Using Windows feels like a constant negotiation with a hostile and unstable terrorist whom I paid for the privilege, so I was ready to get up in arms about it formally “deprecating” the Control Panel in favor of the newer Settings menu. But then, as reported by Ars Technica, Microsoft softened its words, if not the meaning behind them, and more to the point, I don’t think the big M is really doing anything wrong⁠—this time.

A Windows support page was recently updated with the language “The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.” After widespread discussion and reporting on the move, including PC World’s editorial, “Windows will have to pry Control Panel from my cold dead hands” (much respect), Microsoft amended the language to read “many of the settings in Control Panel are in the process of being migrated to the Settings app, which offers a more modern and st…

This month PC Gamer celebrates its landmark 30th anniversary issue. For three whole decades PC Gamer has been there reporting on the PC gaming industry’s biggest games, names and events, as well as its wider culture, and in this very special issue of the magazine we celebrate that heritage, both looking back on 30 years of PC gaming, but also 30 years of PC Gamer magazine.

Many former editors, writers, designers and more return to reminisce about their time on the magazine as well as their experiences in the industry. In addition, this issue comes with an exclusive 32-page bonus mini-mag and A4 poster featuring three of PC gaming’s most notable hero characters. This truly is an issue of PC Gamer magazine not to miss!

And just because we’re looking back over 30 years of PC gaming doesn’t mean this issue doesn’t also deliver the latest previews, reviews, hardware, opinion, and more. Indeed, our 30th anniversary special magazine is one of the most awesome, content…

There are lots of ambitious full conversion Skyrim mods in development, and one of the most anticipated by Elder Scrolls fans is Skywind. Modders have spent more than decade meticulously recreating The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind in Skyrim’s engine, and long-time Bethesda RPG fans are eager to play it.

Unfortunately, the mod isn’t finished yet and Skywind still doesn’t have a release date, but here’s a treat to make the wait a little more bearable. Today the mod team at The Elder Scroll Renewal Project have unveiled a full 20 minutes of new Skywind gameplay footage, and it looks fantastic. You can watch an entire quest, start to finish, in the video below. Check it out:

Morrowind fanatics will probably immediately recognize the setting, and maybe even the quest itself, which is called “Necromancer in Mawia.” The video begins in Molag Amur in the Ashlands as the player strides through a dust storm to visit the temple in the city of Molag Mar. The temple maste…

Humanity has taken yet another step toward the inevitable war against the machines (which we will lose) with the creation of Vall-E, an AI developed by a team of researchers at Microsoft that can produce high quality human voice replications with only a few seconds of audio training.

Vall-E isn’t the first AI-powered voice tool—xVASynth, for instance, has been kicking around for a couple years now—but it promises to exceed them all in terms of pure capability. In a paper available at Cornell University (via Windows Central), the Vall-E researchers say that most current text-to-speech systems are limited by their reliance on “high-quality clean data” in order to accurately synthesize high-quality speech.

“Large-scale data crawled from the Internet cannot meet the requirement, and always lead to performance degradation,” the paper states. “Because the training data is relatively small, current TTS systems still suffer from poor generalization. Speaker similarit…

Update July 14, 2023: Updated with new thermal images for the OneXFly under gaming loads.

Original story July 14, 2023: The OnexPlayer OneXFly is looking like it might be bringing everything I want together in a modern handheld gaming PC. I’m waiting to get my hands on a review unit ahead of the launch of the new lightweight device, but I’ve just got hold of some new images which make it look way more portable than the likes of the Steam Deck or ROG Ally.

Using the same AMD Radeon Ryzen 7 7840U as the AOKZOE A1 Pro I recently reviewed, the OneXFly ought to perform around the same as both it and the ROG Ally. Which is to say it should be a supremely capable mobile gaming slab.

But the key difference is that the OneXFly has been wrapped in a far smaller chassis, theoretically making it easier to slip in a pocket (though I’d recommend wearing a belt—this thing still weighs over half a kilo). That smaller scale is immediately…

Watch On

The latest addition to Hitman’s roster of Elusive Targets is a notorious figure indeed: He’s called The Disruptor, but you might know him better as multi-time MMA champion Conor McGregor.

Somewhat surprisingly (or very surprisingly, depending on how you feel about these things), McGregor is not actually the villain in this scenario. Instead, he’s a multi-millionaire MMA fighter signed for a fight with Tim Quinn, the CEO of tech company Quantum Leap, who’s recently taken an interest in MMA and considers himself a legit contender for the upper ranks. Bit on the nose there, eh?

Anyway, despite his supreme self-confidence Quinn is definitely not ready to run with the big dogs. Alas, because he’s extremely rich, nobody is willing to tell him no, but company executives also don’t want him humiliated in the ring because that might damage the share price. Thus, the obvious move: Hire Agent 47 to wack McGregor—sorry, The Disruptor—before he can clean Quinn’s …

Ever wondered why AMD has never made an all-in-one chip like those it engineered for the latest consoles from Microsoft and Sony and stuffed it in a laptop? Wouldn’t that pretty sweet? Well, something along those lines is actually happening, allegedly.

The big rumour involves a new APU from AMD codenamed Strix Halo. If anything, it’s even better than transplanting a console SoC into a PC laptop. According to Moore’s Law is Dead—admittedly not always the most reliable of sources—Strix Halo will be the first PC APU with a hefty 256-bit memory bus.

All previous APUs from AMD, and indeed Intel, including AMD’s new Ryzen Z1 APU in the Asus RoG Ally, have made do with a mere 128-bit bus and not a lot of bandwidth to share between the CPU and graphics. We’ve therefore often wondered why AMD didn’t do a console-style APU with a 256-bit bus and therefore the potential for decent graphics performance.

Strix Halo is supposedly that APU. Not only does it have that …

Career RPG designer and project lead on the original Fallout game, Tim Cain, has released a near-17 minute video on his YouTube channel to talk about the Hollywood premiere of the Fallout TV show. Cain had a lot of praise for the new series, but also expressed frustration with how fans project onto and treat many of the people who have worked on Fallout.

Cain was invited by Bethesda’s Todd Howard to the premiere event at the Chinese Theater in LA, and seemed to enjoy the big budget celebration of the Fallout series. As for the show itself, Cain had nothing but praise for the premiere, which consisted of the season’s first two episodes. “I was literally at the edge of my seat,” he said.

Cain appreciated the performances and storytelling, but singled out how the show nailed the Fallout “vibe” as its biggest achievement. “I was just looking at all the props,” he said of one scene. “I realized after a few minutes went by that I had not followed the dialogue at all, because I…