Black Myth: Wukong Sweeps 2024 Steam Awards As Narrative Gaming Makes Strong Showing

Every year, Valve holds The Steam Game Awards, a community-driven initiative to recognize the best games that were launched in that year. Valve has just released the results for the 2024 Steam Game Awards, which are determined by community vote—as opposed to events like The Game Awards, which feature a jury selection—and split into individual categories. This year, though, the overall winner for Game of the Year was Black Myth Wukong, which beat out other finalists: Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Balatro, and Helldivers 2 for top spot. Game of the Year wasn't Wukong's only victory, either, with the game also taking home the "Outstanding Story-Rich Game Award," which seems logical given its overall victory, and the cleverly named "Best Game You Suck At Award," which is meant to highlight the best difficult game of the year. In this category, Black Myth Wukong was up against Dragon Ball Z Sparkling Zero, The Finals, Ghost of Tsushima, and Tekken 8, which is again a very diverse mix of games and genres, so it's somewhat interesting to see a narrative-driven game like Wukong come out ahead here.

The rest of the Steam Game Awards 2024 was less of a one-man show, with Metro Awakening VR taking Best VR Game of the Year, Elden Ring nabbing the Labor of Love Award, and God of War Ragnarök taking the Best Game on Steam Deck Award. Helldivers 2 won Better with Friends, while Silent Hill 2 took home the Outstanding Visual Style Award, Liar's Bar won Most Innovative Gameplay, Red Dead Redemption won Best Soundtrack Award, and Farming Simulator 25 was crowned with the Sit Back and Relax award, beating out the likes or Webfishing, House Flipper 2, and Tiny Glade. One of the more surprising "minor" awards winners here is God of War Ragnarök taking home Best Game on Steam Deck, since you often hear in discourse around the Steam Deck that it's not suitable for AAA gaming, and God of War is only two years old at the time of writing, meaning it is still very demanding, with an NVIDIA GTX 1060 6 GB quoted as the minimum recommended GPU to play the game.


https://www.techpowerup.com/330376/black...ng-overall

AMD "Navi 48" To Feature AV1 Hardware Encoders with B-Frame Support

The "Navi 48" silicon powering AMD's next-generation Radeon RX 9070 series could feature AV1 hardware-accelerated encoding with support for AV1 B-Frames. In video compression, a B-frame is an intermediate frame that lacks image information, but has motion-vector and other data from the previous and next image frames (or I-frames), which helps the decoder reconstruct the image component of the frame based on temporal frame data. This is compute-intensive, but greatly reduces file-size or bitrate of the stream, as almost every other frame lacks image information. Support for AV1 B-Frame hardware-accelerated encode was sniffed out by HXL in a recent commit to one of the SDKs AMD maintains in a public repository through its GPUOpen initiative.

AMD's Radeon RX 9000 series generation powered by the RDNA 4 graphics architecture will be based almost entirely on two chips, the "Navi 48" and "Navi 44," with the latter powering mainstream and mid-range SKUs; while the former powers performance-segment ones. There is no enthusiast-segment chip this time around. The "Navi 48" is expected to feature a more advanced video encode/decode hardware than the one RDNA 3.5 comes with; and AV1 is likely to get the bulk of development as the royalty-free codec gains popularity with online video streaming services. It remains to be seen if next-generation architectures like RDNA 4 or NVIDIA's "Blackwell" support acceleration for VVC.


https://www.techpowerup.com/330345/amd-n...me-support

(PR) ZOTAC to Showcase Diverse Range of Products at CES 2025

Industry-leading technology manufacturer ZOTAC TECHNOLOGY PTE. Limited is headed to Las Vegas to showcase its newest products at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2025, one of the world's biggest tech events where hundreds of companies from over 150 countries showcase their latest innovations. This is the first time for ZOTAC to showcase its diverse range of products since its headquarters relocated to Singapore.

ZOTAC will include the Healthcare series ZBOX H37R3500W in the showcase, powered with an NVIDIA RTX Ada Generation professional GPU with up to an Intel Core i9 processor in an all-white metal enclosure, EN 60601-1 certification required for medical electronic devices, it aims to boost AI capabilities in the healthcare sector. Following the successful launch of the ZOTAC GAMING ZONE, ZOTAC GAMING's first-ever gaming handheld with an AMOLED display, premium controls, and hardware, ZOTAC is back to give media a very early sneak peek on the potential next step of the ZOTAC GAMING ZONE with stronger hardware. Read full story


https://www.techpowerup.com/330315/zotac...t-ces-2025

This Week in Gaming (Week 1)

In a couple of days, it'll be a new year, which will bring with it a wealth of new game releases, but before that, we have a couple of days left of this year and a few slow days or possibly weeks in the new year. This week's release includes knights with machineguns, bottle caps, also with guns, a futuristic cowboy, too many alien bugs and what appears to be a new take on the classic game RISK. See you in the new year.

Boomcestors / Monday 30 December / Early Access
Are you prepared to crush medieval armies, reduce their defensive structures to rubble, and dominate sprawling battlefields, all with cutting-edge modern warfare technology at your fingertips? Your squad is a lethal machine, armed with today's weapons. Customize your squad's size and composition, determine who will join your deadly ranks, and choose which weapons they'll wield. Steam link Read full story


https://www.techpowerup.com/330297/this-...ing-week-1

FSP MEGA TI 1350W ATX 3.1 Power Supply Launched

FSP launched the MEGA TI line of premium gaming PC power supplies, led by a 1350 W model. It offers 80 Plus Titanium rated switching efficiency, and meets the latest standards, including ATX 3.1 and PCIe 5.1. This particular variant puts out two 12V-2x6 connectors, each capable of 600 W continuous power delivery. Under the hood, the MEGA TI comes with a single +12 V rail design, with a single 112.5 A rail for the 1350 W model. Other features include active PFC, DC-to-DC switching, and most common electrical protections, against over/under voltage, overload, overheat, and short-circuit. The 18 cm-long fully-modular PSU uses a 135 mm fluid dynamic bearing fan to keep cool, and comes with an "ECO mode" switch that engages a passive fanless mode. The company is backing this with a 10-year product warranty.


https://www.techpowerup.com/330254/fsp-m...y-launched

(PR) Frore Systems Unveils AirJet Cooling for NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super

NVIDIA's brand new 25 Watt "little tiny Jetson Nano" - the Jetson Orin Nano Super - capable of 67 trillion operations per second (TOPS) of AI performance, is going to generate a lot of heat that could limit its performance if the device isn't supported by adequate cooling. Thanks to the high AI performance of the Jetson Orin Nano Super, breakthrough AI models such as NVIDIA Isaac for robotics, NVIDIA Metropolis for vision AI, and NVIDIA Holoscan for sensor processing, NVIDIA Omniverse Replicator for synthetic data generation (SDG) and NVIDIA TAO Toolkit for fine-tuning pretrained AI models may now run at the Edge, delivering compute efficiency, reduced latency and data privacy. But without adequate heat dissipation, the Jetson Orin Nano Super will be forced to throttle, significantly reducing its performance and diminishing the capabilities of Edge AI applications supported including robotics, industrial automation, smart cities, healthcare, and retail analytics.

AirJet PAK 5C-25 from Frore Systems, can provide the full 25 Watts of cooling NVIDIA's Jetson Orin Nano Super needs. The AirJet PAK 5C-25 is a fully self-contained, autonomous, plug and play, solid-state active cooling thermal module, that is thin, silent, dustproof, water resistant, and enables the full performance of the Jetson Nano Super, even in the toughest operating conditions. The AirJet PAK 5C-25 can be combined with the Jetson Orin Nano Super to remove 25 Watts of heat, even in industrial grade casings that are ultra compact, silent, vibration free, dustproof and water-resistant. These industrial grade casings, enabled by the AirJet PAK, are massively smaller and lighter than comparable fanless casings that require large, heavy heat sinks to dissipate heat. Read full story


https://www.techpowerup.com/330228/frore...nano-super

ASRock B850 Live Mixer WiFi, and B860 Live Mixer WiFi Series Pictured

Here are some of the first pictures of ASRock's upcoming Live Mixer series motherboards based on mid-range chipsets from AMD and Intel. The Live Mixer brand of motherboards has a similar positioning in ASRock's product stack as Steel Legend, but with a variation in product design, and a mid-range onboard audio solution that uses audio codecs such as the ALC1200 or ALC4080. There's nothing that particularly stands out in this audio solution (no fancy amp circuits or exotic I/O). The B850 Live Mixer Wi-Fi is an ATX board based on the AMD B850 chipset. This is essentially a re-brand of the popular B650, but with out-of-the-box support for the latest Ryzen 9000 series processors, including the 9000X3D series. The board offers three M.2 NVMe slots, one of which is Gen 5, and the others Gen 4. The WLAN solution is very likely Wi-Fi 6E.

Next up, is the ASRock B860 Live Mixer Wi-Fi. This Socket LGA1851 motherboard is based on Intel's mid-range chipset for its "Arrow Lake" processors, the Intel B860. Much like the previous generation B760, it is expected to lack CPU overclocking support. This board visually looks a lot similar to its AMD B850-based sibling, you could almost confuse the two if you're not looking at the CPU socket. You get three M.2 NVMe slots here, too; one of which is Gen 5, and doesn't eat into the x16 PEG slot. We expect this board to offer Wi-Fi 6E, just like the B850 Live Mixer Wi-Fi. Lastly, there's the B860M Live Mixer Wi-Fi, a Micro-ATX variant of this board, with mostly the same feature-set, it's just that the third M.2 slot is without a heatsink; and the second PCIe slot is physically x8 instead of x16, which shouldn't matter since the slot is likely electrical x4 on both motherboard models. Intel and AMD are expected to debut the B850 and B860 in January.


https://www.techpowerup.com/330204/asroc...s-pictured

NVIDIA App Gets v11.0.1 Update, Disables Game Filters by Default

NVIDIA has released the newest v11.0.1 update for its NVIDIA App, and according to the release notes, it comes with a single new update that disables Game Filter by default. Previously, NVIDIA has released an official statement looking into reported performance issues related to Game Filter options in the NVIDIA App.

The NVIDIA app comes as a replacement for GeForce Experience software, which went out of the beta phase and became the default NVIDIA software application since the GeForce 566.33 driver update. Before the update, users were left with an option to manually disable Game Filter options in Settings > Features > Overlay > Game Filters and Photo Mode. Now, users are left with an option to manually enable the option in the same settings menu. Read full story


https://www.techpowerup.com/330184/nvidi...by-default

Qualcomm Wins Partial Victory in Arm Licensing Dispute, Retrial Possible

A Delaware jury has delivered a mixed verdict in the high-stakes licensing dispute between Qualcomm and Arm, with Qualcomm securing a significant but incomplete victory. The jury unanimously found that Qualcomm's use of Oryon cores in its Snapdragon X processors for client PCs did not violate its licensing agreements with Arm. The case centered on Qualcomm's $1.4 billion acquisition of Nuvia in 2021 and subsequent use of Nuvia's processor designs. Arm had alleged that Nuvia's licensing terms couldn't transfer automatically to Qualcomm and demanded renegotiation of the agreements. When Qualcomm proceeded with development, Arm insisted the designs be destroyed. During the trial, Gerard Williams III, the lead developer of Oryon cores and former Apple engineer, testified that the final design contained less than 1% of Arm technology.

This testimony supported Qualcomm's position that its existing architecture license covered products designed by its subsidiaries. While Qualcomm celebrated the verdict allowing continued development of its Snapdragon X processors, the jury deadlocked whether Nuvia violated its original agreement with Arm, specifically about permitting server processor development. This impasse has prompted Arm to announce its intention to seek a retrial on this unresolved count. "We are disappointed that the jury was unable to reach consensus across the claims," Arm stated, wanting to protect its intellectual property and ecosystem. Meanwhile, Qualcomm expressed satisfaction with the decision, stating the verdict "vindicated Qualcomm's right to innovate." The stakes remain high for both companies. Qualcomm relies on its Oryon cores to compete in the PC market, where it currently holds a 0.8% share of Q3 2024 shipments, while Arm derives approximately $300 million annually from Qualcomm, representing 10% of its revenue.


https://www.techpowerup.com/330131/qualc...l-possible

NVIDIA RTX 5080 Laptop GPU Might Be Up to 60% Faster Than RTX 4080 Laptop

Moore's Law is Dead, a prominent YouTube channel specializing in computer hardware leaks, has revealed its expectations for the RTX 50-series Laptop GPUs. We have already reported on a massive product listing leak shedding light on almost every single "Blackwell" laptop GPU, but needless to say, more information is always welcome. According to Moore's Law is Dead, the RTX 5090 Laptop GPU, and this has been hinted at by the aforementioned prior leak, will only sport 16 GB of GDDR7 VRAM - the same as the RTX 5080 Laptop.

Moreover, his sources indicate that the RTX 5080 will drop with a 175-watt TGP and 7,680 CUDA cores, which is shockingly only a hair more than the 7,424 found in its predecessor. However, the source did state that the RTX 5080 will be around 40 to 60% faster than the RTX 4080, which is a massive generational leap in performance. It is not clear at this point how this number was arrived at, but it sure does seem rather utopian. Yet another source has also indicated that an RTX 5090 Laptop card with a whopping 24 GB of VRAM is also in the works which might launch down the line, but there is little else to be said about it. As MLID notes, NVIDIA has very little to no competition in the high-end laptop segment, which inevitably makes things worse for the end-user. Read full story


https://www.techpowerup.com/330096/nvidi...080-laptop