Month: October 2024

2024 is shaping up to be the year that Windows laptops with Arm processors mount a serious challenge to the dominance of the Intel and AMD x86 duopoly. We’ve been hearing about Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X for sometime, and now the first devices are being unveiled, with more to follow at what’s shaping up to be a very interesting Computex in a few weeks time.

WalkingCat over at Twitter (via Videocardz) revealed some pictures of a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 packing a Snapdragon X processor. But, to what extent will such devices disrupt the laptop market? 

Though there’s not much to glean from the handful of pictures, the Yoga Slim in question looks to be a premium ultra-thin option. I would expect the first wave of Snapdragon X models to be similarly premium options, and not some budget alternative to x86 options from Intel or AMD. It’s not like MacBooks are regarded as cheap options.

And Qualcomm has not just Intel and AMD, but also Apple in its sights. NotebookCheck posted a series of Qualcomm-provided benchmark data from a recent event in London that shows the Snapdragon X Elite competing well against Apple M3, Intel Meteor Lake and AMD Hawk Point CPUs.…

FromSoftware big shot and Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki has delivered some more cryptic Shadow of the Erdtree details in a recent interview shared to the Chinese social network Zhihu. The big takeaways for my money are that this thing is going to be big, and that Elden lore freak favorite St. Trina will make an appearance.

The interview was conducted by Gōuhuǒ yíngdì (篝火营地, literal translation “campfire camp”), a videogames-focused account on Zhihu. User swordandflower on Twitter made a handy English translation of the interview, which I’ve compared against machine translation for this story.

Miyazaki was asked about both the expected playtime of Shadow of the Erdtree and why FromSoft opted for a single expansion instead of a series like Dark Souls 2 and 3 had⁠—Miyazaki reiterated that Shadow of the Erdtree would be the “first and last” DLC for Elden Ring, but said it’s because they wanted to make a whopper.

“Elden Ring focuses on world exploration and a sense of adventure,” Miyazaki said. “In order to provide the players such an experience, it’s necessary to build a vast and expan…

Metaphor: ReFantazio is shaping up to be dangerous for me, as someone who has never played an Atlus RPG—mostly because the developer’s veer away from psychic dream-delving high schoolers and into high fantasy is exactly my kind of bag.

And now there’s a demo! Announced earlier today and re-announced during the Tokyo Game Show, the Metaphor: ReFantazio prologue demo lets you play (you guessed it) the prologue—and it’s downright meaty.

The Steam page promises the “first four” dungeons, seven out of the game’s 40 Archetypes—which function as classes the characters can equip—and “six followers, including party members who will support the protagonist’s journey”.

I’m still downloading this 24-gig heft of a demo as I write this, but players are already reporting they’ve got about four to five hours with it, which is downright generous—alas, they’re also reporting some performance problems which I’ve got on good authority aren’t isolated.

“I have a 7950x3d and an rtx 4090 and my GPU utilisation is all over the place,” writes one player on the game’s subreddit. “When dashing it dips down to 70%, and when standing s…