Today at their own CES 2022 event, Intel had some interesting announcements for PC fans with some new processors coming. Will be updating this article as we go…

The first announcement was the new H-Series mobile processors, with the new top-end flagship being the Intel Core i9-12900HK. They also showed off the new P-Series for thin and light laptops. Check them out (click pics to enlarge):

On top of that there's also the new U-Series for ultra low powered CPUs. Here's the lists (click pics to enlarge):

As for Intel Arc discrete GPUs, Intel has confirmed they're shipping 50 new mobile and desktop customer designs together with Acer, ASUS, Clevo, Dell, Gigabyte, Haier, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, MSI and NEC. Arc will support hardware-accelerated Ray Tracing, Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) AI-driven upscaling technology and Intel Deep Link technology.

XeSS is already being implemented into games, with Death Stranding Director's Cut edition (Windows PC) being a confirmed title to have it. Intel also announced studios including Studios 505 Games, Codemasters, EXOR Studios, Fishlabs, Hashbane, IOI, Illfonic, Kojima Productions, Massive Work Studio, PUBG Studios, Techland, Ubisoft and Wonder People working on adding in XeSS.

Intel Arc starts shipping in Q1 this year.

Raptor Lake due later in 2022.

CES 2022 continues with NVIDIA doing their presentation today where they announced more for their streaming service GeForce NOW, new monitors from parters with GSYNC and new GPUs.

Most of it was the usual marketing speak, along with showing off DLSS / RTX in a couple of titles like Rainbow Six Extraction, and an exclusive clip of Dying Light 2. However, they did eventually get to an actual announcement with the GeForce RTX 3050 with 8GB GDDR6 price starting $249 and availability expected on January 27.

Might this be a GPU we can actually buy? We hope so.

The new 360Hz G-Sync monitors they talked about did sound quite interesting though. Allowing you to transform them between 1440p and 1080p (turning 27-inch monitors into 25-inch). It sounds a little odd but it's supposed to help with games that can't hit the performance needed at the higher resolutions. The main target is e-sports and ultra-FPS gamers.

Over 160 new RTX laptops will be also be coming, along with a 4th generation of Max-Q. These new laptops include models with a new RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti. Both of which will be available February 1.

They also of course announced their latest monster with the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. No real details other than a few basic specs given like it having "24GB G6X memory, 40 shader teraflops, 78 RT teraflops, 320 tensor teraflops".

NVIDIA said to expect more details on this "BF GPU" later this month.

You can see the whole event in our embed below:

Today, AMD presented their 2022 Product Premiere at CES 2022 with a pre-recorded session hosted by Dr. Lisa Su.

We'll be going over what they announced when they get to it, for now you can see the full live event in our embed below. We're expecting a them to announce quite a bit across a range of hardware types. Will be updating the article as they go.

Here's what they announced

AMD Ryzen 6000 Mobile Processors (APUs). Coming with the Zen 3+ 6nm cores, RDNA 2 graphics with "up to" 24 hours battery life. They will also integrate the Microsoft Pluton security chip.

Full event can be seen below:

Do you love games like Slay the Spire? I sure do and so seeing a new free and open source game appear that's inspired by it has me a little excited. This is Hypnagonia. It's currently in development, although playable, it has plenty of work to be done to flesh it out into a full complete experience. Even so, you can easily see that the promise is there.

In Hypnagonia you are asleep, a dreamer and you've been somehow captured and pulled into a nightmare realm. It's a fun sounding idea and you lose if you wake up. The idea is that you're facing "Torments", which are a manifestation of things causing your nightmares. You attack by inspecting them, to try and understand them, while they cause you stress that builds up as anxiety until you wake up.

Built with Godot Engine, the developer is looking for other developers to join in to build it into something special.

You can try it in your browser on itch.io although I do recommend downloading for better performance. The source code is available on GitHub .

Hat tip to aD.

Project Zomboid has been hanging around in Early Access on Steam since the first year that Early Access was even thing, and after a long development period it seems it's finally seeing its popularity explode.

Going from an average of around 5-6 thousand players online, since the recent huge overhaul release it has skyrocketed upwards into Steam's top 100 list with it now regularly seeing over 50,000 players online. That's an astronomical increase and it seems it's been doing just as well on Twitch too with tends of thousands of viewers, which puts it in Twitch's top 20 constantly now beating the likes of Dead by Daylight and World of Warcraft. It's similar in a way to what happened with Among Us, for a game to suddenly become massively popular.

Watch video on YouTube.com

It's not just seeing lots of players though - it's also reviewing very nicely. On Steam it has a Very Positive score for both the recent score (nearly 9,000 reviews) and overall (nearly 50,000 reviews). We wholeheartedly recommend it too. PZ works great on Linux and it's worthy of the current popularity for sure.

You have little over a day left to get it 33% off from GOG and Steam during their sales.

In the mood to try a new desktop shell? Well, the folks behind Nitrux have formally announced Maui Shell and it sure does look pretty.

A desktop environment with an aim to scale and look good across a wide range of different devices including mobiles, tables and desktop computers. They said the aim is to have "no need for multiple versions targeting different form factors" and it's seriously slick. Worth noting at this point, it is far from finished with plenty of missing features. The developers have announced it to get some early testing and feedback.

Click to enlarge. Maui Shell Desktop.

Built on top of KDE tech, it's comprised of two main parts:

• Cask is the shell container and elements templates, such as panels, popups, cards, etc.
• Zpace is the composer, which is the layout and places the windows or surfaces into the Cask container.

Their current roadmap aims for a stable 1.0.0 release in September, followed by the next major version in December.

See more in their blog post and find it on GitHub . The latest release of Nitrux (v1.8.0) includes a preview of Maui Shell.

You can see a brief preview of the normal desktop mode below:

To begin 2022, let's take a fresh look at the current top 100 Steam games and see how well (or not) the run on Linux.

As part of a series we shall be doing, where we first took a proper look at this back in October 2021, including games that are both Native to Linux and Windows games that are run through the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer. With help from ProtonDB reports to investigate.

Something to keep in mind is that while the top 5-10 games doesn't change too often on Steam, the rest do fluctuate quite a lot as it often depends on some of the bigger releases that appear. We are once again going by the numbers on SteamDB using their 24 hour peak-player count. Take this as your snapshot of how things are a month before the Steam Deck releases to see what you might expect to work or not.

Over time the compatibility is expected to increase thanks to native ports, more Windows-only games working with Steam Play Proton and now Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye have expanded their support.

Notes:

• Proton GE refers to the community-built version of Proton. So while it requires adding it manually (which takes all of 5 minutes), it still works. This is sometimes needed for games where videos don't work with the official Proton. Valve is working on getting them all working out of the box with official Proton.
• Rocket League works but was removed from Steam for new players. However, it does work with Wine (which Proton is built from) if you use something like the Heroic Games Launcher to get it from Epic.
• Sea of Thieves voice comms don't work.
• Phasmophobia just recently seemed to fix the voice comms with Proton.
• We did not count Myth of Empires, as Steam delisted it due to ongoing legal troubles .
• F1 2021 had some fixes for AMD GPUs lately but still seem pretty problematic overall.
• The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is Linux Native, but the latest DLC is Windows-only but that does work with Proton.
• Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition works but online multiplayer can desync unless you do a small fix.
• Brawlhalla added EAC, which you can disable and they're trying to support Proton with it.

With not long to go until the Steam Deck releases, hopefully Valve still have a few releases of Proton to improve things further. Anti-Cheat continues to be the biggest hurdle for Linux gaming and the Steam Deck. We've not seen many titles at all enable it officially, with the current list being quite small. We do expect that to change if the Steam Deck is a success though, and we fully expect it to be - as long as Valve can get enough units produced.

A few false-flags have appeared over the last few months like Rainbox Six Siege suddenly working, however do remember that until Valve or the developer actually confirm it, they will likely (and it did) stop working due to the anti-cheat.

Personally, I've not been able to get DayZ to work myself ( now it's supported ) but I know plenty of others have. Even with the suggested fixes, I just get a black screen, which is a shame. In some ways Proton is still a bit of a minefield like that, hopefully a solution will be found.

The most important part — the numbers: we're currently seeing around 76% of the top 100 (based on peak player counts) as of January 2022 working on Linux with Native Linux games and Windows games in Proton taken together. So, things are looking pretty good ahead of the Steam Deck launch since it will use SteamOS 3 which is based on Arch Linux.

It seems there continues to be no stopping Steam's growth, with it only just recently hitting a brand new all-time high for concurrent users online.

The new high recorded by SteamDB on January 2 was 27,942,036 so it's getting real close to hitting another massive milestone. A number we expect to be beaten again later this year, especially with the Steam Deck beginning to roll out during February and continuing throughout the year. When the new high was hit, Steam saw 8,219,950 gamers actually playing something.

The top most played games on Steam doesn't really change much and certainly wasn't different during this time, with the usual suspects there including:

• CS:GO
• Dota 2
• PUBG
• Apex Legends
• Grand Theft Auto 5

AntiMicroX is a great open source app that helps you map your keyboard and mouse to gamepad inputs. It's the continuation of the original AntiMicro project, which was abandoned. Very useful for games that have spotty or no gamepad support, and there's a number of other uses.

Version 3.2.1 just went up with these new features:

• Add note about available update (enabled in Windows)
• Add database of SDL gamepad mappings (more gamepads will be enabled by default)
• Add proper printing information about connected devices to logs
• Apply proper theme to Windows version of app
• Add handling SIGABRT (with printing stack)
• Set theme for Windows
• Bump QT version used in Windows Release to 5.15

It also comes with a few bug fixes and general improvements, like a mention of a lack of AutoProfiles for Wayland users. While it might not be a huge release, it's certainly a good project to reminder readers of that's incredibly useful. The new inclusion of the SDL gamepad mappings is great though, should make it even better to work with.

Available from GitHub and Flathub .