© Arkane Studios
Lego has announced a collaboration with Netflix to release a series of One Piece Lego sets "coming soon."
The One Piece collaboration was announced by Lego with a short teaser trailer, below, showing off Luffy's iconic straw hat in Lego form. No release date was announced, but the "collection" will be revealed in the coming month, and it's otherwise promised to release "soon."
These sets will be based on the Netflix live adaptation of the beloved manga series, and not it directly or its anime. That being said, the Netflix show perfectly recreated myriad elements of the source material so any Lego versions should be fairly close to all the above.
Straw Hats, are you ready for your next adventure? 🏴☠️ Coming soon. #LEGOOnePiece pic.twitter.com/kBbGTTWDlT
— ONE PIECE(ワンピース) Netflix (@onepiecenetflix) January 23, 2025
One Piece fans are invited to "follow the action and embark on their own grand adventures with multiple new Lego sets, inspired by some of the most iconic scenes straight out of the East Blue," Lego said.
"These sets will feature the main crew as seen in the show for the first time in Lego Minifigure form, transporting fans into the heart of the action featuring settings and scenes pulled straight from the screen."
Netflix vice president of consumer products Josh Simon emphasized an attention to detail, too. "Through every detail of the design process, we've worked to meticulously create a collection of playsets that will give fans new ways to live out their own epic voyages into the Grand Line one special Lego brick at a time," he said.
The live action One Piece adaptation premiered in 2023, while its second season is expected sometime in 2025. It will feature a number of new faces including Lera Abova as Nico Robin, Joe Manganiello as Crocodile, Charithra Chandran as Miss Wednesday, Katey Sagal as Dr. Kureha, Mark Harelik as Dr. Hiriluk, Sendhil Ramamurthy as Nefertari Cobra, Brendan Sean Murray as Brogy, Callum Kerr as Smoker, Camrus Johnson as Mr. 5, Clive Russell as Crocus, Daniel Lasker as Mr. 9, David Dastmalchian as Mr. 3, Jazzara Jaslyn as Miss Valentine, Julia Rehwald as Tashigi, Rob Colletti as Wapol, Ty Keogh as Dalton, and Werner Coetser as Dorry.
Jamie Lee Curtis, who was long expected to play Dr. Kureha after expressing interest herself and co-showrunner Matt Owens saying "at this point we're writing for her," won't appear in Season 2 after all.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.
© AMD/Gigabyte/G.Skill/MSI
Sonic the Hedgehog's third cinematic adventure is speeding its way onto 4K and Blu-ray. If you've been hoping to add it to your physical media collection, you're in luck. The standard 4K release is now available to preorder for $35.99 and there are two steelbooks up for preorder as well for $44.99 a piece: one with a blue pattern on the cover and Sonic in the center and an Amazon exclusive steelbook with a red pattern and Shadow up front.
Both the standard 4K and steelbooks are set to release on April 15 this year. Head to the links below to get your preorders in fast.
This steelbook features Shadow speeding front and center with a red lightning bolt pattern around him. It comes with a 4K UHD version of the film, a Blu-ray, and a digital copy. Again, this is an Amazon exclusive steelbook, so if it's caught your eye you'll want to get your preorders in quickly at the retailer. It's available for $44.99.
The design of this steelbook is similar to the one with Shadow but in blue and featuring Sonic on the move instead. This version also comes with a 4K, Blu-ray, and digital copy of the film. You can preorder it from both Amazon and Walmart right now for $44.99.
If you're just looking to scoop up the standard 4K of Sonic the Hedgehog 3, you can preorder it right now at Walmart for $35.99. Unfortunately, it's sold out at the moment at Amazon. Similar to the steelbooks, you'll get a 4K UHD version of the film, a Blu-ray, and a digital copy.
In our review of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 writer A.A. Dowd said, "Better jokes, better imagery, and two (!) inspired comic performances by Jim Carrey give this Sonic sequel an edge on its overly kiddy predecessors." If you're curious when and where you can stream Sonic the Hedgehog 3 instead, have a look at our guide on how to watch Sonic the Hedgehog 3. And if you'd like to know more about upcoming physical releases in general, check out our breakdown of upcoming 4K UHD and Blu-ray releases.
Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN.
If you’re looking to upgrade your gaming PC, buying one of the best graphics cards can end up being one of the most expensive components. With that in mind, sometimes it’s worth holding off and waiting for the best time to buy a new GPU; but when is that?
As Nvidia and AMD release the next generation of GPUs, we break down some of the best times to buy a graphics card every year.
This might seem obvious to some, but if you play games that are less GPU intensive such as Roblox and Minecraft, you might want to consider steering away from a high-end, next-generation RTX 5090 card and focusing your budget on something a little less… monstrous.
If you’re on a budget, and you don’t need a NASA-certified graphics card, the best option is to look at older budget graphics cards, such as the AMD Radeon RX 6600 or Nvidia’s equivalent offering, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050.
If you don’t plan to play GPU-intensive games, or you’re a lover of indie games, you could consider a cheaper option. Buying the latest GPU for these games is like bringing a nuke to a knife fight, whereas a budget GPU would offer better value over a high-end GPU that the games you play most likely won’t fully utilize.
In many cases, games are more CPU-intensive than they are GPU-intensive. You might be better off looking at the best CPUs to upgrade your gaming PC instead.
But if you’re looking to rock some ray tracing eye candy, you’re going to need to splash out on something a little more powerful. Buying the previous generation of GPUs is often a great way to pick up a bargain.
As Tobey Maguire once said, with great power comes great responsibility. While I’m fairly sure he wasn’t talking about the price of GPUs, it does ring true in this case. If you want a powerful GPU, be responsible with your money and wait for the right sale to come along.
Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Prime Day are perfect for picking up a range of bargain graphics cards. Not only can you find the previous generations at a more affordable price, but you can often find the latest cards at a price that won't require a second mortgage to buy.
While historically sales such as Black Friday and Prime Day have seen some pretty good discounts on GPUs, it’s not guaranteed that the exact graphics card you want will be on sale. If you want a great price you might need to be open to buying a slightly different model, or a GPU from a different manufacturer than what you were hoping for.
If you’ve already got a GPU in mind, but it currently costs too much, you could wait for the next generation of GPUs to be announced. Oh wait, that's right now! Nvidia just announced their 50-series graphics cards, with the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 set to release on January 30. Meanwhile, AMD's RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT are set to hit the market in March.
As soon as a new line of graphics cards is announced, most retailers tend to drop their prices in an attempt to make room for the next-generation GPUs. Once the new range of GPUs is officially released, you will often find that the price of last-gen GPUs often goes down again. So if you've been holding for the something from Nvidia's 40-series, like an RTX 4090 or RTX 4070 Super, expect prices to go down throughout 2025.
Of course, if you've decided you need a next-gen GPU that just released, you’re back to square one and will need to wait for a sale.
When looking for the best time to buy a new GPU, it’s not just the price you need to consider, it’s your current build too. For example, if you’re sporting an Intel Core i5, you’re not going to want to pair that with a beefy AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, as you’re more than likely going to cause a bottleneck.
You might also want to check that your current power supply is up to the task of powering a next-gen GPU. The best power supplies should not only have enough wattage to power your new GPU, but they should also have a sufficient rating to ensure better performance. When it comes to PSUs, there’s no such thing as overkill, a gold or platinum PSU will offer much better efficiency.
When you’re looking to upgrade your graphics card, you essentially want to make sure that no other parts are seriously outdated. If even one component is too far behind the rest of your gaming computer, you could be causing a potential bottleneck.
The last thing to consider when thinking about the best time to upgrade your GPU is the gaming market. For example, when a new engine is released, such as the fairly recent release of Unreal Engine 5, you will likely find yourself waiting a while before games come out that will push the limits of your next-gen GPU. Nvidia's RTX 4090 features DLSS 4, but only some games will be able to take advantage of the AI upscaling. You can check out the full list of DLSS 4 launch titles here.
If you're ready to upgrade sooner rather than later, but aren't looking to spend a fortune on the newest generation of cards, we highly recommend the Intel Arc B580. Check out more recommendations from our full guide to the best budget graphics cards on the market right now.
© Capcom
Capcom is experimenting with generative AI to create the "hundreds of thousands" of ideas needed for in-game environments.
As video game development costs rise, publishers are increasingly looking to controversial AI tools to speed up work and cut costs. Call of Duty reportedly sold an "AI-generated cosmetic" for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 in late 2023, and fans accused Activision of using generative AI again for a loading screen last year. EA said in September that AI was "the very core" of its business.
In a new interview with Google Cloud Japan, Kazuki Abe, a technical director at Capcom who has worked on huge titles like Monster Hunter: World and Exoprimal, explained how the company is experimenting with implementing AI in its game development processes.
“One of the most time-consuming and labor intensive parts of game development is coming up with hundreds of thousands of unique ideas,” Abe explained (via Automaton). He added that designs for things like televisions require their own unique designs, logos, and shape. “Including unused ones, we ended up having to come up with hundreds of thousands of ideas,” he continued.
Multiple proposals are needed for the thousands to tens of thousands of these kinds of objects per game, and each proposal includes illustrations needed to communicate the idea to the art director and artists as well as text, Abe explained.
Seeing room for efficiency improvements, Abe created a system where generative AI could read various game design documents and an AI could output the ideas, enhancing development speed and efficiency, delivering feedback for itself in the process and further refining output.
His prototype, which taps into multiple AI models such as Google Gemini Pro, Gemini Flash, and Imagen has apparently received positive feedback from internal development teams. The result of implementing the AI model would ultimately “reduce costs significantly” compared to doing them all by hand, while also improving quality.
Right now, Capcom’s experimentation with AI models appears to be limited to just this system, leaving other aspects of game development, such as ideation, gameplay, programming, and character design firmly in the hands of humans.
Sayem is a freelancer based in the UK, covering tech & hardware. You can get in touch with him at @sayem.zone on Bluesky.
The first season of the HBO show The Last of Us is arguably the best video game adaptation ever made. It's great, and it (mostly) sticks to the story originally laid out in the 2013 Naughty Dog game for PS3. With The Last of Us season two beginning to air in April on Max, the first season is getting an awesome limited-edition steelbook release so you can catch up to where the show left off. It’s available for preorder now, with a release date of March 18. Read on to see what comes with it.
For anyone who hasn’t seen this first season, it basically covers everything that happened in the first game and the Left Behind expansion, plus some extra world-building story lines that add to the overall effect. The scripts for the first season were all written by showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann (Druckmann was a writer and creative director for both The Last of Us video games).
In the Max show, Pedro Pascal takes the role of Joel Miller, while Bella Ramsey plays Ellie. Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson (who played Joel and Ellie, respectively, in the games) have parts in the show as well. It follows the same basic story as the first game, with Joel escorting Ellie on a cross-country trip through a fungal-zombie-infested America, where Ellie will play a key role in potentially saving the world from the outbreak.
The Last of Us is one of my personal favorite video game series, and I think the show does justice to the exceptional story. You can check out our The Last of Us season one review for more details.
Included in The Last of Us: The Complete First Season Limited-Edition Collectible Steelbook bundle is over two hours of bonus content. Here’s what you get:
If the show left you with an appetite to play the games, you can pick up The Last of Us: Part I on PS5 or PC. The Last of Us: Part II Remastered is also available on PS5 and is coming to PC on April 3. Sony has also released some pretty rad Joel and Ellie action figures, if that's your thing. And for those looking forward to the second season of the show, you can check out 5 details in the season two trailer.
Chris Reed is a deals expert and commerce editor for IGN. You can follow him on Bluesky @chrislreed.com.
The 2025 Oscar nominations for the 97th Academy Awards have been announced, and Emilia Pérez is leading the pack this year with 13 nods — the most earned by a film not in the English language.
Rachel Sennott and Bowen Yang unveiled the nominations on January 23 in a live presentation on the Oscars YouTube channel. Jacques Audiard’s Spanish crime thriller Emilia Pérez featured in multiple categories, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Lead Actress, which Karla Sofía Gascón is up for.
Wicked and The Brutalist followed closely behind with 10 nods apiece, while Conclave and A Complete Unknown each scored eight nominations.
And that’s a wrap! The 97th Academy Awards are set for Sunday March 2, 2025, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. The ceremony will be broadcast live on ABC in the U.S., ITV in the UK, and over 200 other territories worldwide. In addition, and for the first time ever, the show will also be streamed live on Hulu.
Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images.
Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on X/Twitter @A_AnkersRange.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is the best selling game of both December 2024 and the full year 2024 in the U.S., returning to the No.1 spot after Hogwarts Legacy took the crown in 2023.
This is according to Circana data and analysis by Mat Piscatella shared with IGN. The annual Call of Duty release historically is almost always the No.1. best-selling game in the U.S. each year by dollar sales going back to 2008, with a few exceptions. Both Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption II beat it out in their respective release years, and in 2023, Hogwarts Legacy took the crown. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was back on top this year, though it's possible that victory is short-lived given Grand Theft Auto VI's expected release late this year.
This year, Call of Duty was also once again the best-selling franchise in the U.S. for a record 16th year in a row.
EA Sports College Football 25, the No.2 best-selling game of 2024 and the No.3 best-selling game of December, was also the best-selling sports game in U.S. history.
Not a single Nintendo game cracked the top 20 for 2024, though that's possibly because Nintendo does not share digital sales data with Circana, meaning all Nintendo first-party games on this list are only including physical sales in their rankings. That said, on the Nintendo Switch console, Super Mario Party Jamboree was the best-selling game of the year, followed by Mario Kart 8 at No. 2 and Mario & Luigi: Brothership at No.3.
Most of the rankings for the month of December were releases from earlier in the year or even prior years, given a low number of new releases. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was the only new release ranking in December, at No.14. Because Circana tracks in dollar sales, we don't see new releases Marvel Rivals (free-to-play) or Path of Exile 2 ($30, as opposed to $60) on the top-selling games list. However, both ranked on Circana's tracking of the top games in the U.S. by Steam MAUs (No.1 and No.3 for December, respectively) and Marvel Rivals was also No.3 on PS5 and Xbox Series by MAUs.
For the full year, content spending in the U.S. increased by 2% to $50.6 billion, the second highest total for content spending in U.S. history, behind 2021's $52 billion. There was an 11% drop in console content spending, but it was balanced out by growth in all other content areas. For December by itself, video game content spending was down 5% year over year to $5.8 billion. There was a 21% drop in console content spending in December, but PC content spending grew 13%.
Hardware spending for 2024 dropped 25% from 2023 to $4.9 billion, with PS5 as the best-selling console of both the month and the year. Switch was second place for the year in unit sales, while Xbox Series finished second in dollar sales. Digital editions made up 45% of PS5s sold in the U.S. during 2024, and 44% of Xbox Series.
For the month of December alone, hardware spending was down 29% from 2023 to $1.1 billion in December. All three console makers saw the drop: PS5 hardware spending dropped 18%, and Xbox Series and Switch both dropped by 38%.
For the full year, overall spending on games was down 1.1% to $58.7 billion. For December, total spending dropped 8.9% year over year to $7.5 billion.
* Indicates that some or all digital sales are not included in Circana's data. Some publishers, including Nintendo and Take-Two, do not share certain digital data for this report.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Nvidia has been a market leader in PC gaming graphics for years, and with the rise of machine learning, AI is playing an increasingly important role in how we experience our games. One of its most revolutionary advancements has been Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), an intelligent upscaling solution that opens the door to increased performance, especially at higher resolutions. This technology has undergone multiple iterations over the years, and with the launch of the RTX 50-series, it’s making its biggest jump forward yet with DLSS 4.
In this guide, I’ll explain everything you need to know about how this tech works, why it matters to you and the future of PC gaming, and why it’s something you may want to keep in mind with your next PC upgrade.
DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, is Nvidia’s proprietary system for intelligently upscaling games. The company has consistently developed and built upon DLSS since its debut in 2019. Throughout that time, its core purpose has been to improve performance by rendering games at a lower resolution and then upscaling that content to your monitor’s native resolution. Rather than leave you with the soft and potentially blurry image you would experience turning up the resolution yourself, DLSS applies its scaling through a neural network that has been trained on thousands of hours of video games. Alternatively, if you don’t want or need to upscale, you can instead enable Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA), which provides image enhancements to your native resolution.
These features are only available on Nvidia graphics cards with Tensor Cores, which began with the RTX 20-series. This is because the upscaling and enhancements taking place are the result of thousands of hours of neural training on Nvidia supercomputers. Its neural network ingests and learns from huge data sets to learn how to upscale and reconstruct/enhance images with the least quality loss and, in fact, even provide additional clarity in some situations.
As time has gone on, Nvidia has enhanced the system with additional features. One of the biggest is Frame Generation, which uses artificial intelligence to create an additional frame between each rendered frame, increasing frame rate. When used in conjunction with Nvidia Reflex (which is also being enhanced with the 50-series), these additional frames can blend in with a minimal impact on latency. The result of which isn’t just “better performance,” but allowing lower-performance graphics cards to reach previously unattainable frame rates with aspirational graphics settings.
Which brings us to the current day with DLSS 4.
This generation marks the most significant change in the feature’s history and includes a completely different, and much more capable, AI model.
The Transformer Model
So far, DLSS has used a model of AI known as a CNN, or Convolutional Neural Network, to deliver its benefits. This type of model analyzes an image to determine key elements, like lines, edges, and spatial relationships to determine how to apply its enhancements. It’s a very common type of neural network specializing in image analysis, which is why it’s not surprising that it was the foundational model behind DLSS up to this point.
DLSS 4 instead utilizes a Transformer model. A Transformer is a different form of AI model that’s able to calculate twice the number of parameters to better understand each frame of the scene. Put another way, it’s able to understand what it’s looking at and what’s taking place much better, and then apply more sophisticated calculations to deliver a higher quality image.
This new model is core to DLSS 4 and impacts each of the different pieces that allow DLSS to look and perform so much better than the prior version.
With DLSS 4, Deep Learning Super Sampling is much more than a simple upscaler (and never was, really). Instead, it’s a series of systems that work together to improve performance, enhance image quality, and reduce latency. In addition, frame generation has been significantly upgraded and can produce three times as many frames as DLSS 3.5.
It’s this network of cooperative systems that allow DLSS to look and perform better than it has in the past. One system handles upscaling (DLSS Super Resolution), while another handles lighting and shadows (DLSS Ray Reconstruction). DLSS Frame Generation multiplies the frames, while Reflex 2.0, which is it’s own feature separate from DLSS, keeps latency numbers low so you’re not noticing input lag as you play your games.
DLSS Super Resolution is the sub-system that handles upscaling. If you’ve ever noticed DLSS in an in-game menu, there’s a good chance that there were quality options to choose from: Ultra Performance, Performance, Balanced, and Quality are the typical presets. Each of these levels adjusts the game’s rendering resolution, the base resolution that the neural model will need to upscale.
Through the new TNN model, DLSS Super Resolution is able to deliver much sharper results and retain much more detail that the previous CNN model would lose, including in motion. The results can look nearly as, equal to, or even slightly more crisp than native resolution. While any enhancements beyond native resolution are subject to discussion and scrutiny, when it works, it can look fantastic. The impact of the TNN is especially noticeable in fine detail, like textures, fine edges, and lettering.
DLSS Ray Reconstruction is the second core image enhancer and one that has seen big improvements. Replacing traditional denoisers (systems that remove graininess and “noise” from a scene), this portion of DLSS is focused explicitly on analyzing and reconstructing lighting and shadow information. Like DLSS more broadly, it has been trained on thousands of hours of data to improve its understanding of different lighting conditions and how they should appear in real-time renders.
The TNN model provides DLSS Ray Reconstruction with much better understanding than it was previously able to have, and the results are easy to spot. DLSS Ray Reconstruction in the CNN model often struggled with fine lines and moving shadows. In the image above, the results speak for themselves, but it’s also evident elsewhere.
The flickering that was previously evident in distant shadows and lines (like telephone wires) is dramatically reduced. Objects in motion, like ceiling fans, retain more clarity. The strange action of “bubbling shadows” isn’t nearly as evident. While scenes in games are variable and more testing and iteration is necessary to come to any hard conclusions, it’s difficult to argue that it’s not a leap ahead for DLSS as a system.
Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing, or DLAA, is an alternative to DLSS Super Resolution. If you don’t need the upscaling features, DLAA allows you to significantly enhance your native resolution through TNN-enhanced anti-aliasing. DLAA smooths out edges much better than traditional anti-aliasing models and maintains those improvements in motion. The result is a very sharp image that looks noticeably clearer than gaming at native resolution with standard anti-aliasing.
For gamers with older GPUs, you’ll be able to upgrade to the new Transformer model, as well as toggle DLAA or DLSS Ultra Performance mode, within the Nvidia App.
DLSS Frame Generation made its debut with the RTX 40-series. It was contentious at the time, though has largely been accepted as an effective way to improve your in-game performance. This system, which I’ll refer to as single frame generation (SFG), allowed the GPU to leverage its Tensor Cores to create an artificial frame based on the details of the previous frame. Using this technology, gamers could play at higher resolutions and frame rates than may otherwise have been possible, make better use of their high refresh rate gaming monitors, and enjoy smoother action overall.
With DLSS 4 and the new Transformer model, the system is now able to generate up to three artificial frames for every true frame that’s rendered. This new capability is DLSS Multi Frame Generation (MFG). DLSS is able to accomplish this thanks to the improved performance capabilities of the new TNN, as well as shifting optical flow into a neural network instead of relying on the hardware-based Optical Flow Accelerator on the RTX 40-series. Because this AI Optical Flow system is unique to the RTX 50-series, DLSS Multi Frame Generation is exclusive to this generation for now.
Optical Flow, in general terms, is the AI’s ability to interpret the composition and motion within a scene to determine what should be rendered into its neural frame. Because the transformer is able to analyze each scene more thoroughly, ingesting more data points, it’s able to more accurately anticipate what will occur further into the future.
While it would be easy for things to get messy with the TNN rendering 75% of the frames when set to its max, the RTX 50-series also introduces flip metering. The important thing to know here is that flip metering controls frame pacing to ensure that gameplay remains smooth. However, Nvidia does recommend that MFG only be set as high as it takes to reach your monitor’s refresh rate. Overshooting to get the highest FPS possible can introduce visual artifacts due to the mismatch.
DLSS 4 is only one piece of the AI-enhanced PC gaming future Nvidia has promised us, but it’s an exciting one. While it’s clearly designed to have something for everyone, its benefits are likely to be especially keen for gamers playing on mid- to low-performance GPUs, extending the usable life of the hardware and opening the door to higher resolutions and graphics settings than would otherwise be possible. Time will tell how DLSS 4 ultimately shapes up, and if prior generations are any indication, Nvidia can be expected to build upon this foundation throughout the generation. As a starting point, however, DLSS is poised to impress.
Every couple of years, Nvidia launches an extremely expensive, extremely powerful graphics card that brings PC gaming into a new generation. That is what the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 ultimately is, but the way it brings next-generation performance is unconventional, to say the least. Because in a lot of games, the performance uplift over the RTX 4090 isn’t quite as steep as you’d expect – at least when DLSS Frame Generation is taken out of consideration. With the next generation of Nvidia’s DLSS for both upscaling and frame generation, however, we get leaps in image quality and performance that feel even greater than what we see with a typical graphics generation.
How much of an upgrade the Nvidia RTX 5090 is going to be for you, then, is ultimately going to depend on the games you play, the resolution you play those games at, and whether you’re ok with an AI algorithm generating extra frames. For a lot of people playing games on anything less than a 4K monitor with a 240Hz refresh rate, this upgrade is simply not going to make a lot of sense. But if you do have a high-end display, these AI-generated frames are going to feel like a taste of the future.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is built on Blackwell, Nvidia’s high-end architecture that’s already powering the data centers and supercomputers behind many of the most popular AI models. That should give you an idea of what the RTX 5090 is especially good at, but Nvidia didn’t neglect the, well, non-AI parts of the card.
With the 5090, Nvidia found a way to shove more Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) into the same amount of GPCs (Graphics Processing Clusters), which means more CUDA cores – 21,760, up from 16,384 in the RTX 4090. That makes up for a 32% uplift in the amount of shader cores over the previous generation, and is where a bulk of the raw gaming performance comes from.
Each SM also has four Tensor Cores and one RT Core, just like its predecessor. That means you get 680 Tensor Cores and 170 RT cores, compared to 512 and 128, respectively, for the RTX 4090. The 5th-generation Tensor Cores are tailor-made to boost AI performance, with this generation adding support for FP4 operations, which should make AI workloads less dependent on VRAM.
All of this silicon is coupled with 32GB of GDDR7 VRAM, or video memory. This is a generational shift from the GDDR6X memory in the RTX 4090, and should be faster and more power efficient than the previous generation. But because the RTX 5090 requires a staggering 575W of power, a huge increase over the already power hungry 4090, power efficiency isn’t exactly Nvidia’s main goal with this graphics card.
Because the new Tensor Cores are more efficient, Nvidia shifted the entire DLSS algorithm to run on a Transformer Neural Network (TNN), rather than a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). This shift won’t necessarily improve your framerate when you enable DLSS, but Nvidia claims it will improve image quality, and mitigate issues like ghosting and other unwanted artifacts.
Nvidia did more than just make an under-the-hood change to the way DLSS works. Team Green also introduces Multi-Frame Generation, which takes the Frame Gen tech introduced with the RTX 4090, makes it more efficient and smooth, and allows it to generate multiple frames off of each rendered image. This drastically improves frame rate, but should probably only be enabled if you’re already getting a decent frame rate, just like the last generation version.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 requires 575W of power, which is much more than the 450W of the RTX 4090. More power inherently means more heat, which means increasingly powerful cooling solutions are needed. Looking back at the RTX 4090 and even the RTX 3090, the Founders Editions were these giant, triple-slot graphics cards that took up a ton of room, and straight up wouldn’t fit in some PC cases.
Before I saw the RTX 5090, I was expecting something even bigger and more unwieldy. However, somehow, it’s smaller. Nvidia was able to make a 575W graphics card fit in a dual-slot chassis with a dual fan configuration. And it works.
Throughout my time with the RTX 5090, which included both my standard testing suite and playing games with DLSS 4 enabled to test multi frame generation, the temperature maxed out at around 86°C, even while its power consumption peaked at 578W. That’s a high temperature, to be sure, and higher than the RTX 4090’s 80°C, but it’s not high enough to throttle, and that’s all that matters.
Nvidia was able to do this by shrinking down the PCB (printed circuit board) to a little square and placing it in the middle of the graphics card. The two fans are placed on each side of where the PCB is, with a heatsink that runs through the width of the card. These fans then take air in through the bottom of the card and shoot it straight through the top of the card and out through your exhaust fans in your PC case. In fact, this graphics card doesn’t even have exhaust vents under the output ports at the rear of the card, unlike previous generation designs.
But it’s immediately apparent that the RTX 5090 Founders Edition follows a similar design language to the last couple of generations. The center of the card has the same silver ‘X’ design as the RTX 4090, with a gunmetal-gray chassis surrounding the black heatsinks. On the outer edge of the graphics card, you get a ‘GeForce RTX’ logo that lights up with white LEDs, too.
Next to that logo, you’re going to find the power connector. While it looks very similar to the 12VHPWR connector of the last generation, it’s actually a new 12V-2x6 power connector. The difference is minor, but it’s supposedly more efficient than the last-generation connector. Maybe Nvidia will be available to avoid controversy around its power connectors melting with this generation – only time will tell.
Nvidia does include an 12V-2x6 adapter in the box, which takes four 8-pin PCIe power connectors in order to provide the required 575W of power. But what’s nice is that the connector on the graphics card itself is now angled, and facing the back of the graphics card, which should make connecting the cable much easier. The power connector seems more secure this time around, too.
The hidden benefit of this design is its ability to be slotted into smaller PC builds. You don’t need a giant case to run the RTX 5090, like you did with the RTX 4090 and 3090. However, it’s very likely that third-party designs from the likes of Asus and MSI are going to be much larger than Nvidia’s Founders Edition.
When Nvidia revealed the RTX 5090, it claimed that it could boost performance by as much as 8x. The actual number isn’t that high, but the RTX 5090 can deliver extremely high frame rates in the most demanding games, but not exactly through traditional rendering. Because while the RTX 5090 does deliver a decent increase in raw rasterization performance, the real next-generation benefit is in its ability to generate extra frames to increase your frame rate.
DLSS 4 introduces ‘Multi-Frame Generation’, a next-gen version of the Frame Generation introduced with DLSS 3 and the RTX 4090. But it’s more than just using the same method to just produce more frames. And the secret behind it is a new AI Management Processor, or AMP core in the RTX 5090 – along with other RTX 5000 graphics cards. The AMP allows the graphics card to essentially assign work to different parts of the GPU, something that was traditionally handled by your CPU. But because it’s physically located on the GPU, it’s able to do this much more efficiently.
According to Nvidia, the AMP and the 5th-generation Tensor Cores allowed it to create a new frame generation model that’s both 40% faster than the original frame generation model, while requiring 30% less memory. This new model only needs to run once on each rendered frame, which then can create 3 AI frames. Something like this would naturally introduce latency, but Nvidia found a way around that, too.
The AMP runs a Flip Metering algorithm, which paces out the frames in order to reduce input lag. Nvidia claims this is why multi-frame generation won’t work on RTX 4000 graphics cards, as the last-generation frame generation relied on the CPU for frame pacing, which would introduce much more latency than the new model, which runs entirely on the GPU itself.
To be clear, this isn’t a magic button to get good performance. Just like the previous generation, you only really want to enable this if you’re already getting a passable frame rate. If you’re not already getting around 60 fps with Frame Gen disabled, turning it on can introduce significant latency problems. That’s why it pairs best with DLSS upscaling also enabled, in order to maximise your performance.
When the RTX 5090 hits store shelves on January 30, DLSS 4 will work in a wide array of PC games that already support DLSS 3 Frame Generation. However, while working on this review, I only had access to two games with this technology enabled, and both were on beta builds – Cyberpunk 2077 and Star Wars Outlaws.
And I was surprised how well it worked. In Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K, on the Ray Tracing Overdrive Preset, with DLSS on Performance mode, the RTX 5090 gets 94 fps. That’s not bad for a game with full ray tracing. When I turned on DLSS 2x frame gen – the same as is supported by the RTX 4090 – that framerate increased to 162 fps. That’s a 2x improvement over just plain ol’ DLSS. However, when I cranked the frame generation to 4x, that’s 3 AI frames per rendered frame, that number went all the way up to 286 fps – more than my 4K display can actually render.
It’s a similar story with Star Wars Outlaws. Playing at 4K with all the settings cranked up to max, I was able to get up to around 300 fps with DLSS 4 enabled – and that’s up from about 120 fps without frame generation.
When I saw these framerates, I was straight-up expecting to see artifacts and weird spikes of lag. However, I only really saw one broken texture in Star Wars Outlaws, and it’s something I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t actively looking for problems. It’s hard to believe, but Multi-Frame Generation actually does work, you just need to have an extremely high-end 4K display to benefit from it, at least with the RTX 5090.
It’s easy to write off this performance as ‘Fake Frames’, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, especially because you need good baseline performance to make it a good experience. But it is going to be genuinely useful for anyone with a high-refresh, high-resolution display. It’s also important to keep in mind that I was only able to test it in a handful of games. Nvidia claims that 75 games will support DLSS 4 when the RTX 5090 hits store shelves on January 30, and there’s a decent possibility that it won’t work flawlessly in at least one of those games. For the time being, though, it looks like it works extremely well.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is an incredibly powerful graphics card, but testing this thing was a journey. In 3DMark, the RTX 5090 proved itself to provide a generational improvement over the RTX 4090 in terms of raw performance. However, things get a lot more complicated when I test actual games. In the vast majority of games, the RTX 5090 is bottlenecked by my CPU, even at 4K – and I paired it with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the fastest gaming processor on the market right now. For most people who already have a high-end graphics card, upgrading to this $1,999 GPU isn’t going to make a world of difference – the games just aren’t there yet. This is a graphics card you buy to set yourself up for future PC games, like The Witcher 4.
I want to note that I did not enable DLSS 4 for any of these comparative benchmarks, and everything was tested on the public drivers available at the time. That means all non-5090 Nvidia cards were tested on Driver version 566.36, and all AMD cards were tested on AMD Adrenalin 24.12.1. All games were tested on their latest public builds, too.
In 3DMark, the RTX 5090 is up to 42% faster than the RTX 4090. In the Speed Way benchmark, the RTX 5090 scores 14,399 points to the RTX 4090’s 10,130, making for a 42% performance uplift. Similarly in Port Royal, the ray tracing test, the RTX 5090 scores 36,946 points to the 4090’s 25,997 points, which is also a 42% performance leap. What’s more impressive is how far Team Green has come since the RTX 3090. That graphics card got 5,619 points in Speed Way and 13,738 points in Port Royal, meaning anyone that skipped the last generation can get a 2.5x performance jump. That’s just 3DMark, though, and not necessarily reflective of real-world gaming performance.
In Call of Duty Black Ops 6, however, we start to see the big issue with the RTX 5090 in today’s games – a severe CPU bottleneck. At 4K Extreme settings, with DLSS set to ‘performance’, the RTX 5090 gets 161 fps, compared to 146 fps from the RTX 4090. That’s just a 10% performance difference, and definitely not what I’d call a ‘next-generation’ performance increase. However, when looking back at the RTX 3090, the 4-year-old graphics card gets 91 fps, which means a nearly 2 x performance increase.
What’s wild is that the RTX 5090 even shows signs of CPU bottleneck in Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most demanding PC games on the market right now. At 4K, with the Ray Tracing Ultra preset and DLSS set to performance, the RTX 5090 gets 125 fps, compared to 112 fps from the RTX 4090 with the same settings. Similarly to Black Ops 6, this is just a 10% performance increase. That scaling just gets worse at lower resolutions, though, with the RTX 5090 getting 153 fps at 1440p and 156 fps at 1080p.
I test Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition with DLSS disabled, because it’s the only upscaling solution in that game, and I need to get an honest comparison with AMD cards. This makes it one of the most demanding tests in my suite, and gives the RTX 5090 a chance to stretch its legs a bit. At 4K with the Extreme preset, the RTX 5090 gets 95 fps, compared to 76 fps from the RTX 4090 and 44 fps from the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. But even without the upscaling, the RTX 5090 only gets a 25% improvement over the RTX 4090, even if it more than doubles the 39 fps from the RTX 3090.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is getting up there in years, but it’s still a gorgeous game. At 4K with every setting maxed out, and DLSS set to performance mode, the RTX 5090 gets 167 fps, compared to 151 from the RTX 4090 and 92 fps from the RTX 3090. That means in this game, which admittedly doesn’t even use ray tracing, the RTX 5090 gets a paltry 6% performance uplift over the RTX 4090.
Total War: Warhammer 3 is an interesting test these days, because it doesn’t support ray tracing or upscaling, and gives a clear picture on raw rasterization performance. The RTX 5090 impresses here, delivering 147 fps to the RTX 4090’s 107 fps. That’s a 35% performance uplift and close to the potential performance difference demonstrated in 3DMark. However, it’s still a far cry from the 67% performance difference enjoyed by the RTX 4090 over the 3090.
Assassins Creed Mirage is a weird one. For some reason, when I first benchmarked this game, the RTX 5090 was getting terrible performance. Its game clock was limited to 772MHz, and was giving me around 50 fps at 4K. I was able to get around that problem, but even when it was resolved the 5090 only got 172 fps, which is lower than the RTX 4090 at 183 fps. What’s worse, is that the framerate was extremely spikey with microstutters. That’s bad, obviously, but it’s very likely that this is a driver bug, and as such should be treated as an outlier.
Black Myth: Wukong, like Cyberpunk 2077, is an extremely demanding game that will push any GPU to its limits. The RTX 5090, however, averaged 104 fps at 4K, with the Cinematic Preset and DLSS set to 40%. The RTX 4090, with identical settings, got 84 fps. That’s a 20% uplift in favor of the RTX 5090.
In Forza Horizon 5, the RTX 5090 averaged 216 fps, compared to 210 fps from the RTX 4090, which is essentially in the margin of error. This is an aging game, to be sure, but the CPU bottleneck means there’s essentially no difference between these two cards at this resolution.
Nvidia really wants us to believe that Moore’s Law is dead and GPUs that deliver a giant uplift over their previous-generation counterparts are going to grow more rare over time. I don’t know if that’s true – I’m not an engineer – but regardless, in most games, the RTX 5090 doesn’t exactly deliver next-generation performance over the RTX 4090 – at least not to the extent that the latter card thoroughly trounced the 3090 back in 2022.
That’s not to say the RTX 5090 is a bad graphics card. No matter how you slice it, the RTX 5090 is now the fastest graphics card on the consumer market, and that’s not nothing. The problem is that a lot of games can’t really take advantage of the extra power offered by the Blackwell GPU. That’s something that will absolutely change over time, but it also means there’s little reason for someone with an RTX 4090 to upgrade to the new hotness.
Instead, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is betting its existence on the future of AI-powered gaming. DLSS 4 uses AI to greatly increase frame rates, which is definitely a sight to behold. This graphics card is therefore best for gamers that want to be on the cutting edge, and are willing to bet $1,999 (at least) on an AI gaming future. For everyone else, the RTX 4090 is going to be more than powerful enough for the next few years.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
Developer VOXEL and publisher Noovola have announced The Bench, a upcoming "old man at the park" simulator. Yes, you play an elderly gentleman hanging out on a park bench controlling flocks of pigeons, fending off hungry wildlife, annoying park staff, and solving puzzles in the newspaper in this casual sim/puzzle game with a wholesome twist.
In addition to the largely cozy single-player action, The Bench is also, according to the developers, "enhanced with Twitch integrations, allowing viewers to interact with streamers by spawning in-game events like pigeons, raccoons, and NPCs that can either assist or hinder gameplay." Watch the teaser trailer above and check out the first screenshots in the gallery below.
A playable demo of The Bench will be available on Steam as part of Steam Next Fest next month. You can also wishlist it if you're interested.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket's next set is a Diamond and Pearl-themed booster called Space-Time Smackdown, and it launches next week.
The Pokémon Company revealed the set arrives January 29 in a trailer, below, but its website currently lists a January 30 date. Space-Time Smackdown includes the likes of Dialga ex and Palkia ex alongside the generation four starter Pokémon: Turtwig, Chimchar, and Piplup.
Despite being the second full set, unlike the expansion set that was Mythical Island, Space-Time Smackdown features between just 140 and 150 cards. This should make it significantly easier to complete compared to set one, Genetic Apex, which includes 286 cards. It's unclear if this 140 to 150 number includes the alternate art pieces, however, which could bump up that number by a few dozen.
"Are you ready to rumble? Discover a whole new expansion’s worth of cards in Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket," The Pokémon Company said. "Legendary Pokémon Dialga and Palkia from the Sinnoh region have bent time and space to rule the battlefield as dimension-altering Pokémon ex.
"The Space-Time Smackdown expansion features over 140 cards including exciting Pokémon ex cards, new Trainer cards, and gorgeous immersive cards ready to bring you into the wondrous world of Pokémon."
The widely panned trading feature was also confirmed to arrive alongside this set.
Pokémon TCG Pocket arrived in October and follows the standard mobile and free-to-play game model, flooding players with rewards in the first few days before soon drying up, with spending real-world money the only real way to re-experience that early thrill outside of the occasional set drop like this one.
Completing Genetic Apex without spending money, for example, will take players around two years according to one estimate, while those looking to make it rain can wrap up the collection after dropping around $1,500.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.
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One of the biggest features of the RTX 50 series GPUs is the inclusion of Multi-Frame Gen in DLSS 4. And, since this is a topic that interests a lot of gamers, we’ve decided to have a separate article for it. So, time now to see what Multi-Frame Gen does, and whether it’s worth enabling … Continue reading NVIDIA DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Gen Benchmarks & Impressions →
The post NVIDIA DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Gen Benchmarks & Impressions appeared first on DSOGaming.
NVIDIA has lifted the review embargo for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 GPU. And, since the green team has provided us with a review sample, we can benchmark it and compare it against the mighty NVIDIA RTX 4090. For our benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D with 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz. We … Continue reading NVIDIA RTX 5090 vs RTX 4090 Native 4K Benchmarks – 20 of the Most Demanding PC Games Tested →
The post NVIDIA RTX 5090 vs RTX 4090 Native 4K Benchmarks – 20 of the Most Demanding PC Games Tested appeared first on DSOGaming.
Square Enix has now completed the story of the third and final part of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy.
Speaking to Famitsu and translated by Eurogamer, Final Fantasy series producer Yoshinori Kitase and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi said development on the highly anticipated conclusion is progressing smoothly.
"I'm very satisfied with [the story], so I'm sure fans will be satisfied with the final chapter," Kitase said, adding that Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth creative director Tetsuya Nomura gave him "homework" to ensure this was the case.
The story of Part 3, which currently lacks an official name or release window, was required to have a respect for the original Final Fantasy 7 alongside a new level of satisfaction not felt in that game, Kitase said.
Square Enix announced its plans to release Final Fantasy 7 Remake as a trilogy in June 2022, following the release of the first game which had fans questioning if the entire story would need a dozen parts to be told properly. This is because Final Fantasy Remake itself only adapted the opening few hours of the original game, up to the point where the party leaves Midgar.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth expanded the scope significantly, however, introducing the open world and thus covering myriad locations such as Costa del Sol, the Golden Saucer, and many more, including some new ones.
It brought the overall story up to the end of Disc 1 of the original Final Fantasy 7, which closes in both games with what's arguably the most iconic moment in video game history.
Part 3 will pick up immediately after this, though very little is known about it so far. Development began in June 2022 but Square Enix hasn't said when it will end, only vaguely noting it hopes to release Part 3 by 2027.
Something it has said, however, is that it "will not cheat" when it comes to the Highwind airship. This allowed the party to quickly move around the map in the original game but, now in the world of fast travel, many fans wondered how the iconic ship could be implemented.
"We will not cheat with the airship system [in Part 3] but take the challenge head on so it can freely fly all over the game map," Hamaguchi said in November.
In our 9/10 review of the last game, IGN said: "Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth impressively builds off of what Remake set in motion, both as a best-in-class action role playing game full of exciting challenges and an awe inspiring recreation of a world that has meant so much to so many for so long."
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.
CD Projekt RED has just released Patch 2.21 for Cyberpunk 2077. This update adds support for the NVIDIA RTX 50 series GPUs and DLSS 4. Moreover, it packs a number of bug fixes. So, let’s take a closer look at it. With this update, owners of the RTX 50 series GPUs will be able to … Continue reading Cyberpunk 2077 Patch 2.21 Released, Adding Support For RTX 50 Series GPUs and DLSS 4 →
The post Cyberpunk 2077 Patch 2.21 Released, Adding Support For RTX 50 Series GPUs and DLSS 4 appeared first on DSOGaming.
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