NVIDIA’s GeForce Now game streaming service is coming to cars
Happy New Year, folks! I’m trying something new by putting together a daily round up of the biggest gaming news. I’m planning to run the recap in the early evening on weekdays, but we’ll see how it goes. I’ll include the most noteworthy news and trailers I can find, so consider this your one-stop shop for all your gaming news needs.
I’m getting this recap started at a pretty fruitful time, as this year’s CES announcements are underway. NVIDIA announced new GPUs and cloud gaming upgrades today. We have some Microsoft unionization, Twitch and Hitman news as well. So, let’s get to it.
As expected, NVIDIA announced its GeForce RTX 4070 Ti graphics card. It starts at $799 and it’s a lower-priced entry point to 40-series cards. You’ll get more bang for your buck than you will with a 4080. It’s also faster than a 3090 while requiring less power.
The company revealed 40-series GPUs for laptops as well. Laptops with those cards will go on sale on February 8. ASUS is among the companies that are working on laptops with 40-series graphics cards.
On the cloud gaming front, NVIDIA is upgrading the highest tier of GeForce Now to RTX 4080 tech. It’s promising gameplay of up to 240 frames per second with full ray-tracing and DLSS 3 from the cloud, along with click-to-pixel latency below 40 milliseconds to make the service more responsive. The 4080 upgrades will be available on the Ultimate tier for $20 per month or $100 for six months. North America and Europe will get the upgrade starting later this month.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA is bringing GeForce Now to cars, starting with Hyundai, BYD and Polestar models. The driver and front-seat passenger can play while parked, while those in the rear can be literal backseat gamers on the road.
There’s a bunch of other gaming news coming out of CES already. Alienware unveiled a 500Hz monitor. Samsung had a bunch of monitors to show off too, while Dell, Alienware and Acer revealed new or refreshed gaming laptops.
Twitch was down for many users for a while on Tuesday afternoon. All seems well now, though, so you can get back to your regular streaming or viewing.
Around 300 testers at ZeniMax (the parent of Bethesda, Arkane and id Software, among others) have unionized. ZeniMax Workers United is now the largest union at a gaming company and the first union at Microsoft, which bought ZeniMax in 2021.
Microsoft (which is trying to curry favor with regulators and the public to push through its proposed Activision Blizzard takeover) voluntarily recognized the union. Now, the union will need to work with the company to agree on a contract. On the other hand, current leaders at Activision Blizzard have resisted unionization efforts within their ranks.
Hitman 3 is being renamed and will include access to the two previous games at no extra cost as of later this month. I covered the news at Engadget and you can read more details there.
The long-awaited System Shock remake should finally, hopefully, be out in March. The devs at Nightdive Studios offered a few more peeks at gameplay, including the dismemberment system, in a Kickstarter update.
Lastly today, this month’s Amazon Prime Gaming and PlayStation Plus Essential titles are out. If you have a Prime subscription, you can snag The Evil Within 2, Lawnmower Simulator and others at no extra cost:
This month’s PS Plus Essential games are Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (PS4 and PS5), Fallout 76 (PS4) and Axiom Verge 2 (PS4 and PS5). I think I’m ready to start Fallen Order for a third time after dropping off of it on Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming.
Is there anything I missed or should I be keeping a closer eye on something? Let me know! Email me at [email protected], or hit me up on Twitter or Mastodon. Also, follow my blog! It’s a great way to support me and my work at no cost. You’ll get a weekly round-up email that includes everything I publish too.
