Nvidia graphics card owners can rest easy; Starfield modders have already added support for Nvidia's Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS) technology (alongside the game's official support for AMD's FSR2 upscaling). But unlocking the full power of that mod will require either paying for a Patreon subscription or using cracks to get around some controversial DRM protecting the most full-featured version of the mod.

Since its initial release on Friday, the "Starfield Upscaler" is currently the most popular Starfield mod listed on clearinghouse NexusMods. That should be welcome news to a significant portion of the PC gaming community running a newer Nvidia GPU that supports the frame-rate-enhancing upscaling technology. That's especially true for the Nvidia owners who were outraged when Bethesda announced an official Starfield partnership with AMD this summer.

In practice, though, the practical effect of that DLSS support might be hard to notice for many players. In Ars' testing on a GTX 2080 Ti gaming rig (running at 2560×1440 resolution, Ultra quality, and 50 percent render resolution), we were able to hit 35 frames per second using both the DLSS mod and the game's built-in AMD FSR2 support (which also works on Nvidia cards). Neither upscaling technology had an apparent performance edge, even as both improved significantly on the ~25 fps frame rate when running at full resolution without any upscaling (and even as DLSS has shown superior visual quality in other tests ).

Anticipation is mounting among Marvel fans for the October debut of the second season of Loki , starring Tom Hiddleston as everyone's favorite Norse god of mischief. We now have a new teaser showcasing a time-slipping Loki seemingly caught in an endless cycle of shuttling between the past, present, and future as he tries to restore order to the multiverse.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

As I wrote in my review , the first season of Loki was "an excellent mix of action, surprising twists, canny exposition, and intimate character moments, all leading up to the final reveal: what is the TVA's true nature and purpose, and is there someone (or something) else behind the scenes pulling the strings of the sacred trio of Time Keepers?" The puppet master turned out to be none other than Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors, who reprised the role for this year's Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania ) —or rather, a Kang Variant known as He Who Remains.

Years ago, director Zack Snyder had an idea for an epic Star Wars movie that he pitched to Lucasfilm. That project never panned out for a variety of reasons. But the idea continued to germinate until it became Rebel Moo n , a two-part film for Netflix that Snyder and the streaming giant hope will launch a new franchise. Snyder unveiled the first extended teaser at Gamescom in Germany.

Apart from Star Wars, Snyder has said that his influences include the films of Akira Kurosawa, especially The Seven Samurai and The Dirty Dozen . He has set his epic saga in a universe controlled by a ruthless and corrupt government of the Mother World (the Imperium) with an army led by one Regent Balisarius (Fra Fee), and the rebel moon of the title is called Veldt. Per the official premise:

When a peaceful colony on the edge of a galaxy finds itself threatened by the armies of a tyrannical ruling force, Kora (Sofia Boutella), a mysterious stranger living among the villagers, becomes their best hope for survival. Tasked with finding trained fighters who will unite with her in making an impossible stand against the Mother World, Kora assembles a small band of warriors—outsiders, insurgents, peasants and orphans of war from different worlds who share a common need for redemption and revenge. As the shadow of an entire Realm bears down on the unlikeliest of moons, a battle over the fate of a galaxy is waged, and in the process, a new army of heroes is formed.

Kora knows something about the oppressive nature of the Imperium, since she used to be an Imperium leader, and now seeks redemption from her past. The band of allies that Kora assembles includes a former Imperium general named Titus (Djimon Hounsou); her farmer friend Gunnar (Michiel Huisman); Tarak (Staz Nair), a blacksmith who can bond with animals to rally them to a fight; a cyborg sword master named Nemesis (Doona Bae); a warrior named Darrian Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher) and his sister Devra (Cleopatra Coleman); a spider warrior named Harmada (Jena Malone); and Jimmy, the last of a race of mechanical knights from a fallen kingdom, voiced by Anthony Hopkins. Ed Skrein plays Admiral Atticus Noble, right hand to the tyrannical Regent, and Cary Elwes has also been cast in an as-yet-unnamed role.

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  The Atari 2600+ and joystick. [credit: Atari ]

If you read about Atari issuing a new cartridge of a new Atari 2600 game and your first thought was, "What am I supposed to play this on?" there's an answer for you. Today, the company announced the Atari 2600+ , a $130 retro console with a cartridge slot that can accept vintage and modern Atari 2600 and 7800 cartridges, plus a $25 CX40+ joystick and $40 CX30+ paddle controller bundle that appear to more-or-less faithfully re-create the originals.

All items are currently available for pre-order and will ship in November 2023. The console includes a 10-in-1 game cartridge with Adventure , Combat , Missile Command , Haunted House , Yars' Revenge , and a few other 2600 games.

The Atari 2600+ takes its design cues from the early-1980s revision of the original console, with fake wood grain on the front and four control switches. But Atari says the console is only 80 percent as large as the original console, "making it easier to fit into modern living spaces." The console also has an HDMI output and uses USB-C for power.

First it came to Portal , now it's coming to the Source engine's other big classic: Half-Life 2 is getting a ray-tracing remaster thanks to the efforts of a community modding superteam with support from Nvidia.

Awkwardly titled Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project , the remaster is currently in development with no set release date. Nvidia announced it today as part of its pre-Gamescom presentations. The remaster will use RTX Remix, Nvidia's toolkit, for bringing ray-tracing to classic PC games. RTX Remix was previously announced using The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind as an example; it seeks to give community modders and hobbyists the ability to do ray-tracing conversions for old games, but it's still only available to a few people.

The people, in this case, are a group of modders from multiple community projects who have banded together under the name Orbifold Studios. The team includes modders who worked on VR Half-Life 2 project Project 17 , asset remastering project Half-Life 2 Remade Assets , total conversation mod Raising the Bar: Redux, and another VR mod simply called Half-Life 2 VR , among others.

Enlarge / Intel's latest Arc GPU drivers do come with a firmware update, but contrary to most reports, it's not an "overclock." (credit: Intel)

When we write about Intel's Arc GPUs, we're typically paying the most attention to the A750 and A770 because they're the cards that perform well enough that you might actually put them in an entry-level-to-midrange gaming desktop. But there's one other Arc graphics card of note: the lowly Arc A380, which snuck into some stores a few months before either high-end Arc card was released.

With its eight Xe cores (down from 32 in the A770), 96-bit memory interface, and 6GB of RAM, the Arc A380 has been (in my case, literally) nothing to write home about. It's an entry-level graphics card that competes reasonably well with ancient and low-end cards like Nvidia's GeForce RTX 1650 and AMD's Radeon RX 6400, and its hardware-accelerated AV1 video encoding support makes it mildly interesting for people who work with video. It's one of the better GPUs you can get for $100, its current street price , but that's not saying much.

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  Pre-firmware update, HWInfo reports the clock speed at 2,000 MHz. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

But Intel's latest graphics drivers provided an update specifically for the A380 that seems notable because of how rare it is: the 31.0.101.4644 driver package released last week also includes a firmware update for A380 cards that seems to boost their base clock speed from 2,000 MHz up to 2,150 MHz. That's a 7.5 percent increase, supposedly being provided for free to all A380 owners with a simple firmware update. At least, it would be if it were an actual increase in the card's peak clock speed, which it isn't.

Enlarge / Ubisoft could be the new home to Activision's streaming catalog under a new proposal from Microsoft. (credit: Ubisoft)

In a major restructuring of its long-proposed acquisition plans for Activision Blizzard , Microsoft has announced that the cloud-streaming rights for current and future Activision titles will be controlled by Ubisoft rather than Microsoft itself. The move is an effort to ameliorate concerns from UK regulators who blocked the proposed acquisition in April over potential impacts on competition in the cloud-gaming space.

The newly proposed deal covers perpetual, worldwide streaming rights for all current Activision games and those released in the next 15 years, according to an announcement from Microsoft Vice Chair President Brad Smith. Ubisoft will have exclusive control of those streaming rights outside of the European Union, allowing the company to make those games available on its own Ubisoft+ service and to license them out to other cloud-gaming providers (including Microsoft itself). In the EU, Microsoft will pay to license those Activision streaming rights back from Ubisoft to satisfy promises made to the European Commission regarding free licensing to competing cloud-gaming providers.

In a statement provided to Ars Technica, Ubisoft said the deal would allow Activision titles to be offered via Ubisoft+ Multi Access on PC, Xbox, and Amazon Luna, as well as via Ubisoft+ Classics on PlayStation . "Today’s deal will give players even more opportunities to access and enjoy some of the biggest brands in gaming," said Chris Early, Ubisoft SVP of Strategic Partnerships and Business Development, in the statement.

Enlarge / Someone had better warn that snowsuit-clad guard about the "outdated" content he's about to walk into... (credit: Konami)

Gamers of a certain age may find it hard to accept that the Metal Gear Solid series will be celebrating its 25th anniversary next month. And publisher Konami is apparently worried that the game's age may be starting to show for some modern audiences.

As noted by GamesRadar , the upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection re-release warns players that the games in the collection contain "expressions and themes which may be considered outdated." The disclaimer notes that the games are presented "without alteration" to preserve the "historical context" and the "creator's original vision," but still urges that "player discretion is advised."

While the disclaimer doesn't go into specifics of the "outdated" content in the games, it's not hard to come up with examples that might hit a little differently in the context of the 2020s (warning: vague spoilers for Metal Gear series plot points until the next heading). Metal Gear Solid 2 , in particular, features discussion of some heavy incest themes between a major character and their step-family, for instance. That game also features a scene in which a character grabs another by the crotch to confirm their sex.

Charles Martinet will no longer serve as the voice of Mario, Luigi, Wario, and Waluigi, Nintendo announced via tweet today . The announcement ends Martinet's three-decadeslong career in one of the most iconic vocal roles in video games.

Martinet will be "moving into the brand-new role of Mario Ambassador," Nintendo writes, a role that will see him "continue to travel the world sharing the joy of Mario and interacting with you all!" Nintendo didn't provide a reason for the transition, but the company promised a video message featuring Martinet and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto "at a future date" that might have more details.

"My new Adventure begins! You are all Numba One in my heart!" Martinet said in his own retweet of the news .