There’s no denying that the ongoing semiconductor shortage has made it a challenging time to get your hands on a new GPU. Even if you can, you’re often forced to pay well over the recommended retail price for it, with demand heavily outweighing available supply and thus creating a lucrative market for some unwelcome price gouging. It’s what makes new releases of GPUs, such as the RTX 3050, so tricky. On paper, the latest graphics card from Nvidia delivers–it’s a good GPU for 1080p gaming at high refresh rates, with the bonus of ray tracing and DLSS support. But if you can’t find it for the price it’s meant to be sold at, does that even matter anymore?

The RTX 3050 sits at the bottom of Nvidia’s current line of new GPUs, positioned as this generation’s budget card alongside significantly more expensive options such as the RTX 3060 and RTX 3070. It’s evident that the price cut comes with its own share of concessions made on the hardware side. The GA106 GPU that the RTX 3050 uses is a slightly smaller version of the one in the RTX 3060, suggesting that Nvidia is making economical use of silicon it previously might have kept off shelves. That said, you’re not going to get close to the same performance, even with the 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM that is shared between the two tiers of cards.

Technical details

For starters, the RTX 3050 limits its memory to a 128-bit bus, drastically reducing its effective memory bandwidth to just 224GBps. This comes into play when trying to hit higher frame rates at 1440p, where the available memory on offer hits the mark but just doesn’t have the raw speed to keep up. Elsewhere, the 2560 CUDA cores and 12 billion transistors initially make the RTX 3050 sound more like a replacement for the RTX 2060 from last generation, but its much lower Tensor Core count and effective memory bandwidth keep it well behind in real-world applications.

RTX 3050

RTX 2060

GTX 1060 Ti

CUDA Cores

2560

1920

1280

RT Cores

20

30

N/A

Tensor Cores

80

240

N/A

ROPs

32

48

48

Boost Clock

1777MHz

1680MHz

1709MHz

Memory

8GB GDDR6

6GB GDDR6

6GB GDDR

Bus

128-bit

192-bit

192-bit

Bandwidth

224 GB/s

336 GB/s

192.2 GB/s

TDP

130W

160W

120W

Launch Price

$250

$350

$300

That isn’t to say that the addition of both Tensor and RT cores should be overlooked, especially if you’re planning to upgrade from an older GTX 1060. These are the bits of hardware that make ray tracing and DLSS possible, both of which are big features for a budget card. While ray tracing performance does require some sacrifices in other graphical settings (more on this later), it’s DLSS that continues to be the biggest benefit to even the weakest cards in Nvidia’s Ampere lineup. The RTX 3050 slightly outdoes the raw performance of older cards such as the GTX 1660 Ti (which we didn’t have to test ourselves), you’ll be able to get more out of it for longer thanks to the performance DLSS can claw back, even if you’re just running games at 1080p.

The RTX 3050 doesn’t feature a reference design from Nvidia, so the one we were supplied with for testing comes from Gigabyte. This RTX 3050 OC Gaming Edition is a dual-slot card, featuring a triple-fan design that is overkill for the 130W TDP of the card, even at its boost clocks. The design features a premium look, however, with a nice metal backplate and a cut-out over the furthest fan down the card to allow air to get flung upwards into your chassis for better airflow (a design Nvidia has been using on its own Founder’s Edition cards).

The over-engineered cooling does mean the RTX 3050 stayed whisper-quiet during testing, never going over 76 degrees Celsius on the core when stressed to its limit. The card also features a 0RPM fan mode when the GPU is idle, which is a nice touch in a budget offering. There’s even a splash of RGB with an illuminated and addressable Gigabyte logo on the side of the card for traditional mounting.

Methodology and test bench

Performance is where the real strengths and inescapable weaknesses of the RTX 3050 come to bear, especially if you’re hoping for a GPU that will power your gaming at 1440p for the foreseeable future. The short of it is that this new card is more suited to 1080p gaming in most respects, especially when you’re looking to run the most modern titles at above 60fps. The good news is that, on that playing field, it does remarkably well, as results in graphically demanding titles such as Forza Horizon 5, Metro: Exodus Enhanced Edition, and more show.

Our testing took place in the same machine as the one used for the RTX 3080 Ti (although we won’t be comparing results to that card, for obvious reasons). Because we didn’t have access to either the RTX 2060 or AMD’s latest budget offering, the RX 5600 XT, we couldn’t do comparisons to those either, but a GTX 1060 we did have on hand offers some context into the performance gains you can expect if you missed out on Nvidia’s last generation of GPUs. Testing was done on the following system:

MSI Mortar B550M MotherboardAMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-core/12-thread CPU clocked at 4.65GHzNoctua NH-U12S CPU CoolerCorsair Vengeance DDR4-3200, CL16 RAM (2x16GB dual-channel DIMMs)Corsair Hxi Series HX850i (80mPlus Platinum) PSUIntel 660p 2TB NVMe SSD

Testing was done across numerous titles, both modern and slightly older, all of which allowed us to test features such as ray tracing, DLSS, and more. These include Cyberpunk 2077, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Metro: Exodus Enhanced Edition, Borderlands 3, Gears Tactics, Forza Horizon 5, and Hitman 3.

If you are looking for a GPU that might just tide you over until the semiconductor shortage subsides, but want to make use of a new 1440p display, the RTX 3050 can fill that gap if you’re struggling on much older hardware. In the performance results for Forza Horizon 5 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, it’s clear that you can enjoy frame rates higher than 60fps if you’re willing to drop down a handful of settings from their maximum. That isn’t the rule across the suite, however, with more demanding titles such as Metro: Exodus and Cyberpunk 2077 showing that, in some cases, you might be better off locking your frame rate to 30fps for stability.

That’s especially true if you plan on throwing ray-traced workloads on top of a 1440p resolution. This is where the RTX 3050 really buckles under the pressure, and it’s just not the right card for something this demanding. You can, however, claw back a lot of performance if you combine that with DLSS, which is where the RTX 3050 can make a lot of sense as an upgrade. In some cases, you can almost double your performance when choosing the Performance preset, which doesn’t hinder image quality too much at 1440p. Even at 1080p, there’s additional performance to be gained, although with such a low resolution already you’ll be best served by sticking to Quality and Balanced presets.

Still, with DLSS you can count on breezing through ray-traced games at above 60fps at 1440p, as results in both Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Metro: Exodus show. You can run into some memory bandwidth issues, especially when navigating a world as detailed and large as Cyberpunk’s Night City, but DLSS at least gives you more room to customize your settings without sacrificing too much.

In truth, it’s the features that Nvidia has made standard across its RTX line that make the RTX 3050 worth it, even with its less-than-stellar traditional rasterization performance when compared to previous budget offerings. There’s no question that DLSS puts the RTX 3050 a cut above AMD’s latest budget option (with many other reviews of the RX 6500 XT indicating there’s many more problems in rasterized workloads there, too). The problem then is just whether you can find an RTX 3050 for the $250 that Nvidia is planning to sell many of them for, which skews its value proposition based on what the market eventually decides it’s worth.

Verdict

With cryptocurrency mining still alive and kicking (and the 8GB of VRAM present on this card making it an alluring option), there’s little chance that the RTX 3050 will fly low enough on the radar to be excluded from the current climate of scalping and price gouging. It’s impossible for us to know what it will eventually settle on in terms of price, but at its MSRP there’s a strong case to make for the weakest card in the RTX 30 series line depending on your current setup. It’s an easy recommendation if you held off on a 20-series card, with its latest hardware allowing you to finally take advantage of DLSS and ray tracing.

If you’re looking for an upgrade path from Nvidia’s last generation of cards, the RTX 3050 isn’t really a good option. Even if you’re still managing with an RTX 2060, the performance uplift won’t be noticeable in most cases, so there’s no reason to be thinking about paying more than retail price for a similar experience, and only a slightly convincing argument at MSRP given how the two cards can regularly trade blows. The RTX 3050 might have been the card to buy now because it’s one of the only ones you can find, but it shows that even when pickings are slim you need to think carefully about whether it’s worth the premium.

Read MoreGameSpot – Game News

Certain ideas and assumptions about what World of Warcraft is, ranging from character progression to faction rivalries, have long felt set in stone, baked into the game from its earliest days. It may have taken close to two decades, but some of those assumptions are finally beginning to change.

Blizzard’s landmark MMORPG is almost 20 years old. Plenty has changed in the 18 years since the game first released, both in-game and out. WoW has received eight expansions, new dungeon and raid difficulties, new classes, new races, cross-server play, visual updates, and more. But as much as various pieces of WoW have changed over time, much of the core design philosophy behind the game has stayed the same. Some of those core pillars that have long defined WoW are now changing, at what can only be described as a critical moment in the developer’s long history. Amidst ongoing sexual harassment and discrimination allegations at Activision Blizzard and a planned $69 billion acquisition by Microsoft, the WoW team is looking to forge a new path, one that challenges long-held ideas on what WoW is, how it’s played, and who it’s for. So far, the results are promising.

There is no better example of old assumptions that in recent years have held the game back than the divide between the game’s two factions: the Horde and the Alliance. For almost 20 years, WoW has been defined by the Cold War-esque battle between Azeroth’s two superpowers, so much so that the WoW portion of Blizzard’s annual BlizzCon convention would often begin with a competition among players in the packed convention hall to see which faction was the loudest. The faction rivalry, at least in Blizzard’s mind, has always been one of the most essential parts of WoW’s DNA. Never mind the fact that the Horde and Alliance teamed up in the game’s story to defeat world-ending threats time and time again, dating all the way back to Warcraft III. Never mind the fact that the leaders of both factions regularly cooperate and are even friendly with each other. The war between the factions, and the divide between the game’s two playerbases, needed to persist, because that’s what WoW was all about when it first launched in 2004.

Only a few years ago, this made the idea of cross-faction play unthinkable. Developers even said as much. Humans and orcs fighting together? Off the table, despite the game’s narrative supporting the idea and the fact that the game would benefit from a larger, connected playerbase when it came to enjoying endgame content. The idea was even popular with many players, but that didn’t matter. There were certain ideas that couldn’t be touched, and this was one of them.

WoW is no longer defined by orcs versus humans

Now, in 2022, it’s finally happening. Cross-faction support is coming, allowing Horde and Alliance players to team up for dungeons, raids, and rated PvP. It’s a monumental shift in the idea of what WoW is and can be. The initial response speaks for itself. Players largely seem ecstatic about cross-faction play, proving they are ready for change. While rethinking the iron curtain between the Horde and Alliance is just one assumption the team took a hard look at, there are other changes that have been made or are in the process of being made that reexamine other ideas that were once thought to be untouchable.

The seeds for this kind of change were planted months ago, prior to the release of the game’s 9.1.5 patch (a patch that notably reworked or removed certain systems from the game’s most recent Shadowlands expansion that were widely unpopular with players). It was around that time game director Ian Hazzikostas said the team has, at times, clung too closely to old traditions instilled in them by some of WoW’s original creators.

“It’s patterns we’ve been trained to think in and accustomed to think in,” Hazzikostas said in an interview with GameSpot prior to patch 9.1.5. “Working on World of Warcraft this long, that can lead to what seems like stubbornness to the outside, and I get that and I get that is frustrating.”

One of those patterns, the idea that progression in WoW is largely on a per-character basis instead of account-wide, is now being reevaluated.

“World of Warcraft at the start was rooted in the paradigm of ‘you play your character,’ and you switch to a different character, going back to Classic in 2004, nothing was account-wide,” Hazzikostas said. “Everything lives on your character. If you played an alt, it was a brand-new journey, you’d have to earn everything and do everything from scratch. And that’s pretty standard across RPGs, single-player or otherwise. You make a character, this is your character’s journey.”

However, as the game aged and new classes and races were introduced (and Blizzard began to offer level boosts both free and paid), more and more players had a number of characters to play. Having “alts” became less of a niche part of the game and something a majority of WoW players do. Despite that, few aspects of the game’s progression carried over to multiple characters, resulting in players having to repeat pieces of content or reputation grinds that were not designed with repeated playthroughs in mind.

Whereas the WoW team once looked at most game-system decisions from a character-first perspective, only occasionally unlocking things account-wide, the inverse is becoming true. Evidence of this change in mindset is already evident in WoW’s most recent patch, which introduced alt-friendly changes that were praised by the game’s community.

“I think now increasingly we are asking the question in regard to almost every reward, every piece of content, is this something that holds up for multiple playthroughs?” Hazzikostas said. “Is this something that’s going to feel meaningfully different on a different character? Or is this something, and depending on the answer to those questions, we’d like to make more and more things account-wide or easily accessible to alts from the start?”

As for what’s next, the team has continued to update various elements of the game that could be seen as offensive, problematic, or that have otherwise aged incredibly poorly. These changes have ranged from reworking achievement names to altering quest dialogue, all with the mindset of creating a more welcoming and inclusive game world in the wake of the shocking allegations that have surfaced as part of ongoing investigations and lawsuits into Blizzard’s workplace culture. Whereas altering older in-game content might have once been off the table, that is no longer the case, and Blizzard seems committed to making sure the game in its entirety is reflective of the current development team and playerbase’s values. The current team taking ownership of what WoW is and should be in 2022 is a good thing, even if some of the changes made to older content may seem frivolous to long time players.

It’s clear that Blizzard is looking to chart a new path forward for the MMO that made the developer a household name, one more informed by the modern needs of players and their feedback and less dictated by decade-old ideas about how the game must be. Whether Blizzard is able to chart that path successfully remains to be seen. Fans are still eagerly awaiting news of the game’s next yet-to-be announced expansion, hoping that what Hazzikostas has said “is a new perspective going forward” for the team since patch 9.1.5 will translate into new ideas and a new era of success for the MMO. It’s still unclear what the next year and beyond of WoW will look like, but if nothing else, it’s refreshing to see Blizzard cast off old assumptions that have long held the game back, one update at a time.

Read MoreGameSpot – Game News

The best-selling games of the past week on Steam have been announced, and Dying Light 2 dominated the charts. In the fifth week of 2022, Dying Light 2 held the top three positions, and held six of the top 10 spots overall. That’s possible due to the game’s various editions, all of which are selling well, it seems.

Outside of Dying Light 2, Lost Ark Platinum Founder’s Pack landed at No. 4, with preorders for Elden Ring coming in at No. 6. It Takes Two ended the week as the eighth best-selling game, while Total War: Warhammer III preorders finished tenth. The lists are based on revenue, not unit sales.

To put Dying Light 2’s launch on PC into context, it reached a peak concurrent record of more than 274,000, which is higher than what Halo Infinite was able to achieve–and that game was free (for multiplayer).

This data is available due to how Valve shares information publicly. Other PC stores and console platforms like PlayStation and Xbox do not share similar levels of detail about sales and player behavior.

Dying Light 2 is out now on most platforms, with a cloud-enabled Nintendo Switch version of the open-world zombie game coming later this year.

Steam Top Sellers Week Ended February 6

Dying Light 2 Stay HumanDying Light 2Dying Light 2 UltimateLost Ark Platinum Founder’s PackDying Light 2 Stay HumanElden RingDying Light 2 Stay HumanIt Takes TwoDying Light 2 DeluxeTotal War: Warhammer III

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I was out of commission last week, so I could only watch from a hospital bed as the world reacted to the real-life Fortnite Zero Point that was discovered some 4,000 light-years away from Earth. I thought it was so cool, but couldn’t share in the strangeness of the moment. Thinking I had missed the boat, I moved on with my Fortnite week, finishing Foundation challenges and whatnot. But when I was feeling better, I caught up on the details of the mysterious space object and realized there’s even more to it that’s bizarre. Beyond the way it looks stunningly like the Zero Point, it also behaves like it.

For the uninitiated, let’s catch you up quickly on what exactly the Zero Point even is. I mentioned it a few weeks ago when I compared Fortnite to ABC’s hit drama-adventure series of yesteryear, Lost. That’s because, like the heart of the island on Lost, the Zero Point rests at the center of the Fortnite island, Artemis, and appears to be the life-giving force for all beings in the omniverse.

The Zero Point is often the target of ne’er-do-wells who seek to control it or even destroy it for their own personal power, but to date, no one has snuffed it out for good–despite a few close calls. The Zero Point has a distinct look. It’s a perfect sphere, made up in blue and purple hues, with a wispy tail that spins around the sphere in different directions. It emanates energy and the essence of total enigma at once. Here’s a picture of it for reference:

Okay, I’m kidding. That’s actually the mysterious space object that astronomers found last week. But here’s the weird part: It really does look pretty much identical to the Zero Point, as you can see below.

Now, that’s all the fun I missed last week when I couldn’t write about it here. But a closer look at the details of this strange orb revealed an added hint that something wildly coincidental (or not?) is afoot. Astronomers have noted that this mystery sphere emits a curious pulse of energy roughly every 20 minutes. Fortnite fans who keep up with their lore may recall that the Zero Point seems to be responsible for The Loop–the timelooping mechanism of the island, which resets the island on something of a strict schedule.

If the Zero Point ends, we all end.

According to The Foundation, leader of The Seven, The Loop resets roughly every 22 minutes. What?!

Yeah. It’s weird. This is an object that was not known to humankind, so unlike Lost or the book Sapiens, this can’t have been an inspiration for the game’s story universe. How is it that it looks and acts just like the Zero Point? It’s uncanny to the point of being unsettling. Is there a world out there where everyone is just cranking 90s, flossing like bosses, and waging war with the Imagined Order? If so, how do we ask them to practice better Zero Point care so they don’t erase the omniverse with us inside?

All jokes aside, it’s a really fun coincidence. There’s nothing to be worried about for now. Call me when the evil Cube Queen’s golden cube suddenly appears on our planet. Only then will I worry.

Uh oh.

Read MoreGameSpot – Game News