepfather from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Growing up, the emphasis in our home was on working hard, doing well in school, and not taking for granted the opportunities we had in America.
That meant things like video games were frowned upon. The idea of having a video game system in our home was unthinkable to my immigrant parents. My parents worked hard to afford our lives and support family members back in Africa, so there wasn't a lot of spare money for gifts. Gifts were rare, even during the holidays; we were lucky to get a single gift.
I was fine with not getting as many gifts or the types of games and tech that my friends got. I understood early that not everyone's life can be the same. When the PlayStation came out in 1994, however, that was the first time I really wanted a gift.
I begged my mom every day leading up to Christmas, did extra work around the house, and ran errands, all while pleading for my mom to make an exception and let us have a video game system in the house. I established a set of self-governing rules for my brothers and me to follow, ensuring the game wouldn't interfere with our school work.
The author, right, and one of his brothers in an old family photo.Credit: Kimanzi Constable
That's why I cried every ounce of liquid out of my body on Christmas morning when there was a PlayStation and some games.
My brother later had cancer, and my mom is battling late-stage cancer now. My mom can't talk much these days, but I can still talk to her. I often share with her the core memory of that gift and what it meant to me.
The author and his mother.Credit: Kimanzi Constable
Giving a similar gift to my children
I wanted my kids to have the same kind of gaming console memory that I had when I was a kid. So in 2012, I gifted them a Nintendo Wii.
We spent every night playing Wii Sports as a family, creating memories that my kids, now adults, recall often. I had to teach them how to take turns playing the Wii and how to play against each other without it becoming an all-out war when they won or lost a game. There were more than a few incidents when a controller found itself flying across the room.
This author with some of his children and children-in-law.Credit: Kimanzi Constable
Giving a similar gift to… myself
I started living abroad in 2021, and I'm fortunate that my family supports it. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, my wife and I realized we wanted to live a more nomadic life and explore the world further. I had lost many family members to cancer, and I worried I might get cancer too, so I wanted to live life fully, both for myself and in memory of those I’ve lost.
With our kids all out of the home, attending college and living adult lives, it felt like the right time. We sold everything, including our cars and home, and began traveling with no fixed home base. We became full-time digital nomads.
I gave my adult children, who live together, my original Switch before I moved to Thailand, so they could play Switch Sports via Nintendo Online with me while I was in Thailand. I knew the Switch 2 was coming out before I moved, and that I would get one over here in Bangkok once I settled in.
We get to relive the fun every time we log on, and it's a way to stay connected even though we're physically 8,500 miles apart. We coordinate our playtime: nighttime for them and morning for me, since Thailand is either 11 or 12 hours ahead of the Central time zone.
Although the Switch 2 console is larger, I've still been able to fit it in my travel backpack and play it comfortably. I recently played Switch 2 on a three-hour car ride from Bangkok to Hua Hin, Thailand, and even played it on the beach at a resort in Hua Hin. I've used the built-in voice chat, the stable dock with a second USB-C port, and the larger, magnetically attaching Joy-Con 2s. Playing online is more fun with the upgraded Joy-Cons.
The author after purchasing a Switch 2.Credit: Kimanzi Constable
Tech gifts can rekindle old memories and create new ones
I enjoy the Nintendo Switch 2 so much that I'm buying a console for our two grandchildren, ages six and four. I know they'll have a similar reaction to the one I had when my mom got us a PlayStation, as my granddaughter has been begging me for a Switch 2. I want my grandkids to experience the fun I experience every day.
Gaming consoles give me a way to channel nostalgia and nourish my soul, and what I've learned through travel is that I need a full soul to live sustainably as a digital nomad.
As we get ready for another holiday season, it's okay for you to capture the nostalgia and buy yourself fun gifts, too. You no doubt have core memories of gifts you got as a child—perhaps there's an equivalent gift you can buy yourself as an adult, or something you can get for your children to build upon your own meaningful memories.
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Black Friday sales officially start Friday, November 28, and run through Cyber Monday, December 1, and Lifehacker is sharing the best sales based on product reviews, comparisons, and price-tracking tools before it's over.
Follow our live blog to stay up-to-date on the best sales we find.
Browse our editors’ picks for a curated list of our favorite sales on laptops, fitness tech, appliances, and more.
Sales are accurate at the time of publication, but prices and inventory are always subject to change.
Black Friday 2025 is a good time to look for gaming accessories, and I think the best overall deal you can get right now is on the Xbox wireless controller. I started using it in 2021, when I got my Xbox Series X, and I think it's probably the second-best controller for most people. I personally like the PS5's DualSense a little more, but that's not a dig on the Xbox controller at all. Especially when you look at the fact that the Xbox controller is about $15 cheaper than the PS5 alternative, it's a really smart move to get the cheaper option—you can use both with devices other than their respective consoles.
The Xbox wireless controller works with your Xbox Series X|S, PC, and mobile devices. It uses a pair of AA batteries for power. If you don't enjoy buying disposable batteries, you still have the option to buy rechargeable AA batteries or even pick long-lasting Lithium batteries. The controller also has a USB-C port and you can use it to connect the device to your console or PC to use it wired. I've had to use it as a wired controller a couple of times when the AA batteries ran out in the middle of a long online gaming session, and it worked fine. Do ensure that you use a good USB cable, though, or you risk frequent disconnections.
When you're buying an Xbox wireless controller off Amazon, you have the option to choose the black color variant with a USB-C cable. The included USB-C cable is convenient, although other colors might not have one. Good cables are quite cheap and ubiquitous these days, so I'd rather get my favorite color rather than worry about which one ships with a cable. Still, it's worth looking at all your options, since they do differ in price, landing between $40 and $50. The Pulse Red color looks quite tempting to me, but you should pick the color that calls to you.
Does Amazon have Black Friday deals?
Yes, Amazon has Black Friday sales, but prices aren’t always what they seem. Use a price tracker to make sure you’re getting the best deal, or refer to guides like our live blog that use price trackers for you. And if you have an Amazon Prime membership, make the most of it.
What stores have the best sales on Black Friday?
Nowadays, both large retailers and small businesses compete for Black Friday shoppers, so you can expect practically every store to run sales through Monday, December 1, 2025. The “best” sales depend on your needs, but in general, the biggest discounts tend to come from larger retailers who can afford lower prices: think places like Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and Home Depot. You can find all the best sales from major retailers on our live blog.
Are Black Friday deals worth it?
In short, yes, Black Friday still offers discounts that can be rare throughout the rest of the year. If there’s something you want to buy, or you’re shopping for gifts, it’s a good time to look for discounts on what you need, especially tech sales, home improvement supplies, and fitness tech. Of course, if you need to save money, the best way to save is to not buy anything.
Our Best Editor-Vetted Cyber Monday Deals Right Now
We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.
Black Friday sales officially start Friday, November 28, and run through Cyber Monday, December 1, and Lifehacker is sharing the best sales based on product reviews, comparisons, and price-tracking tools before it's over.
Follow our live blog to stay up-to-date on the best sales we find.
Browse our editors’ picks for a curated list of our favorite sales on laptops, fitness tech, appliances, and more.
Sales are accurate at the time of publication, but prices and inventory are always subject to change.
Of all the gaming controllers I've used, I like Sony's DualSense controller the most. I like its heft, ergonomics, and the fact that I don't have to keep replacing AA batteries to use it. And while the DualSense works best with the PS5, it's also a great controller for your PC, iPhone, iPad, or Android devices. If you've been eyeing one, then Black Friday 2025 is a great time to buy the PS5's DualSense controller.
During the Black Friday 2025 sale on Amazon, the PS5's DualSense controller is going for $54 to $59 (25% to 32% off), depending on which color you choose. That's a great price for a fuss-free controller that works with multiple devices. I've used my DualSense controller with my PS5, my PC, and my iPhone, and enjoyed it on all devices. I have a tendency to get sucked into long, story-driven games, and as a result, I used the DualSense for my second 120-hour playthrough of Persona 5 Royal. The controller worked flawlessly, and I never felt tired holding it during these playthroughs.
The DualSense controller has a USB-C port for charging, which is quite convenient to use, but do note that you don't get a cable with this device. Still, if you have any other device that uses USB-C for charging, then you can reuse the same cable to charge this controller. If you couldn't tell from the name, the DualSense's haptic feedback is especially well-done, as it's a lot more than some mild or intense vibrations. The feedback changes subtly based on what you're doing in-game—try playing the PS5's free Astro's Playroom game to get an idea of the DualSense's capabilities.
The controller also has an integrated touch pad, accelerometer, and gyroscope, which means that it can also be used for motion controls. Don't forget that you get a built-in microphone in the DualSense controller, but if you don't want to accidentally record yourself, you can turn off the mic in your PS5's settings.
How long do Black Friday deals really last?
Black Friday sales officially begin Friday, November 28, 2025, and run throughout “Cyber Week,” the five-day period that runs from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, December 1, 2025. But Black Friday and Cyber Monday dates have expanded as retailers compete for customers. You can get the same Black Friday sales early, and we expect sales to wind down by December 3, 2025.
What stores have the best sales on Black Friday?
Nowadays, both large retailers and small businesses compete for Black Friday shoppers, so you can expect practically every store to run sales through Monday, December 1, 2025. The “best” sales depend on your needs, but in general, the biggest discounts tend to come from larger retailers who can afford lower prices: think places like Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and Home Depot. You can find all the best sales from major retailers on our live blog.
Are Black Friday deals worth it?
In short, yes, Black Friday still offers discounts that can be rare throughout the rest of the year. If there’s something you want to buy, or you’re shopping for gifts, it’s a good time to look for discounts on what you need, especially tech sales, home improvement supplies, and fitness tech. Of course, if you need to save money, the best way to save is to not buy anything.
Our Best Editor-Vetted Black Friday Deals Right Now
After Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine living room box earlier this month, some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales. In a new interview with YouTube channel Skill Up, though, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais ruled out that kind of console-style pricing model, saying that the Steam Machine will be “more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market.”
Griffais said the AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 GPU in the Steam Machine were designed to outperform the bottom 70 percent of machines that opt-in to Valve’s regular hardware survey. And Steam Machine owners should expect to pay roughly what they would for desktop hardware with similar specs, he added.
“If you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at,” Griffais said.
We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.
Black Friday sales officially start Friday, November 28, and run through Cyber Monday, December 1, and Lifehacker is sharing the best sales based on product reviews, comparisons, and price-tracking tools before it's over.
Follow our live blog to stay up-to-date on the best sales we find.
Browse our editors’ picks for a curated list of our favorite sales on laptops, fitness tech, appliances, and more.
Sales are accurate at the time of publication, but prices and inventory are always subject to change.
If you have a gamer on your list, make this the year that you don't get them Lee Carvalla's Putting Challenge when they want Bonestorm. The list of Black Friday discounted items below contains everything from full systems to high-end monitors to novelty gifts that'll get a quick laugh—in other words, something for every kind of gamer.
Meta Quest 3S
If the gamer in your life is virtual-reality-curious, Meta's Quest 3S headset is the best entry-level VR headset. It might not be the top of Meta's line of VR headsets, but it does everything its bigger brother the Meta Quest 3 does—at a much lower price. Check out my comparison for an in-depth look. The Meta Quest 3S is $249, down from $299.
Huqjot retro gaming console
It's a golden age for fans of old school games—emulators have gotten so compact and so inexpensive that you can play almost any old game you can think of with just a memory stick plugged into your TV. There are a lot of emulators choose from, but this classic gaming stick comes pre-packaged with over 20,000 games and 23 emulators plus two controllers for less than $50.
It pains me to say this as a longtime Xbox user, but PlayStation has won this generation for serious console gamers. This sleek, slim version of the console is all digital, so there's no disc drive to worry about. It plays the entire catalog of PS5 games, and it comes with a controller. Plus, the Black Friday price is $399, as cheap as it has ever sold for. If you'd rather have a drive, the PS5 Slim disc version is on sale for $449.
PlayStation DualSense wireless controller
If you do gift a PS5, don't forget the extra controller. This DualSense encourages couch co-op and competitive gaming. It charges through a USB-C port, features haptics, and has a built-in mic, so it's everything you need to get Player 2 up and running fast on a PlayStation system.
Xboxers need a second controller, too.This first-party wireless controller works great and looks slick. It works for both Xbox and PC and includes a "share" button so you can instantly disseminate screenshots and videos. At $49, this Black Friday price is as low as the Ice Breaker has ever been priced.
When you're serious about PC gaming, you need a serious gaming mouse like the Logitech G502 X Plus. This wireless mouse has programmable LED lighting, a dual-mode scroll wheel, and a Hero 25K gaming sensor that's precise down to the sub-micron. They're on Black Friday sale for $128.49, down from $179.99.
KontrolFreek performance thumbsticks
PC gamers aren't the only people who need more precise input. These simple accessories snap on to the thumbsticks of your console controller and give you a little more grip and a little more height, and thus a little better control. They're less than $15 for Black Friday.
This Sceptre PC monitor curves around you for better immersion. It packs 5 million pixels into its 34" frame, features 3440 x 1440, and the 21:9 aspect ratio provides you with 30% more screen space versus a conventional monitor. At $187.97, it's 30% off the list price.
If your giftee is really into flight sims, a set of Logitech flight rudder pedals will take their gaming into the stratosphere (so to speak). Compatible with Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10, this controller has adjustable tension to give the feel of every kind of aircraft, from ultralights to passenger jets. It's $129.99 for Black Friday.
These noise-cancelling Bluetooth headphones from Bose have an onboard mic, USB-C charging, and play for 24 hours on a charge. They sound excellent too, whether you use them for listening to music or making sure you can hear someone sneaking up on you in Battlefield 6. The discount is substantial, too: $199 down from $349.
Everyone needs batteries, but gamers really need batteries. This bundle combines 28 AA and 28 AAA batteries in one package. These aren't the cheap batteries, either; they're Duracells, so they're reliable and long-lasting. They're 18% off for Black Friday.
Crucial X10 Pro 2TB Portable SSD
Crucial's X10 Pro is a two-terabyte SSD drive that connects to just about everything—Windows, Mac, iPad, Chromebooks, Android, Linux, PS4, PS5, and Xbox—via USB-C and USB-A. It stores all kinds of data, and retrieves it fast too: up to 2,100MB/s read and 2,000MB/s write speeds. Plus, it's IP55 water and dust resistance and drop resistant up to 7.5 ft. It's currently $149.99, almost 50% off.
Snactiv Pro Finger Chopsticks
Unwrapping a pair of Snactiv Pros will definitely make your gamer smile. They're finger chopsticks that attach to your knuckles so you can eat snacks without hitting pause or getting Cheeto dust all over your controller, which is either ridiculous or useful, depending on your point-of-view. In other words, a perfect for a Christmas gift.
You might think there's something impersonal about buying gift cards for Christmas, but trust me, this is what gamers actually want—as long as you know what ecosystem they're in. You can set how much money to put on these cards and choose between digital delivery or a physical card.
If there's a Nintendo gamer in your life, this JSAUX charger will power-up their controllers and look good doing it. It charges up to four controllers at once, and features LED lights that tell you how much gas is in the tank. It's $12.99, down from $15.99.
What stores have the best sales on Black Friday?
Nowadays, both large retailers and small businesses compete for Black Friday shoppers, so you can expect practically every store to run sales through Monday, December 1, 2025. The “best” sales depend on your needs, but in general, the biggest discounts tend to come from larger retailers who can afford lower prices: think places like Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and Home Depot. You can find all the best sales from major retailers on our live blog.
Are Black Friday deals worth it?
In short, yes, Black Friday still offers discounts that can be rare throughout the rest of the year. If there’s something you want to buy, or you’re shopping for gifts, it’s a good time to look for discounts on what you need, especially tech sales, home improvement supplies, and fitness tech. Of course, if you need to save money, the best way to save is to not buy anything.
Are Cyber Monday deals better than Black Friday?
Black Friday used to be bigger for major retailers and more expensive tech and appliances, while Cyber Monday was for cheaper tech and gave smaller businesses a chance to compete online. Nowadays, though, distinction is almost meaningless. Every major retailer will offer sales on both days, and the smart move is to know what you want, use price trackers or refer to guides like our live blog that use price trackers for you, and don’t stress over finding the perfect timing.
Over the past couple of weeks, friends and colleagues have made me aware of multiple ingeniously implemented, browser-based ways to play classic MS-DOS and Windows games with other people on basically any hardware.
The late 1990s and early 2000s were the peak of multiplayer gaming for me. It was the era of real-time strategy games and boomer shooters, and not only did I attend many LAN parties, but I also played online with friends.
That’s still possible today with several old-school games; there are Discord servers that arrange scheduled matches of Starsiege Tribes, for example. But oftentimes, it’s not exactly trivial to get those games running in modern Windows, and as in the old days, you might have some annoying network configuration work ahead of you—to say nothing of the fact that many folks who were on Windows back in those days are now on macOS or Linux instead.
Zork, the classic text-based adventure game of incalculable influence, has been made available under the MIT License, along with the sequels Zork II and Zork III.
The move to take these Zork games open source comes as the result of the shared work of the Xbox and Activision teams along with Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO). Parent company Microsoft owns the intellectual property for the franchise.
Only the code itself has been made open source. Ancillary items like commercial packaging and marketing assets and materials remain proprietary, as do related trademarks and brands.
Earlier this year, Google announced the end of its efforts to get Steam running on Chromebooks, but it’s not done trying to make these low-power laptops into gaming machines. Google has teamed up with Nvidia to offer a version of GeForce Now cloud streaming that is perplexingly limited in some ways and generous in others. Starting today, anyone who buys a Chromebook will get a free year of a new service called GeForce Now Fast Pass. There are no ads and less waiting for server slots, but you don’t get to play very long.
Back before Google killed its Stadia game streaming service, it would often throw in a few months of the Pro subscription with Chromebook purchases. In the absence of its own gaming platform, Google has turned to Nvidia to level up Chromebook gaming. GeForce Now (GFN), which has been around in one form or another for more than a decade, allows you to render games on a remote server and stream the video output to the device of your choice. It works on computers, phones, TVs, and yes, Chromebooks.
The new Chromebook feature is not the same GeForce Now subscription you can get from Nvidia. Fast Pass, which is exclusive to Chromebooks, includes a mishmash of limits and bonuses that make it a pretty strange offering. Fast Pass is based on the free tier of GeForce Now, but users will get priority access to server slots. So no queuing for five or 10 minutes to start playing. It also lacks the ads that Nvidia’s standard free tier includes. Fast Pass also uses the more powerful RTX servers, which are otherwise limited to the $10-per-month ($100 yearly) Performance tier.
On Monday, veteran game developer Rebecca Ann Heineman died in Rockwall, Texas, at age 62 after a battle with adenocarcinoma. Apogee founder Scott Miller first shared the news publicly on social media, and her son William confirmed her death with Ars Technica. Heineman’s GoFundMe page, which displayed a final message she had posted about entering palliative care, will now help her family with funeral costs.
Rebecca “Burger Becky” Heineman was born in October 1963 and grew up in Whittier, California. She first gained national recognition in 1980 when she won the national Atari 2600 Space Invaders championship in New York at age 16, becoming the first formally recognized US video game champion. That victory launched a career spanning more than four decades and 67 credited games, according to MobyGames.
Among many achievements in her life, Heineman was perhaps best known for co-founding Interplay Productions with Brian Fargo, Jay Patel, and Troy Worrell in 1983. The company created franchises like Wasteland, Fallout, and Baldur’s Gate. At Interplay, Heineman designed The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate and Dragon Wars while also programming ports of classics like Wolfenstein 3D and Battle Chess.
If you’ve ever tried to hook an old Nintendo 64 up to a modern HDTV, you know the results can be less than ideal. Assuming your original hardware still works and your flatscreen even has the requisite R/F and/or composite inputs to allow for the connection, the N64’s output will probably look like a blurry mess on a flatscreen that wasn’t designed with those old video signals as a priority.
The Analogue 3D solves this very specific problem very well, with a powerful FPGA core that accurately replicates a Nintendo 64 and well-made display filters that do a good job of approximating that cathode-ray tube glow you remember from decades ago. But the lack of easy expandability limits the appeal of this $250 device to all but the most die-hard fans of original N64 hardware.
A beauty to behold
As a piece of physical design, the Analogue 3D is a work of art. The gentle curves of its sleek black shell evoke the original N64 design without copying it, coming in at a slightly smaller footprint and height. Plus, there’s no ugly power brick.
A group of dedicated coders has managed to partially revive online gameplay for the PC version of Concord, the team-based shooter that Sony famously shut down just two weeks after its launch last summer. Now, though, the team behind that fan server effort is closing off new access after Sony started issuing DMCA takedown requests of sample gameplay videos.
The Game Post was among the first to publicize the “Concord Delta” project, which reverse-engineered the game’s now-defunct server API to get a functional multiplayer match running over the weekend. “The project is still [a work in progress], it’s playable, but buggy,” developer Red posted in the game’s Discord channel, as reported by The Game Post. “Once our servers are fully set up, we’ll begin doing some private playtesting.”
Accessing the “Concord Delta” servers reportedly requires a legitimate PC copy of the game, which is relatively hard to come by these days. Concordonly sold an estimated 25,000 copies across PC and PS5 before being shut down last year. And that number doesn’t account for the players who accepted a full refund for their $40 purchase after the official servers shut down.
For well over a decade now, the Cities franchise has done its best to pick up the urban simulation ball that EA’s SimCity famously dropped. Going forward, though, that ball will be handed off from longtime developer Colossal Order to Finnish studio Iceflake (a subsidiary of Cities publisher Paradox Interactive).
The surprise announcement Monday morning on Paradox’s official forums says that Cities‘ developer and publisher “mutually decided to pursue independent paths” without going into many details as to why. “The decision was made thoughtfully and in the interest of both teams—ensuring the strongest possible future for the Cities: Skylines franchise,” the announcement says.
“Both companies are excited for what the future holds while remaining deeply appreciative of our shared history and grateful to the Cities’ community,” the statement continues. Colossal Order “will work on new projects and explore new creative opportunities,” Paradox wrote in an accompanying FAQ.
Valve’s second big foray into first-party PC hardware isn’t a sequel to the much-imitated Steam Deck portable, but rather a desktop computer called the Steam Machine. And while it could go on your desk, Valve clearly intends for it to fit in an entertainment center under a TV—next to, or perhaps even instead of, a game console like the Xbox or PlayStation 5.
Depending on what it costs—and we can only guess what it will cost—the Steam Machine could be a good fit for people who just want to plug a more powerful version of the Steam Deck experience into their TVs. But for people who like tinkering or who, like me, have been messing with miniature TV-connecting gaming PCs for years and are simply tired of trying to make Windows workable, the future promised by the Steam Machine is already here.
Back in 2012, Dishonoredearned the first Game of the Year honor of my tenure at Ars Technica. Looking back on the game some 13 years later, Arkane’s well-constructed world of steam punk magical realism earns its place as a modern classic.
The game does a great job of drawing you into that world immediately, with a memorable opening sequence that sees you framed for the on-screen murder of the empress you’ve been sworn to protect. The scene does a great job establishing the emotional stakes of the coming missions while also throwing you into the deep end of the political infighting that has consumed a besieged, plague-beset kingdom.
A Victorian steam punk world you can lose yourself in.
Credit:
Arkane Studios
Those stakes, and a battle against a real feeling of injustice, drive the plot through some admittedly predictable beats as Dishonored continues through a set of sneak-and-assassinate missions. But it’s hard to care about that predictability when even minor side characters on both sides of the conflict quickly develop from stereotypes to engaging, fleshed-out characters.
If you ask random gamers what price they think Valve will charge for its newly announced Steam Machine hardware, you’ll get a wide range of guesses. But if you ask the analysts who follow the game industry for a living the same question… well, you’ll actually get the same wide range of (somewhat better-informed) guesses.
At the high end of those guesses are analysts like F-Squared‘s Michael Futter, who expects a starting price of $799 to $899 for the entry-level 512GB Steam Machine and a whopping $1,000 to $1,100 for the 2TB version. With internal specs that Futter says “will rival a PS5 and maybe even hit PS5 Pro performance,” we can expect a “hefty price tag” from Valve’s new console-like effort. At the same time, since Valve is “positioning this as a dedicated, powerful gaming PC… I suspect that the price will be below a similarly capable traditional desktop,” Futter said.
DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole similarly expects the Steam Machine to start at a price “around $800” and go up to “around $1,000” for the 2TB model. Cole said he expects Valve will seek “very low margins” or even break-even pricing on the hardware itself, which he said would probably lead to pricing “below a gaming PC but slightly above a high-end console.”
Yesterday’s announcement of new living room and VR hardware from Valve obviously has many gamers clamoring for any news of a more powerful version of the nearly 4-year-old Steam Deck. In a new interview with IGN, though, Valve Software Engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais says that portable gaming silicon still hasn’t advanced enough to justify brand-new benchmark hardware.
“The thing we’re making sure of is that it’s a worthwhile enough performance upgrade [for a Steam Deck 2] to make sense as a standalone product,” Griffais told IGN. “We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20 or 30 or even 50 percent more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that.”
“So we’ve been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now there’s no offerings in that landscape, in the SoC [System on a Chip] landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck,” Griffais continued.
Now, after years of rumors, Valve is finally ready to officially rejoin the VR hardware race. The Steam Frame, set to launch in early 2026, will run both VR and traditional Steam games locally through SteamOS or stream them wirelessly from a local PC.
Powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor with 16 GB of RAM, the Steam Frame sports a 2160 x 2160 resolution display per eye at an “up to 110 degrees” field-of-view and up to 144 Hz. That’s all roughly in line with 2023’s Meta Quest 3, which runs on the slightly less performant Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor. Valve’s new headset will be available in models sporting 256GB and 1TB or internal storage, both with the option for expansion via a microSD card slot. Pricing details have not yet been revealed publicly.
Nearly four years after the Steam Deck changed the world of portable gaming, Valve is getting ready to release SteamOS-powered hardware designed for the living room TV, or even as a desktop PC gaming replacement. The simply named Steam Machine and Steam Controller, both planned to ship in early 2026, are “optimized for gaming on Steam and designed for players to get even more out of their Steam Library,” Valve said in a press release.
A Steam Machine spec sheet shared by Valve lists a “semi-custom” six-core AMD Zen 4 CPU clocked at up to 4.8 Ghz alongside an AMD RDNA3 GPU with 28 compute units. The motherboard will include 16GB of DDR5 RAM and an additional 8GB of dedicated DDR6 VRAM for the GPU. The new hardware will come in two configurations with 512GB or 2TB of unspecified “SSD storage,” though Valve isn’t sharing pricing for either just yet.
If you squint, you can make out a few ports on this unmarked black square.
Credit:
Valve
A strip of LEDs adds a touch of color to the front face of the Steam Machine.
I'm a fan of the big fan.
Credit:
Valve
Those chips and numbers suggest the Steam Machine will have roughly the same horsepower as a mid-range desktop gaming PC from a few years back. But Valve says its “Machine”—which it ranks as “over 6x more powerful than the Steam Deck”—is powerful enough to support ray-tracing and/or 4K, 60 fps gaming using FSR upscaling.
The original Framework Laptop 16 was trying to crack a problem that laptop makers have wrestled with on and off for years: Can you deliver a reasonably powerful, portable workstation and gaming laptop that supports graphics card upgrades just like a desktop PC?
Specs at a glance: Framework Laptop 16 (2025)
OS
Windows 11 25H2
CPU
AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 (4 Zen 5 cores, 4 Zen 5c cores)
RAM
32GB DDR5-5600 (upgradeable)
GPU
AMD Radeon 860M (integrated)/Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Mobile (dedicated)
SSD
1TB Western Digital Black SN770
Battery
85 WHr
Display
16-inch 2560×1600 165 Hz matte non-touchscreen
Connectivity
6x recessed USB-C ports (2x USB 4, 4x USB 3.2) with customizable “Expansion Card” dongles
Weight
4.63 pounds (2.1 kg) without GPU, 5.29 pounds (2.4 kg) with GPU
Price as tested
Roughly $2,649 for pre-built edition; $2,517 for DIY edition with no OS
Even in these days of mostly incremental, not-too-exciting GPU upgrades, the graphics card in a gaming PC or graphics-centric workstation will still feel its age faster than your CPU will. And the chance to upgrade that one component for hundreds of dollars instead of spending thousands replacing the entire machine is an appealing proposition.
Upgradeable, swappable GPUs would also make your laptop more flexible—you can pick and choose from various GPUs from multiple vendors based on what you want and need, whether that’s raw performance, power efficiency, Linux support, or CUDA capabilities.
Now, a new open source project is seeking to extend Linux interoperability further back into PC gaming history. The d7vk project describes itself as “a Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 7 [D3D7], which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine.”
If you’ve played any number of RPGs, you probably know the skill tree as a break from the game’s core action. It’s a place to pause, take a breather, and scroll through a massive visual menu of upgrade options, considering which path of stat and ability tweaks best fits your character and your play style.
With Skigill, indie developer Achromi has taken that break-time menu and transformed it into the playing field for an intriguing Vampire Survivors-style roguelike. And while the Early Access game currently lacks the kind of deep content that will keep players coming back for a long time, it’s still a clever and engaging take on the genre that I haven’t been able to put down for long.
Clear the way, I need +5 armor!
Like Vampire Survivors and its many imitators, Skigill is all about navigating through waves of enemies that converge somewhat mindlessly on your position. The game automatically aims and deploys weapons to carve some safe space through what can be screens full of hazardous enemies, which leave behind coins as they explode in puffs of yellow smoke.
Nvidia’s DLSS has become the secret sauce that keeps gamers hooked on the company’s GPUs. Sure, Nvidia’s GPUs are solid even without DLSS, but the company’s own marketing claims DLSS with multi-frame generation can boost the frame rate of Cyberpunk 2077 from 28 FPS to 242 FPS. That’s an eight-fold improvement! Who wouldn’t want that?
But as some reviewers have noted, the boosts from DLSS aren’t always as impressive in real life as they are in marketing materials. And it’s often less powerful systems—like gaming laptops—that see the most modest benefits. So, I decided to test it out myself.
Here are my Nvidia DLSS 4 results on a gaming laptop. Keep reading for the exact laptop I used and the various gains (or lack thereof) I saw in a handful of different high-profile games.
The laptop I used for these tests
When Nvidia boasted about the awe-inspiring eight-fold improvement in Cyberpunk 2077 performance, those tests were done under ideal conditions. According to the fine print, it was achieved on a PC with an RTX 5090 at 4K resolutions with all the graphical bells and whistles turned on, and in DLSS performance mode.
But that’s far from your typical gaming PC. Most modern gaming PCs are budget laptops—like the Lenovo LOQ 15, so that’s the laptop I chose to use for these tests. It’s equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 250 CPU, 16GB of DDR5 memory, and a 512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD, as well as a 15.6-inch 1080p display with a refresh rate up to 144Hz. With specs like that, it’s one of the best gaming laptops under $1,000.
It also has Nvidia’s RTX 5060 mobile. Boasting 8GB of GDDR7 memory and a maximum graphics power of 115W, the RTX 5060 mobile isn’t an incredibly powerful GPU… but it iswidely available in laptops priced around $1,000, and it faces precisely zero competition from AMD and Intel. That means the RTX 5060 mobile, like the preceding RTX 4060 mobile, is destined to become one of the most popular graphics solutions on the face of the planet.
Even so, the RTX 5060 mobile is much less powerful than a desktop RTX 5090, and the LOQ 15 (which has a display resolution of 1080p) isn’t the preferred scenario for using DLSS. Does that mean DLSS is pointless on a lesser machine? Or is it still an awesome addition? Let’s find out.
Laptop DLSS 4 in Cyberpunk 2077
As already mentioned, Cyberpunk 2077 is the headline use case for DLSS 4. It’s repeatedly included in Nvidia’s marketing, and the claims made are so aggressive they seem unrealistic. But the reality is not so far from what the marketing suggests—when it comes to frame rate, at least.
1080p Ray Traced Ultra, No DLSS:
Avg: 36 FPS
Min: 31 FPS
1080p Ray Traced Ultra, DLSS 4 Auto 2x:
Avg: 99 FPS
Min: 88 FPS
1080p Ray Traced Ultra, DLSS 4 Auto 4x:
Avg: 176 FPS
Min: 160 FPS
Results:
Matt Smith / Foundry
The Lenovo LOQ 15 can barely handle Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p and the Ultra ray-traced preset, with an average just a shade above 30 FPS. For many gamers, reducing quality a step would be preferred to enjoy a smoother and more stable experience.
Or you could just turn on DLSS 4 with frame generation. Enabling DLSS 4 with 2x frame generation boosts the average to 99 FPS, a nearly three-fold gain. If that seems odd, remember that the first test didn’t enable DLSS all (or any other form of upscaling or frame generation), so the gain from DLSS upscaling is also part of this result.
Flipping on DLSS 4 with 4x frame generation boosts the average again to 176 frames per second. That’s not quite the 800 percent gain that Nvidia’s marketing bragged about, but it’s still a nearly five-fold improvement. Honestly, it’s a bit nuts.
Laptop DLSS 4 in Marvel Rivals
Marvel Rivals is another game that paints DLSS 4 in a favorable light. It includes support for DLSS 4 with up to 4x frame generation. It also runs well on the LOQ 15 to begin with, so adding DLSS 4 quickly boosts the average FPS above 100.
1080p Ultra with Lumen On, TUUA (No DLSS):
Avg: 70 FPS
1% Low: 38 FPS
1080p Ultra with Lumen On, DLSS 4 Balanced Frame Gen 2x:
Avg: 145 FPS
1% Low: 44 FPS
1080p Ultra with Lumen On, DLSS 4 Balanced Frame Gen 4x:
Avg: 245 FPS
1% Low: 68 FPS
Results:
Matt Smith / Foundry
As the graph shows, moving from no DLSS to DLSS 4 with 2x frame generation slightly more than doubles performance. Upping DLSS 4 frame generation to 4x boosts performance by (roughly) another 70 percent, for a total increase in frame rate of 350 percent when compared to native rendering (no DLSS).
That said, the 1% Low still reveals some significant dips. I didn’t find them a major problem during actual gameplay, but they were noticeable. Competitive players might not find them acceptable.
This isn’t the fault of DLSS 4, by the way, as those dips still occurred with native rendering. Not to mention that DLSS 4 boosts the dips as well as the average. Still, the difference between the average and dips is high enough that a rare stutter-stop feel can be noticed.
Laptop DLSS 4 in No Man’s Sky
No Man’s Sky is the game I’m currently playing the most out of this set, but the settings I decided on for testing were a bit tricky.
The LOQ 15 is mostly able to handle No Man’s Sky at Ultra detail, but a few settings—including textures and GTAO—obliterated the frame rate. (I’m talking single digits!) Blame the RTX 5060’s 8GB of video memory, which just isn’t enough to handle Ultra textures in this game.
1080p Ultra / High Textures, Tessellation, GTAO, FXAA:
The good news is that DLSS provides a noticeable boost to performance in No Man’s Sky, with the average frame rate increasing by roughly 40 percent. Interestingly, the 1% Low nearly doubled—which is important, as it indicates less noticeable stuttering in-game, something that can be a problem for No Man’s Sky.
On the downside, bumping up from DLSS with 2x frame gen to DLSS with 4x frame gen didn’t return an improvement. In fact, even the 2x frame gen doesn’t provide the 2x performance gain you might expect from its name. Clearly, some other limitation (most likely CPU performance) is a bottleneck here.
This creates an awkward situation. With DLSS 4 enabled, No Man’s Sky can find itself reaching much lower levels of performance than Cyberpunk 2077 and Marvel Rivals, though I’d argue No Man’s Sky isn’t as visually appealing as those games. DLSS 4 Frame Gen still posts a gain and is maybe worth using with 2x frame generation, depending on your preferences for image quality versus frame rate, but it’s definitely not the most impressive result.
Laptop DLSS 4 in Ghostrunner 2
Ghostrunner 2 is a bit tricky. It supports DLSS 4 and multi-frame generation, but it doesn’t offer the same range of options that can be found in other titles. DLSS can be on or off and provides the usual quality settings. Frame generation can also be either on or off, but doesn’t promise a specific multiplier (i.e., 2x, 3x, or 4x).
Perhaps that’s for the best because Ghostrunner 2 didn’t benefit as much from DLSS 4 as other titles.
1080p Epic, No DLSS:
Avg: 115 FPS
1% Low: 41 FPS
1080p Epic, DLSS 4 Balanced Frame Gen:
Avg: 144 FPS
1% Low: 45 FPS
Results:
Matt Smith / Foundry
The average frame rate went up by nearly 30 FPS, which isn’t bad and is arguably still enough to provide a slight boost to motion fluidity. However, it didn’t do much to improve the lowest frame times, and the boost to performance—though nice to have—isn’t essential.
On the other hand, the game averages 115 FPS to begin with, so it’s not as if DLSS 4 is required to save the title’s performance. The LOQ 15 handles it beautifully at native 1080p.
Laptop DLSS 4 in Diablo 4
An action-RPG like Diablo 4 isn’t the sort of game that most people expect to deliver beautiful and demanding graphics. But the game is, surprisingly, rather harsh on modern hardware when the full suite of ray traced features are turned on.
1080p High/Highest, RT Shadows/Reflections High, RT Particles On, No DLSS:
Avg: 52 FPS
1% Low: 35 FPS
1080p High/Highest, RT Shadows/Reflections High, RT Particles On, DLSS 4 Balanced Frame Gen 2x:
Avg: 131 FPS
1% Low: 41 FPS
1080p High/Highest, RT Shadows/Reflections High, RT Particles On, DLSS 4 Balanced Frame Gen 4x:
Avg: 215 FPS
1% Low: 36 FPS
Results:
Matt Smith / Foundry
Diablo 4 ran better than I expected even without DLSS enabled, but adding DLSS 4 with 2x frame generation increased performance by roughly 250 percent. Swapping to DLSS 4 with 4x frame generation boosted performance by a tad more than 400 percent relative to rendering at native resolution with no frame generation.
DLSS 4’s boosts come with a cost
The benchmarks above may look favorable to DLSS 4, and that’s because they are. The option to boost performance by over 500 percent with the flip of a simple switch is nutty. It’s the kind of thing I simply wouldn’t have believed possible if you told me it would exist when I first dove into PC gaming over 25 years ago.
But it’s not all good news.
Image quality can suffer when frame generation is used. Yes, it’s impressive that DLSS 4’s frame generation works at all, but modern AI still has limits. Trying to piece together several synthetic frames for every real frame isn’t easy and it leads to image quality artifacts like blurring, ghosting, and shimmering.
Nvidia
Even Nvidia’s headliner, Cyberpunk 2077, shows this problem. Aiming down the sights of a gun will almost always reveal ghosting and smearing around the weapon’s sight. The problem is most severe with 4x frame generation, but still rather obvious with 2x frame generation. I also noticed this problem in Marvel Rivals when I paid attention to the fast, flashy effects and animations that accompany most in-game abilities.
However, while frame generation can at times lead to noticeable downsides, DLSS 4 upscaling is generally awesome even at 1080p. It’s much improved over DLSS 3 and the best of the current image upscaling technologies. You don’t have to use frame generation with DLSS 4—it’s an option that’s part of DLSS 4 in some titles, and you can choose to leave it off while still enjoying the benefits of DLSS 4 upscaling.
Indeed, that’s probably the way to go if the game you’re playing is already able to achieve a frame rate high enough to match the maximum refresh rate of your gaming display.
But DLSS 4 is still rather awesome
The frame rate boosts found in games well suited to DLSS 4—like Cyberpunk 2077, Marvel Rivals, and Diablo 4—are incredible. The added motion fluidity is smack-you-in-the-face obvious.
That’s important on a laptop with a high-refresh display. Even the budget-friendly Lenovo LOQ 15 has a 144Hz refresh rate. A boost from 36 to 176 FPS, as I recorded in Cyberpunk 2077, is a difference anyone who owns the laptop will be able to enjoy and appreciate. Indeed, DLSS 4 is way more than just “fake frames.”
Matt Smith / Foundry
There’s also something to be said for the range of choice DLSS 4 provides to gamers. Prior to DLSS, your options for improving performance on low-end and mid-range hardware were limited to detail settings or sub-native resolutions. But modern upscaling technologies give you big fat dials that can crank up performance at the expense of image quality, and DLSS 4 provides the biggest, fattest dial.
DLSS 4 isn’t perfect, but I came away impressed by how much utility it provides even on budget hardware at 1080p resolution—so impressed, in fact, that I must begrudgingly admit it could be time for me to join Team Green for my next video card purchase. The benefits of DLSS 4 may even be enough to let me forgive Nvidia for its comical stinginess when it comes to video memory. Maybe.
Battlefield 6 has almost arrived and it’s already getting a lot of love from online shooter fans. The series has a reputation for smooth gameplay, so how is the latest entry faring? That’s the question Will Smith is answering in the latest PCWorld video, benchmarking its micro stutter (or possibly lack thereof?) on an ideal hardware setup. And as Will has explained before, this is a key metric in how smooth a game feels.
Will’s test PC is running an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card, so it’s just about the best hardware you can reasonably expect in the current PC gaming landscape. What we’re looking for isn’t necessarily high frame rates but smoothness. So what we don’t want to see is big spikes in the frame rendering time, which normally oscillate between 5 and 12 milliseconds. And most of the standard campaign gameplay doesn’t really have any of it, though some of the showpiece scripted sections (such as the beach landing) can hit it hard with effects like smoke.
Some Battlefield veterans might be a lot more concerned with multiplayer performance, where Will turned off a lot of the bells and whistles like super-high resolution, DLSS, ray tracing, etc. There are more variables in the frame time due to the general chaos of multiplayer and a lot of extra processing that goes on in a multiplayer game.
But even in multiplayer, the render time was only a little more chaotic, with possible spikes coming from loading shaders. Even with tons of player characters on the screen, Battlefield 6 seems to be remarkably stable. It looks like the developers have also turned off some of the more performance-hitting effects in the multiplayer mode.
Intel is showing off its new Panther Lake laptop CPUs, set to start appearing in devices in early 2026. They’re pretty darn exciting for a lot of reasons, but gamers in particular will be eyeing up those Xe3 integrated graphics that come in 4-core and supercharged 12-core variants. Intel fellow Tom Peterson had a chat with Adam all about it in PCWorld’s latest YouTube video.
The 12-core version of the Panther Lake iGPU is obviously the one to watch, jumping core count over Lunar Lake by 50 percent and giving a huge graphics boost to thin-and-light laptops (and possibly even PC gaming handhelds, currently dominated by AMD’s Ryzen Z series). In addition to the usual power boost that newer chips get, the Xe3 series is getting new intelligent bias control powers for more game-specific resource management, x3 and x4 frame generation for all games that support XeSS 2, and a handful of other optimizations.
Tom’s a great guest—whom you might recognize from The Full Nerd podcast—but unfortunately he couldn’t get specific on that new Intel-Nvidia partnership. And there’s no news on when, or even if, all those NPUs popping up in “AI” PCs will actually add something to gaming powers. Intel’s also not making dedicated chips for handhelds like AMD is, though at least one family from a major manufacturer (the MSI Claw) is offered in Intel flavor.
The Steam Deck still reigns as the go-to pick for handheld PC gaming more than three years after its debut. But if you’re a PC gamer, you know those games can fill up a storage drive faster than you can say “This year’s Call of Duty is 160GB.” Fortunately, you can get a fantastically tiny (in the physical sense) and huge (in the figurative sense) 2TB SSD for your Steam Deck for just $139.99 on Amazon right now.
Surprisingly, you don’t need an Amazon Prime membership to score this deal. It’s available for all and sundry, huzzah.
The Western Digital Black SN770M seems to be one of the most popular options for the M.2 2230 (30mm long) form factor, and it’s perfect for devices like the Steam Deck, other portable gaming PCs like the Asus Ally or Lenovo Legion Go, and even some ultraportable laptops that demand the smallest drive possible. The PCIe Gen 4 drive is more than fast enough for gaming at over 5,000 MB/s, and it comes with a 5-year warranty. All you need to install it on the Steam Deck is a screwdriver. You can read more about this specific module in PCWorld’s review of it, where it gets a glowing recommendation.
Normally in the $180 range, today’s discount on this drive is a solid one, if not unbeatable. It’s a lot cheaper than most 2TB upgrades for handheld gaming PCs. (For example, Valve wants an extra $100 for the Steam Deck OLED model just to bump it up from 512GB to 1TB.) It’s probably the best upgrade you can make to your device in terms of value, so don’t be surprised if this deal goes out of stock quickly.
Get a 2TB SSD for your Steam Deck for just $139.99 right now
Okay, c’mon, you knew this was going to happen. LEGO is on a nostalgia kick at the moment, laser-targeting millennials like me with retro gaming sets, including a 1:1 model of the original Game Boy. This is just a model, albeit a fantastic one with some lenticular swap-out cards for different “games.” But since Game Boy modding has been a thing for years, it’s no surprise that someone already made it play real games.
Natalie The Nerd was already a notable Game Boy modder with an online parts and service shop, so modifying the official LEGO set with replica Game Boy guts (spotted by PCMag) was likely child’s play for her. The original Game Boy hardware isn’t fantastically complicated, even by late-80s standards, and its big brick-like housing offers plenty of workroom. Even so, Natalie started working even before the LEGO set was out, estimating what she’d need to do based on official dimensions.
Her final product preserves all of the exterior LEGO parts, including the brick buttons, with only the “screen” and faux cartridge parts modified to the naked eye. It’s ready to go in terms of functionality, though it looks like her test unit may not have an internal battery pack yet.
Some custom 3D-printed parts are needed for the button functions, and there are a few modern creature comforts: power comes from USB-C (inside a 3D-printed LEGO brick) and the LCD is backlit, unlike any Game Boy from the 20th century. It’s running off of genuine Game Boy cartridges, not an emulator setup, which would probably be a lot easier.
The modder is still working out the last details and will release the plans once she’s done. It looks like a great weekend project.
Microsoft increased the prices for Xbox Game Pass this week, causing a lot of consternation from players who were already less than pleased with price jumps on almost all game consoles and the high MSRP of the incoming ROG Xbox Ally. But if you know where to look, you can still get Game Pass Ultimate at the older $20/month price, at least for a while.
It’s all in the code, or codes. No, I’m not saying you should hack Microsoft like a grungy 90s movie star (or a cringey 2000s TV star). I’m saying there are tons of prepaid Game Pass cards out there that are still going for the original price. These are the little plastic credit card-sized gift cards you often see in grocery stores and drug stores, next to dozens of others for Netflix, Audible, etc. It looks like there are still plenty of them out there going for $20 USD (or three months for $60), and there are digital alternatives delivered via email that work just as well.
GameStop has said it’s still selling Game Pass Ultimate subscriptions at the previous $20/month price (via Tom’s Hardware), presumably because that’s the price the stores themselves paid for the cards. There are also digital versions on Amazon at that price (or tripled for $60), and a few others for things like Game Pass Core (now called “Essential”) or the PC-only Game Pass. Because the codes on these cards or emails are redeemed for a specific tier of service and not a set value in currency like a standard gift card, you’re essentially getting a huge discount on the new prices. Once purchased, they can be redeemed anytime.
If you want to keep playing Game Pass at the old price, hunt down these cards and codes wherever you can. Check physical retailers to see if they’ve raised the price to $30/month (or $90 for three months) for Ultimate. If they haven’t, you just found some free money… okay, not actually free money, but free value in the form of a bunch of PC and console games you can play or stream. But considering how rapidly these services are enshittifying, you might want to load up on the old price while you can. It’s only going to go up.
RAM is one of the components that is often underestimated when gaming—but choosing the right RAM can bring tangible benefits, especially in the gaming sector. DDR5 has long since arrived in the mainstream. However, not every DDR5 RAM module delivers the same performance.
If you are setting up your system with speed and future-proofing in mind, you should focus on DDR5-6000 with low latency.
Current platforms such as AMD’s Ryzen 7000 and 9000 series or Intel’s Raptor Lake refresh benefit particularly strongly from this combination. DDR5-6000 hits the sweet spot here: the memory controllers work optimally at this clock rate. At the same time, voltage requirements and heat development are kept within limits.
Even more important, however, is the CAS Latency (CL). Kits with CL30 or CL28 timings deliver significantly better results than widely used standard kits with CL36 or CL40. The difference is particularly noticeable in CPU-limiting scenarios—for example in competitive shooters such as Valorant or in simulations such as Cities: Skylines II.
The memory latencies can be displayed and adjusted via the BIOS (here from MSI). This is crucial for the performance of DDR5 RAM with a low CL.
IDG
Various benchmarks show performance increases of up to 10 percent with the same CPU clock—simply by switching from a high-clocked, but slow-responding RAM to a finely tuned DDR5-6000 kit with low latency.
The system is also subjectively more responsive: programs start faster, loading times are shorter, and even the Windows desktop feels more direct.
For most users, a capacity of 32 GB RAM remains the sweet spot—more is currently of little benefit in everyday gaming. The quality of the modules is much more important: Those who rely on EXPO or XMP-optimized kits benefit from stable profiles that do not require manual fine-tuning.
The only important thing is that the mainboard and the BIOS or UEFI support these profiles correctly. A quick check on the QVL list (Qualified Vendor List) of the motherboard manufacturer provides clarity here.
DDR5-6000 (here from G.Skill) with low latency is currently the sweet spot for gaming PCs – fast, efficient and ideally matched to current platforms.
G.Skill
In short: DDR5-6000 with CL30 or lower is currently the most efficient and future-proof choice for demanding gamers and power users. If you upgrade now, you’ll not only ensure better performance, but also a stable foundation for future CPU generations.
Screens with OLED panels are increasingly being used in laptops and PC monitors. The reason: The prices for OLEDs have fallen, and this is likely to continue in the future.
A laptop with an OLED display is currently available for as little as $750, such as the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14.
You won’t find top equipment here, neither in terms of components nor the screen. However, the 60-hertz display offered in this device class masters most everyday tasks without any problems, as long as gaming is not involved.
A monitor with an OLED panel is often aimed at special application scenarios. It either supports creative work with outstanding detail or gaming on the computer with ultra-fast switching times.
An OLED gaming monitor with a 27-inch diagonal, QHD resolution and 240 hertz refresh rate is priced at a good $700 — such as the LG Ultragear OLED 27GS95QE-B. A 4K 32-incher such as the Dell 32 Plus (S3225QC) costs upwards of $800. This means that OLED monitors are still no bargain, but their prices are increasingly moving into affordable regions.
The Dell 32 Plus 4K QD-OLED
Matthew Smith / Foundry
Stumbling block: Burn-in due to static image content
Just like OLED televisions, OLED monitors also impress with their outstanding contrast. As they can dim with pixel precision and switch off the pixels completely, they display true black.
The self-illuminating pixels also impress with their rich colors, very short switching times, and extremely stable viewing angles, where colors hardly change at all, even when you look at the screen from the side.
What curbs the enthusiasm for OLED screens in the computer environment is the risk of burn-in. These effects can occur if image content is displayed statically for a long time.
In the case of televisions, this applies to channel and program logos, for example. There are far more possibilities when working on a desktop monitor or laptop display on a daily basis.
This is because many applications involve the display of static content — for example, tables, texts, or the Windows taskbar, which always remains visible in the default settings of the operating system.
Even if the OLED panel is not yet a bargain for PC monitors, many gaming screens, such as the LG Ultragear OLED 27GS95QE-B shown here, are now quite affordable.
LG
There are different levels of burn-in effects: image sticking, image retention, or ghost image is a temporary effect. A slight shadow image or outline remains visible even though the image signal has already changed.
The effect is caused by the fact that OLEDs react very sensitively to changes in the current voltage. If the threshold voltage of the pixel transistors shifts, the faulty picture can occur.
Proper burn-in or image retention, on the other hand, is permanent in OLEDs. Static content that is displayed repeatedly over a long period of time leaves permanent traces on the panel. You then see them as shadow images in the background that no longer disappear.
Burn-in occurs because OLED panels wear out during operation. They age and lose luminosity in the process. However, this is a very slow process. For this reason, genuine defects caused by burn-in are covered by most manufacturers’ device warranties.
In addition, the panel can compensate for a deficit in luminosity by increasing the power supply to precisely these pixels.
OLED maintenance support
For both desktop monitors and most laptops with OLEDs, the manufacturers offer built-in maintenance measures. You should definitely carry them out in order to maintain the panel quality.
In the case of monitors, you will find the integrated routines for OLED maintenance in the on-screen display (OSD). They are often located under the menu item “Other.”
Laptop manufacturers often integrate the functions into the manufacturer’s own maintenance tools. Asus, for example, has added the “Asus OLED Care” section to the MyAsus utility program for laptops with OLED panels.
In many cases, there are also additional apps for both device categories that support you with OLED care. However, the offer depends very much on the specific device.
Lenovo, for example, limits the Lenovo Display Refresh utility to the Thinkpad X1 Fold. At the same time, an update of the respective tool does no harm. In our experience, some OLED maintenance functions are only enhanced by an update.
Pixel refresh: Basic maintenance for the OLED screen
A common maintenance routine that is intended to prevent the risk of burn-in from the outset is the pixel refresh, or pixel update.
This measure checks and corrects the threshold voltage on the pixel transistors. This can shift in the course of OLED operation — especially when many bright areas are displayed.
This is where the most current flows and the highest temperature is generated as a result. The aim of the routine is to restore the threshold voltage that was set when the panel was produced. The correction also eliminates any display errors.
The pixel refresh starts automatically on most devices after a certain number of operating hours. Some monitor models, such as the Dell 32 Plus S3225QC, indicate in the OSD that a pixel refresh is necessary after just four hours.
Visually, a green dot at “OLED screen status” changes to yellow. In this case, however, we do not receive an active notification to intervene. If we start the correction, the process runs automatically and takes six to eight minutes. The display switches off at the end.
For good reason, the setting in the OSD cannot be deactivated. However, you can select that the refresh only starts when the monitor is in standby mode.
Taking a look at the OSD from time to time and performing the refresh will benefit the lifespan of your OLED monitor.
Panel refresh: Self-calibration of the OLED pixels
To prevent irreversible damage caused by real burn-in, all OLED panels have an integrated self-protection mechanism — panel refresh, also known as panel compensation.
The protection process starts automatically after a specified operating time. The device manufacturers are keeping quiet about when exactly this happens. However, several hundred operating hours have probably already passed.
The panel refresh starts as soon as the display is switched off. For this reason, you should not completely disconnect an OLED monitor from the power supply via a switchable power strip.
During panel refresh, the screen uses a memory function. The internal controller saves all the data on light duration and brightness — for each pixel.
Those OLED pixels that have been shining at high brightness for a particularly long time and have therefore already diminished in brightness are given a higher power supply.
This works because OLED panels do not usually light up in the maximum range, but on the basis of the Average Picture Level (APL). This describes in percent how high the average brightness of a picture on the screen is.
Further protective measures: Pixel shifting, logo dimming, and more.
Especially with OLED monitors and laptops intended for gaming, manufacturers integrate additional protective mechanisms for the OLED screen. However, not every model has to feature all of these processes.
Pixel shifting: This function is also known as pixel orbiter. If it is activated, the displayed image is shifted horizontally and vertically by a few pixels at predefined intervals — approximately every three minutes. This changes its position on the display. This is intended to prevent certain pixels from being overused and therefore ageing more quickly.
Logo recognition can be activated on some devices with OLED screens. It detects the static image content on the screen and darkens it to protect the panel from burn-in.
Foundry
Logo dimming/logo detection: If the operating menu of your monitor offers this function, the display automatically recognizes logos and recurring overlays and reduces their brightness. You can usually determine how much this should happen yourself using several levels. This setting is a precautionary measure that is useful for toolbars in games, channel logos, or program names.
Screen saver: To protect the entire display, you can activate a screen saver via the manufacturer’s tool. It starts as soon as there is no input signal — often after just two minutes.
An activated screen saver — here on a Samsung OLED monitor — protects the display from damage caused by static content when the computer is not in use.
Foundry
OLED protection measures for everyone
With these measures, you can protect the valuable OLED screen from burn-in effects and preserve the lifespan of the pixels.
Hide the taskbar: On the computer, the Windows taskbar is one of those static contents that are always displayed. To protect the OLED pixels, you can prevent this by hiding the taskbar.
In Windows 11, right-click on the desktop and select “Personalize.” In the “Taskbar” area, scroll down to “Taskbar behaviors.” Tick the box next to “Automatically hide the taskbar.”
Screensaver: Even if your OLED device does not have a screensaver, you can activate it in Windows 11. Again, under “Personalize,” click on “Lock screen” and go to “Screen saver.”
Ideally, you should choose a dark color. You can display it in the preview and set a waiting time in minutes.
Foundry
Dark mode: Dark mode is a suitable means of further reducing the bright areas on the OLED screen. It is not only easy on the eyes, but also on the OLED panel. It can also be switched on in the Windows “Personalization” area. Click on “Colors” and select “Dark” under “Choose your mode.”
Full screen mode: Full screen mode is particularly recommended for watching films and videos, so that the video display is scaled to fit the entire screen area. Cinema fans should therefore pay attention to the 16:9 format at the time of purchase to avoid annoying bars on the sides.
Brightness control: With desktop monitors, ambient light sensors often regulate the brightness of the OLED screen depending on the conditions at the installation site. Depending on the situation, the luminance is automatically reduced.
For moving images such as films, it is advisable to use existing modes — such as film mode. If you use HDR settings, don’t forget to switch them off again. This reduces the peak brightness, protects the OLED pixels and also saves energy.
Xbox Game Pass is getting a lot more expensive—up to 50 percent more expensive for the all-you-can-eat Ultimate tier—which is a problem for a service that appeals to players based on its relative affordability. It looks like Brad Chacos isn’t the only one cancelling before the higher prices hit, as the Game Pass website is straining under increased traffic.
Yesterday, posters on the Xbox subreddit noticed that when they tried to cancel their Game Pass subscriptions, they were met with errors on the Microsoft My Access website where you manage your various Microsoft-associated accounts. Apparently, a considerable number of users found themselves unable to cancel Game Pass, met with this message: “We couldn’t load your subscriptions. Refresh and we’ll try again.”
The Reddit post (spotted by Windows Central) implies that Microsoft is blocking people from cancelling their subscriptions. That seems unlikely to me. With Hanlon’s Razor in full effect, I’d say it’s more likely that the news of the price increase just nudged a lot of people to do some quick budgeting match and drop the sub. (Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, et al. are probably used to the same dips by now.) Perhaps it’s unsurprising that a 50 percent jump—from $20/month to $30/month for the most popular tier—would cause a rush to leave the service… but the idea that it would overload Microsoft of all companies is a bit telling.
The increase in price isn’t without some added benefits. Game Pass Ultimate now includes more classic Ubisoft games and the Fortnite Crew subscription for the mega-popular Fortnite, and the lower tiers (some of which are also getting more expensive) get some extra games and features. Microsoft is pushing its streaming options especially hard, in combination with its “This is an Xbox” campaign.
But Game Pass is Microsoft’s push to create a new and dominant platform for gaming everywhere, as the Xbox console now lags far behind Sony and Nintendo. Game Pass is supposed to be the crowning feature of the new Asus ROG Xbox Ally, and it’ll be front and center when the new gaming-focused Windows 11 interface arrives for other PC gaming handhelds. Prices are going up everywhere, including for the unpopular Xbox itself (oh wait, that was the first increase in Xbox prices this year, it happened again) but kneecapping your value proposition just as you’re teaming up to sell new hardware seems less than wise to me.
The Lenovo Legion Go 2 is an awesome handheld gaming PC with the best display you’ll find on a handheld gaming PC. The hardware is excellent, but the high price and the Windows 11 experience are huge drawbacks.
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The Lenovo Legion Go 2 is a high-end handheld gaming PC that outshines the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X in many ways. The huge 8.8-inch OLED display is beautiful, and you’re getting everything from a built-in kickstand to detachable controllers for flexibility. For a handheld gaming PC, this is great hardware.
There are two huge elephants in the room here, so let’s get them out of the way so I can review the Lenovo Legion Go 2 for what it is.
Lenovo Legion Go 2: The elephants
First, Windows 11 still isn’t ready for a gaming handheld. When I reviewed the Lenovo Legion Go S, I noted how much of a mess the interface is compared to the Steam Deck I own.
For example, Windows 11 has a “gamepad” keyboard layout that lets you navigate with the on-screen keyboard with the joysticks, but it’s not activated by default. You have to tap into the little settings menu in the on-screen keyboard and turn it on before you can use said on-screen keyboard with the joysticks. Many people will miss this buried setting. Why is this not activated by default on a handheld gaming PC? Windows 11 is full of issues like this.
The good news is that Microsoft is making Windows better for handheld PCs, but the bad news is that Legion Go 2 owners will have to wait for the fix. The Legion Go 2 will get it in “Spring 2026.” If you want it sooner, you’ll have to buy Asus’s ROG Xbox Ally, which will be available in mid-October, shortly after the launch of this Lenovo’s Legion Go 2. I haven’t yet gone hands on with ROG Xbox Ally console, but from a user experience standpoint, I imagine its optimized Windows experience for handheld PCs is going to be much better than the Legion Go 2 at launch. (There’s already a leaked way to enable it on any handheld, but your mileage may vary.)
The second elephant in the room is pricing. The Legion Go 2 we reviewed is $1,349 at launch, and the base model starts at $1,099. Handheld PC gaming started off with surprisingly affordable hardware, but this device costs more than many gaming laptops. It’s a premium device.
Tariffs are almost certainly to blame for part of this. But deals can still be found — as I write this, it’s the Steam Autumn Sale and you can grab a base-model Steam Deck for $319.20. You’d have to really want higher-end hardware (without a polished operating system experience) to pick this over a Steam Deck.
However, if you are looking for a high-end handheld experience and you don’t mind the extra expense — and if you know what you’re getting into with the Windows operating system quirks on a device like this one — this handheld combines the latest high-end handheld-optimized hardware with a beautiful OLED display in a nice form factor, and I really enjoyed playing with it.
Lenovo Legion Go 2: Specs
The Lenovo Legion Go 2 has an AMD Ryzen Z2 processor with AMD Radeon 890M-class graphics. I reviewed the $1,349 model, which comes with AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme hardware and 32GB of RAM. Bear in mind that the base model comes with AMD Ryzen Z2 hardware and 16GB of RAM, so it won’t perform at the same level.
Under the hood, this is RDNA 3.5 — the same graphics you’ll find in Ryzen AI 300 series (Strix Point) laptops, but tuned for a handheld where power usage is critical.
There’s a lot to like here: The RAM is soldered, but the internal SSD is user upgradable. Plus, this machine’s USB4 ports mean external GPUs are a possibility.
Model number: Lenovo Legion Go 2 83N0000BUS
CPU: AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme
Memory: 32 GB LPDDR5x-8000 RAM
Graphics/GPU: AMD Radeon 890M
NPU: None
Display: 8.8-inch 1920×1200 OLED display with touch screen and up to 144Hz variable refresh rate
The Lenovo Legion Go 2 is made of black plastic — Lenovo calls this color “Eclipse Black.” It’s a thoughtful design that feels good to hold, and the plastic is high-quality. Lenovo has really gone above and beyond thinking through ways to make the hardware better than many competing consoles, including the Steam Deck I own and the Legion Go S I reviewed.
The Lenovo Legion Go 2 isn’t trying to be the lightest console — it has a big 8.8-inch OLED screen — so it’s no surprise it’s a little on the heavy side. But the extra weight is a fair trade for the higher-end hardware and larger screen.
For example, you can easily detach the side controllers like you’re using a Nintendo Switch. The Legion Go 2 also has a built-in kickstand, so you can easily prop it up and use it on any surface. The power button has a built-in fingerprint reader so you don’t have to tap a PIN into the sign-in screen each time you wake the console. While the side controllers are detachable, you have to press a button on the back of each one to detach them. While attached, they feel incredibly secure.
Foundry / Chris Hoffman
The Lenovo Legion Go 2 isn’t trying to be the lightest console — it has a big 8.8-inch OLED screen — so it’s no surprise it’s a little on the heavy side. At 2.02 pounds (compared to 1.41 pounds for a Steam Deck OLED), that’s a real factor. It’s not that it’s too heavy to hold, but the weight discourages me from holding it in certain positions for extended periods of time. But the extra weight is a fair trade for the higher-end hardware and larger screen.
Lenovo Legion Go 2: Joysticks, controls, and trackpad
Foundry / Chris Hoffman
The Lenovo Legion Go 2 touts Hall Effect joysticks for a smooth experience and no stick drift, and they feel great. The buttons on the Lenovo Legion Go 2 feel great. Lenovo has also added a few extra buttons for accessing Legion software features, the desktop, and Alt+Tabbing between apps. On the top of the handheld, you’ll find power and volume buttons.
The right controller can be used in “FPS Mode” — you detach it, snap it into a base, and flip a switch on the bottom. Then you can hold it and move it around. While it looks like a joystick, it’s more like a virtual mouse. I didn’t find it particularly ergonomic in my experiments with it, but perhaps you’ll love it if you put some time into learning it.
This handheld also has a good-size trackpad on the right controller, and it’s just the right side and shape to use the mouse with your thumb. After the extremely tiny trackpad on the Lenovo Legion Go S, this one feels excellent. But it’s not like a Steam Deck’s trackpads — there’s no haptic feedback here. It’s a convenient way to accomplish some mouse input, but I wouldn’t want to use it all the time.
The display here is also a touch screen with multi-touch. That’s often critical for navigating Windows, but it does mean you’re encouraged to put fingerprint smudges on the display.
Lenovo Legion Go 2: Display and speakers
Foundry / Chris Hoffman
The Lenovo Legion Go 2’s display is one of its standout features. It’s an 8.8-inch OLED screen on a handheld PC. What’s not to like? I’m not sure I’d even want a larger screen than this one when I’m holding it this close to my face!
With HDR support and up to 1,100 nits of peak HDR brightness and a variable refresh rate up to 144Hz, it’s beautiful. And the display doesn’t seem to massively cut into battery life, either. The battery life was ticking down at a reasonable rate that felt similar to other gaming handhelds I’ve used, despite this higher-end display.
While this is a vivid OLED display, it has a glossy surface. It’s prone to reflections in bright environments like direct sunlight. If you’ll be using this as a handheld console outdoors in challenging lighting environments, that’s going to be a problem: You may want to look for a device with a more anti-reflective screen. But glossy screens look beautiful in the right lighting, and this one is no exception.
Foundry / Chris Hoffman
The HDR support was another place where Windows 11 doesn’t make sense on this handheld: By default, Windows disabled HDR on this device while it was unplugged “to save battery life.” That’s yet another example of Windows not understanding these devices.
The speakers here are great for gaming. They had more than enough volume, and the chunky sounds of firing a shotgun in Doom: The Dark Ages were satisfying. Naturally, there’s not a lot of bass in a handheld console.
Lenovo Legion Go 2: Microphone and biometrics
The Lenovo Legion Go 2 has a dual-array microphone setup. The microphone sounds fine, and the audio is clear enough for in-game chat on a handheld gaming device. It’s a little muffled — this doesn’t sound like a high-end business laptop mic picking up crystal-clear audio for Zoom meetings. But it’s plenty good for voice chatting while gaming.
There’s no webcam on the Lenovo Legion Go 2, but you probably wouldn’t want one and it might be a challenge to fit it into the bezel.
Lenovo put a fingerprint reader into the power button, and it works extremely well. When you wake the Legion Go 2 by pressing the power button, it can instantly sign you into Windows with Windows Hello. You just have to rest your finger on it for a split-second longer. It makes the experience of waking the console fast and streamlines a major pain point Windows 11 has on a gaming handheld.
Lenovo Legion Go 2: Connectivity
Foundry / Chris Hoffman
The Lenovo Legion Go 2 has two USB Type-C ports, and both of them are USB4. You’ll find one on the top of the handheld and one on the bottom. It comes with a USB-C charger, so it’ll charge through one of these ports. Because these are speedy USB4 ports, this handheld should be ready for external GPUs, too.
Aside from the two USB-C ports, you’ll find a combo audio jack and a microSD card slot on the bottom of the handheld. That’s it, and it’s plenty of ports for handheld gaming PC. If you want more ports when using it at a desk, you can connect a dock to the USB-C port.
This device has both Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity. I’d prefer to see Wi-Fi 7 at this point, especially in a premium $1,349 handheld gaming PC, but most people don’t have Wi-Fi 7 yet anyway.
Lenovo Legion Go 2: Performance
The Lenovo Legion Go 2 had solid performance. I was able to play Doom: The Dark Ages, and while I prefer shooting demons with a higher FPS, it was technically playable. Treating this like a console, I fired up games like Sonic X Shadow Generations and saw buttery-smooth performance. The reality is that, while handhelds are improving a lot, their graphics performance is far from high-end desktop or laptop GPUs. If you’re mainly looking to play the latest high-end, most-demanding games, these may not be ideal. But the hardware here offers incredible smooth performance in older games.
I was impressed by how quiet the fans stayed, even in demanding games like Doom: The Dark Ages. The speakers could easily drown them out, and the console itself stayed comfortable, with cool air being sucked in on the underside of the device and blown out the vents on the top. Playing a lightweight 2D game like Deltarune, they were so quiet I could only just barely hear them once I muted the game.
As always when we review gaming PCs, we ran the Lenovo Legion Go 2 through our standard benchmarks to see how it performs. The results show us how it performed against previous generation hardware (I benchmarked the Lenovo Legion Go S) as well as modern gaming laptops.
Spoiler: It’s a big upgrade over the last Lenovo handheld I reviewed. In many workloads, the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme hardware in the Legion Go 2 was often nearly twice as fast as the AMD Ryzen Z2 Go hardware in the Legion Go S.
Foundry / Chris Hoffman
First, we run PCMark 10 to get an idea of overall system performance. This is designed as an overall system performance benchmark, but CPU performance is a big factor.
With an overall PCMark 10 score of 7,285, overall performance was quite good. The AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme hardware here is substantially ahead of the lower-end AMD Ryzen Z2 Go hardware in the Lenovo Legion Go S. It scored on par with lower-end gaming laptops.
Foundry / Chris Hoffman
Next, we run Cinebench R20. This is a heavily multithreaded benchmark that focuses on overall CPU performance. It’s a quick benchmark, so cooling under extended workloads isn’t a factor. But, since it’s heavily multithreaded, CPUs with more cores have a huge advantage.
The Lenovo Legion Go 2 with its eight-core Ryzen Z2 Extreme CPU produced a multi-threaded score of 5,239, a huge jump over the Legion Go S. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t catch up to larger and more power-hungry gaming laptops, but this is very respectable for a handheld PC.
Foundry / Chris Hoffman
We also run an encode with Handbrake. This is another heavily multithreaded benchmark, but it runs over an extended period. This demands the PC’s cooling kick in, and many PCs will throttle and slow down under load.
The Lenovo Legion Go 2 completed the encode process in 1,076 seconds, which is nearly 18 minutes. That’s only a bit slower than gaming laptops with AMD Ryzen hardware. It’s also a massive improvement over the Legion Go S’s performance here.
Foundry / Chris Hoffman
Next, we run a graphical benchmark, just like we do on gaming laptops. First, we run 3Dmark Time Spy, a graphical benchmark that focuses on GPU performance.
With an overall 3DMark Time Spy score of 3,984, the Lenovo Legion Go 2 showed substantial improvements over the Legion Go S. The HP Elitebook X G1a in the chart here isn’t a gaming laptop, it’s a premium business laptop with a similar GPU. That’s a perfect example of what you’re getting here — higher-end integrated graphics from AMD.
Compared to gaming laptops with beefy discrete GPUs, this machine is far behind on GPU performance. But that’s the idea. It’s designed for handheld use, possibly away from an electrical outlet. Big gaming laptops need to be plugged in to deliver solid gaming performance.
Foundry / Chris Hoffman
After that, we run the benchmark built into Shadow of the Tomb Raider, an older game, but one that’s very useful for comparing performance across hardware.
With an average FPS of 40, Shadow of the Tomb Raider was playable on the highest settings here, unlike on the Lenovo Legion Go S. You’ll get even smoother performance if you nudge the settings down, but once again this is a great example of the relative performance of a handheld vs. a traditional gaming laptop.
Foundry / Chris Hoffman
Finally, we run the benchmark in Metro Exodus. This is a very demanding game, and we run it with extreme detail settings. With an average FPS of 14 in our standard benchmark, the Lenovo Legion Go 2 was substantially faster than the Legion Go S here — nearly twice as fast. But you can see how much faster gaming laptops are.
Overall, the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme and its Radeon 890M-class graphics delivered solid performance for a handheld gaming PC.
Lenovo Legion Go 2: Battery life
The Lenovo Legion Go 2 has a 74 Watt-hour battery along with AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme hardware, which can operate between 15W and 35W of TDP. The precise battery life you’re going to get will heavily depend on how you use the handheld. A less demanding game will use much less power. Also, you can configure power usage by pressing the button at the top of the right controller and choosing your preferred thermal mode. “Performance” will deliver more hardware power for gaming but drain the battery faster, for example. Depending on the game you’re playing, lower thermal settings may be just fine.
Foundry / Chris Hoffman
For our standard Windows PC battery benchmark, we play a 4K copy of Tears of Steel on Windows 11 with airplane mode enabled until the PC suspends itself. We set the screen to 250 nits of brightness for our battery benchmarks. This is a best-case scenario for any PC since local video playback is so efficient, and real battery life in day-to-day use is always going to be less than this.
The Lenovo Legion Go 2 lasted 796 minutes in this test — that’s over 13 hours and beats even the HP Elitebook X G1a, which is a business laptop. This hardware can really scale down and sip electricity when you aren’t playing demanding games.
Lenovo Legion Go 2: Conclusion
The Lenovo Legion Go 2 is a high-end handheld gaming PC. The AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme processor and its Radeon 890M-class graphics delivered solid performance and efficiency for a handheld gaming PC, the screen is big and beautiful, and the hardware is well thought out. You get detachable controllers and a kickstand for extra flexibility, too.
But, between the Windows handheld experience and tariffs driving up the cost of hardware, Lenovo is fighting an uphill battle here. At $1,349, you could currently buy a $999 gaming laptop and a $319 Steam Deck and come out ahead with a more powerful laptop at your desk and a more lightweight handheld for on-the-go gaming.
But if you want a handheld gaming PC with higher-end premium hardware — that 8.8-inch OLED is nice — and you’re willing to wait for an improved software experience or deal with the realities of Windows 11 today, you’ll be happy with this, assuming you’re ready to spend this much cash.
Need a new monitor for your PC? I’ve combed through scores of options to find the best monitors on the market right now. These picks are the result of hundreds of hours spent testing the latest models from Acer, Asus, BenQ, Dell, LG, Samsung, and other major brands.
While my favorite monitor overall is an awesome choice for most people, I also have alternative options for budget shoppers, gamers, and those seeking the best HDR performance. After all, not everyone needs the same features from a monitor. You can find out more about how I evaluate monitors and what specs matter most below my list of recommendations.
Why you should trust PCWorld for monitor reviews and buying advice: It’s in our name! PCWorld prides itself on PC hardware experience and expertise. We’ve been covering PCs since 1983, and we now review dozens of monitors every year. All of our recommendations have been personally tested and vetted by our expert reviewers, who’ve applied not only performance benchmarks but rigorous usability standards.
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Who should buy the Dell Ultrasharp U2724DE?
Dell’s Ultrasharp U2724DE is an incredibly versatile monitor that will satisfy most users. It’s great for home office productivity, good for gaming, and can handle more serious content creation workflows, like photo and video editing.
The U2724DE has an IPS Black panel that roughly doubles the monitor’s contrast ratio (compared to other IPS monitors). It can’t beat a more expensive OLED or Mini-LED panel, but it’s still alluring. It also lacks the burn-in worries of OLED which, although unlikely to occur in mixed use, might become an issue if you spend all day working in Excel and plan to keep your monitor for as long as possible.
Dell pairs the IPS Black panel with an enhanced 120Hz refresh rate. Upping the refresh rate greatly improves motion clarity and makes the U2724DE a viable display for gamers. That’s a big deal. It means you can buy one monitor for both work and play.
The U2724DE goes all-in on connectivity. Thunderbolt 4, USB-C, USB-A, DisplayPort-in and -out, and HDMI are present. It even has a 2.5G Ethernet port. These features are ideal if you plan to connect a laptop over USB-C, as the U2724DE will greatly expand the laptop’s connectivity.
Dell Ultrasharp U2724DE: Further considerations
Resolution is the only notable downside. The U2724DE is a 1440p monitor, while many competitors in its price bracket offer 4K. This is often the trade-off made to hit monitor’s 120Hz refresh rate. For 4K goodness see the Dell U3225QE below. Just know that it’s almost 50 percent more expensive.
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Who should buy the Acer Vero B247Y G?
Value shoppers who want a good-quality, versatile monitor at a budget price will be pleased with the Acer Vero B247Y G. This 24-inch 1080p IPS monitor stands out with its surprising 120Hz refresh rate and Adaptive Sync support, making it suitable for both productivity and PC gaming. It also provides great image quality for a budget display, with above-average scores in contrast ratio and brightness, as well as good color performance.
Build quality exceeds expectations, too, with a fully ergonomic stand that offers height, tilt, swivel, and even pivot adjustments—a rarity in budget displays. The monitor’s clear on-screen menu system provides easy access to various image settings, while the inclusion of both modern (HDMI, DisplayPort) and legacy (VGA) connections ensures compatibility with a wide range of devices.
Acer Vero B247Y G: Further considerations
Though it’s possible to find a less expensive 24-inch 1080p monitor, the Vero B247Y G justifies its slightly higher price through quality-of-life improvements, and it still manages to limbo under $150 when discounted (which it often is). It’s hard to find a more well-rounded budget monitor.
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Who should buy the Dell G2724D?
Dell’s G2724D hits the sweet spot for gamers on a budget who also care deeply about quality.
The 27-inch IPS LCD panel features 1440p resolution and a refresh rate of 165Hz. The color gamut spans 100 percent of sRGB, 86 percent of DCI-P3, and 82 percent of Adobe RGB, ensuring a bright and vibrant image that’s not only excellent in games but serviceable for most content creation. But its standout feature is the Adaptive Sync support, with official support for VESA Adaptive Sync, AMD FreeSync Premium, and Nvidia G-Sync.
Despite its affordable price, the monitor doesn’t skimp on design, with a handsome matte black and gray chassis and sporty rear vents that provide an aggressive yet unobtrusive look. It also comes with a functional monitor stand that offers a range of ergonomic adjustments and a compact base that doesn’t take up unnecessary desktop space.
Dell G2724D: Further considerations
The monitor doesn’t offer USB connectivity or 3.5mm audio-out. Also, the HDR performance is a bit lackluster, so those who require HDR gaming may want to look at other options.
But it’s hard to beat the G2724D’s performance at $200 or below and, more importantly, it offers everything an average PC gamer is going to need for smooth and responsive gaming. All told, it offers excellent value, and could have a place on your desk for five to 10 years.
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Who should buy the MSI MPG 272URX QD-OLED?
For anyone who wants a high-performance gaming monitor, the MSI MPG 272URX QD-OLED should be at the top of your list.
This 26.5-inch display delivers stunning 4K resolution with an ultra-smooth 240Hz refresh rate in a cutting-edge OLED panel. It’s an excellent choice for gamers who want both visual clarity and fluid motion. With its 240Hz refresh rate, the MSI delivers fast-paced gaming yet maintains the deep contrast and vibrant colors that OLED monitors are known for. It also supports Adaptive Sync for smooth frame pacing.
MSI MPG 272URX QD-OLED: Further considerations
The QD-OLED panel offers excellent contrast and color accuracy, which makes it a solid pick for creative professionals and anyone who enjoys watching HDR movies. Connectivity is also generous, with HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.1a, and USB-C inputs, as well as 98 watts of USB Power Delivery for charging laptops or tablets. The design is a bit plain, but the stand is sturdy and fully adjustable, which is far more important.
The MSI MPG 272URX is more expensive than 1440p OLED alternatives, which can be found for under $800. But if 4K clarity and a fluid 240Hz refresh rate are what you’re after, this monitor is worth the investment.
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Who should buy the Dell S2722QC?
If you’re looking for a budget 4K monitor, Dell’s S2722QC is the best option going right now. Initially priced at $380, the monitor can now be found for much less, even dipping below $300. It stands out among other budget offerings by combining 4K resolution and USB-C connectivity typically reserved for more expensive models.
Dell’s 27-inch IPS display is suitable for most lighting conditions, with crisp visuals and a respectable brightness of 296 nits. In addition to its sharp 4K image, the monitor delivers color performance that can easily handle everyday productivity, streaming, and light gaming. A USB-C port with 65 watts of USB Power Delivery for charging a connected laptop or tablet, as well as two USB-A ports for connecting wiring peripherals make it very versatile. The monitor even ships with a sturdy yet compact ergonomic stand that adjusts for height, tilt, swivel, and pivot.
Dell S2722QC: Further considerations
Naturally, the Dell S2722QC makes some compromises to keep the price low. The IPS panel’s contrast ratio is low, which can make the image look flat and dull when playing games or watching a movie. Think of it as more of a home office monitor than the centerpiece of a gaming setup. After all, quality 4K gaming monitors are usually more expensive.
All in all, the Dell S2722QC’s combination of 4K resolution, USB-C connectivity, and affordability makes it a solid choice if you want a tack-sharp home office monitor at a low price.
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Who should buy the Dell U3225QE?
This is a great choice for professionals who want a top-of-the-line home office monitor. The U3225QE has it all: a sharp 31.5-inch 4K IPS Black panel with excellent color accuracy and an above-average contrast ratio for a productivity monitor. The 120Hz refresh rate enhances responsiveness, making tasks like scrolling through documents and multitasking smoother. The ergonomic stand provides height, tilt, swivel, and portrait mode adjustments, and the anti-glare coating ensures comfortable viewing in various lighting conditions.
In addition to all that, the U3225QE’s mitigates the need for external docks and adapters, with generous connectivity. It features Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C ports with 140W of Power Delivery—enough to charge most laptops—along with HDMI, DisplayPort, and a secondary DisplayPort for daisy-chaining multiple monitors. A built-in 2.5Gbps Ethernet port ensures a fast and stable wired network connection, a rare feature among monitors. It also offers six USB-A ports, a pop-out USB hub with quick-access USB-C and USB-A ports, and KVM switch functionality for seamless switching between two connected PCs.
Dell U3225QE: Further considerations
While it lacks built-in speakers and its HDR performance is limited, the U3225QE’s extensive connectivity and high-quality display make it a standout choice for professionals who need a central hub for their workspace.
Want a smaller version of this monitor? Check out the Dell Ultrasharp U2725QE. It has a similar 4K IPS Black display panel and Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C connectivity.
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Who should buy the ProArt Display 5K PA27JCV?
The ProArt Display 5K PA27JCV is perfect for content creators, programmers, designers, and anyone who values ultra-sharp image quality and accurate colors for productivity work.
With a true 5K resolution (5120×2880) on a 27-inch panel, the ProArt Display 5K packs an incredibly crisp 218 pixels per inch. That’s much sharper than 5K ultrawides and nearly matches Apple’s Pro Display XDR. Text is crisp and hi-res photos look lifelike.
The ProArt Display 5K’s color performance and brightness solidify its position. The monitor covers 100 percent of both sRGB and DCI-P3 color spaces, plus 91 percent of AdobeRGB, making it ideal for content creation. Its impressive 578-nit brightness ensures excellent visibility in any lighting condition, too.
ProArt Display 5K PA27JCV: Further considerations
Most compelling is the PA27JCV’s unmatched value proposition. At $800, it’s the most affordable true 5K monitor available as of early 2025. While it has some limitations, like a 60Hz refresh rate and modest contrast ratio, these are minor tradeoffs. It delivers super-sharp 5K resolution, professional-grade color performance, and outstanding value.
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Who should buy the Asus ProArt Display 6K PA32QCV?
If you want a 32-inch 6K monitor that delivers exceptional sharpness and strong color performance without the sky-high prices usually attached to this resolution, the ProArt PA32QCV is an easy recommendation.
It’s ideal for professionals, prosumers, and creatives—especially Mac users—who need precise visuals, solid brightness, and Thunderbolt 4 connectivity with 96 watts of power delivery. While it doesn’t claim the very top spot in every technical category, particularly in contrast and HDR performance, its combination of resolution, usability, and value is unmatched.
The ProArt also benefits from attractive design, a highly functional ergonomic stand, and a wide range of options that provide precise monitor adjustment. These features make it easy to tune and calibrate the monitor to fit your needs.
Asus ProArt Display 6K PA32QCV: Further considerations
Shoppers who want additional features should know there are other 6K monitors that provide more connectivity or higher-end capabilities.
Dell’s UltraSharp U3224KB, for example, offers an IPS Black panel, integrated 4K webcam, Ethernet, and more powerful Thunderbolt 4 power delivery, making it a great fit for heavy collaboration workflows. MacBook users may also want to look at Apple’s Pro Display XDR, which offers unmatched HDR brightness and contrast alongside its impeccable build quality.
There’s a big problem with these alternatives, though: They’re outrageously expensive. The Dell U3224KB is currently $2,800 and the Apple Pro Display XDR starts at $5,000. Most people who want 6K resolution will be better off buying the PA32QCV and keeping the extra cash in their wallet.
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Who should buy the Viewsonic VP16-OLED?
If you want a monitor that you can easily transport for content creation work, the Viewsonic VP16-OLED will fill that role with aplomb. This impressive monitor combines a class-leading image quality with a unique and useful stand.
The VP16-OLED has a 15.6-inch OLED panel with 1080p resolution. It delivers outstanding image quality, scoring top marks in color accuracy, gamut, and contrast. The VP16-OLED’s performance is superior to many full-sized OLED monitors—and completely smashes portable competitors. This makes the VP16-OLED ideal for photographers, videographers, and other content creators.
The monitor has a versatile stand. It can be used as a kickstand, as is true of most portable monitors, or expand to hold the monitor upright. The stand includes two USB-C ports, either of which can be used to provide power and video input to the monitor. It also offers a micro-HDMI port for use with devices that lack USB-C.
Viewsonic VP16-OLED: Further considerations
Viewsonic bundles the monitor with several cable types and a USB-C power brick, so you don’t have to buy additional adapter cables or accessories.
There’s just one problem: It’s expensive. The Viewsonic VP16-OLED retails at $399.99, more than double the price of a basic 1080p portable monitor. That’s tough to justify if you just need a second monitor to display Slack and Twitter, but it’s a worthwhile upgrade if you care about image quality.
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Who should buy the BenQ RD280U?
The BenQ RD280U is the best monitor for coders thanks to its unusual 3:2 aspect ratio, which is much taller than a conventional widescreen. The extra height is great for viewing more lines of code simultaneously and reduces the need for constant scrolling back or forth.
Beyond its unique aspect ratio, the RD280U’s image quality is ideal for long coding sessions. The monitor’s IPS panel delivers excellent color accuracy and wide viewing angles, ensuring code remains clear and legible from any position. The 28-inch display panel has a crisp 3840×2560 resolution, which helps to render small fonts. It also has a matte finish that reduces glare, making it ideal for various lighting conditions.
BenQ RD280U: Further considerations
The monitor has a MoonHalo ambient light and an automatic night mode, both designed to reduce eye strain during extended use — a crucial consideration for programmers who often work long hours. Connectivity is another strong suit of the RD280U, with a versatile array of ports including USB-C with DisplayPort Alternate Mode and 90 watts of USB Power Delivery. Programmers can easily connect and charge a laptop.
Priced at $599.99, the BenQ RD280U is relatively expensive for a monitor of its size, but its long list of unique features makes it an easy recommendation for coders. The added cost is justified by the fact no competitor offers the same features at any price.
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Who should buy the BenQ SW242Q?
Another specialized monitor from BenQ, the SW242Q targets creative professionals with its unique 16:10 aspect ratio and 2560×1600 resolution. Its aspect ratio, which is closer to square than the more typical 16:9, provides additional vertical space for creatives, and its resolution beats most competitive 24-inch monitors.
Designed for professionals, the SW242Q is encased in a sturdy, charcoal black frame and supported by a robust stand that offers adjustments for height, tilt, swivel, and pivot. The stand’s deep and wide base is flat and covered in a luxurious material. Connectivity options include HDMI, DisplayPort, USB-C with 90 watts of USB Power Delivery, and an SD card reader.
Where the SW242Q truly excels is its color performance. It boasts an impressive color gamut that covers most of the DCI-P3 and AdobeRGB spaces, which is essential for accurate photo and image editing. The monitor’s color accuracy is bolstered by its low color error and “fine-coated” panel, which is designed to emulate the look and texture of a printed material.
BenQ SW242Q: Further considerations
The BenQ SW242Q has some trade-offs. It has a low measured contrast ratio of 980:1, which reduces the depth and richness of movie and games. Its 60Hz refresh rate and lack of Adaptive Sync underscore its focus on static content over motion clarity. And with a price tag at around $500, the monitor’s cost may be hard to justify for some.
Creative professionals seeking top-notch color accuracy and a 16:10 aspect ratio, however, are likely willing to pay a high price for the monitor’s strengths. It’s the best, most feature-rich 16:10 monitor available right now.
The Asus ROG Strix OLED XG32UCWG is competitive in the sea of 32-inch OLEDs that supports dual-mode functionality at 4K/165Hz or 1080p/330Hz; the MSI Pro MP165 E6 is a budget portable monitor with a surprising degree of flexibility; the Dell 32 Plus 4K QD-OLED delivers great image quality, solid audio, and good motion clarity, at a competitive price; the Arzopa Z1FC is a budget portable monitor that can game; the Alienware AW3425DW foregoes extra features to deliver stellar SDR and HDR image quality at an aggressive price; the MSI Modern MD272UPSW is a solid smart TV powered by Google TV OS; the Asus ProArt PA32UCDM delivers pro-worthy OLED image quality and high refresh rates, but limited connectivity holds it back; the HP Omen Transcend 32 combines great USB-C connectivity and top-tier SDR image quality with a 4K OLED panel; the LG Ultragear 45GX950A-B‘s high price and extreme curve aren’t for everyone, but it’s gamers will appreciate its sharpness and HDR performance; the BenQ GW2786TC is a great choice if you need a home office display with USB-C for under $200; the Gigabyte G34WQCP is a $350 ultrawide monitor that delivers in SDR brightness, contrast, and color performance; the Asus ProArt PA278CFRV offers the color performance and connectivity options that one needs for productivity at a very friendly $380; the Samsung OLED G8 makes a good fit for small spaces, where its dual purpose as computer display and TV can really earn its keep.
How we test monitors
Our monitor guides are based on testing by freelance and staff contributors with decades of combined experience.
While we rely on our eyes for an initial impression, we thoroughly test each monitor with a Datacolor Spyder X2 Ultra color calibration tool. This specialized hardware can objectively measure a monitor’s brightness, contrast, color gamut, color accuracy, luminance and color uniformity, gamma, and many other aspects of image quality.
Using this tool helps us detect strengths and weaknesses that don’t stand out at a glance and guarantees that a change in lighting conditions or monitor location won’t skew our impression.
Matthew S. Smith is a freelance technology journalist with 15 years of experience reviewing consumer electronics, including the universe of computer monitors. In addition to PCWorld, his work can be found on Wired, Digital Trends, Reviewed, Lifewire, and other technology publications.
How to choose the best monitor
There are literally hundreds—and perhaps thousands—of monitors to choose from. Choosing one from the crowd can be difficult, but knowing the key traits of a monitor will help you make your decision.
Resolution
Most monitors are available in 4K (3840×2160), 1440p (2560×1440), and 1080p (1920×1080) resolution. A higher resolution provides a sharper, more attractive image and is generally preferable. There’s nothing wrong with 1080p, however. It remains the baseline and is by far the most popular resolution sold today.
Connectivity
Look for a monitor with a connection supported by your computer. HDMI and DisplayPort are the most common. USB-C is rising in popularity because it can charge connected devices, such as a laptop.
Refresh rate
Most monitors have a 60Hz refresh rate, but a higher refresh rate (such as 144Hz) will make motion look smooth and crisp. This is most appealing to PC gamers, as improved motion performance is most noticeable when panning the camera in a 3D game.
Adaptive sync
This technology also improves motion performance. It does so by keeping a monitor’s refresh rate in sync with the video input from your computer. Our guide to FreeSync and G-Sync provides more detail.
HDR
Many 4K monitors support HDR, but often the HDR performance is lackluster. The HDR will function, and may look superior to SDR, but it won’t approach the quality implied by the spec. To ensure a quality HDR experience, look for a minimum of VESA DisplayHDR 1000 certification (or VESA DisplayHDR True Black). See our article on everything you need to know about HDR on your PC to learn more.
Want to know more before you make a decision? Our monitor buying guide explains the nerdy details of monitor specifications.
FAQ
1.
What is the best monitor?
The best monitor overall is the Dell Ultrasharp U2724DE. This 27-inch IPS display with 2560×1440 resolution, a 120Hz refresh rate, and extensive connectivity options can truly do it all, from productivity to gaming. It’s solidly built, has ergonomic adjustments, and top-of-its class image quality.
2.
What is the best cheap monitor?
There are monitors that are cheaper than the Acer Vero B247Y G, but none that are nearly as good for the price. Hovering around $150, the 24-inch, 1080p B247Y G exceeds its price range with a 120Hz refresh rate, adaptive sync, a fully adjustable stand, and above-average image quality. A truly great value!
3.
What size of monitor should I buy?
Monitor size depends on personal preference and location.
A 24-inch monitor is fine for a desk that is around 24 inches deep, or less. Its small size will still be sufficient because the monitor is closer to you.
Most people, however, will want to go with a 27-inch monitor. The added size will make the monitor easy to see. This also opens up a wider range of 4K monitor options, as 4K is very rare on a 24-inch monitor.
Larger monitors, such as a 32-inch widescreen or 34-inch ultrawide, are great for deep desks and people who want an immersive experience. Monitors this large can serve as a TV replacement in a small room.
Displays of even larger size, such as 42-inch or 48-inch HDTVs, are best for home theater setups or an unusually large office. You’ll want to sit four to six feet away from a display of this size.
4.
What display input is best? (HDMI vs. DisplayPort vs. USB-C)
USB-C is the best display input for most people. It works by bundling DisplayPort into USB-C, so offers all the same features as DisplayPort. Yet it retains the features of USB-C including optional support for Power Delivery to charge external devices. This is why we recommend a USB-C monitor for most people.
DisplayPort is generally second-best. It supports higher resolutions and refresh rates than HDMI. This input is particularly common on desktop computers.
HDMI comes in third due to lower resolution and refresh rate support. This is improved by HDMI 2.1, but this feature remains hard to find and often adds to a monitor’s price.
All three of the options above handle 1080p at 60Hz, which is the most common resolution and refresh rate available today. It’s also important to buy a monitor that has an input compatible with your PC.
5.
Are all monitors compatible with Windows and MacOS?
Modern monitors are compatible with all recent versions of Windows and MacOS. They’re plug-and-play, which means the monitor should display an image without the need to install driver software or mess with Windows or MacOS settings.
Electronic Arts (EA) is being privatized for $55 billion, one of the biggest deals in gaming history. The buyers include Saudi sovereign wealth fund PIF, Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, and Silver Lake.
EA confirmed the takeover on September 29th, 2025 in a press release. Shareholders will receive $210 per share, a 25 percent premium to the current share price (before the rumors).
The deal—financed with $36 billion in equity (including PIF’s 9.9 percent stake) and a $20 billion loan from J.P. Morgan—is expected to be completed in early 2027 following shareholder and regulatory approval. It’s the most expensive leveraged buyout of all time and the second largest gaming deal ever, after Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard for $69 billion.
EA—known for game franchises like FIFA, Madden NFL, Battlefield, The Sims, and Need for Speed—is under pressure following studio closures and layoffs. Privatization allows for longer development cycles without stock market pressures, explains Variety. CEO Andrew Wilson remains, as do the headquarters in Redwood City, CA.
Saudis and Trump connections in the background
The PIF, headed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, diversifies Saudi Arabia beyond oil. The fund holds stakes in Nintendo, Activision-Blizzard, and Take-Two, and has bought ESL, FACEIT, and Scopely. “PIF is ideally positioned to drive gaming and esports,” said Turqi Alnowaiser, PIF’s deputy governor.
Jared Kushner, son-in-law to President Trump and CEO of Affinity Partners, added: “EA creates iconic experiences—I’m excited about the future.” The investment company Silver Lake, with investments in Unity and Dell, rounds off the consortium.
This deal is a source of controversy for many, though. Saudi Arabia’s severe human rights violations (e.g., the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi) and Kushner’s PIF financing ($2 billion) are fueling debate. Nevertheless, Saudi Vision 2030 is driving gaming investments, with an eye on the 2025 Esports World Cup as the highlight.
Implications for EA and the industry
For EA, privatization means freedom to pursue longer development cycles for games like FIFA and Battlefield without quarterly pressures. After cutting costs with hundreds of layoffs last year, this deal could bring stability. Indeed, the industry is consolidating with Tencent interested in Ubisoft and PIF’s activities (9.4 percent in EA since 2021, plus 55 percent more since 2023) are shaping the market.
The deal must overcome regulatory hurdles, including in-depth reviews due to Saudi participation. Nothing will change for customers until 2027 at least. EA remains a giant, just now in private hands.
For investors and fans, it could be a significant milestone that makes gaming more global. However, as EA has to bear the repayment burden for $20 billion in debt, industry experts expect savings, restructuring, and possibly further job cuts.
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