You can't find a new Nvidia graphics card for love nor money. Between pent-up demand from PC gamers and Nvidia selling every GPU it can to the bubbling AI industry, new models are going out of stock in a matter of minutes -- and it looks like the situation isn't going to improve any time soon, as the biggest AI company around wants even more hardware. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to the social network formerly known as Twitter (spotted by Tom's Hardware) to say that OpenAI's ChatGPT version 4.5 is ready to go… but desperately in need of even more hardware. The "giant, expensive model" requires even more data center capacity than older versions, and to launch with enough access for paid users, the company is gobbling up GPUs at an even faster rate. The CEO claims that OpenAI is adding "tens of thousands of GPUs next week" for the planned rollout, with hundreds of thousands following soon after.

Before the internet, if you were an avid gamer then you were very likely to be an avid reader of games magazines. From the early 1980s, the likes of Crash, Mega, PC Gamer and the Official PlayStation Magazine were your connection with the industry, providing news, reviews and interviews as well as lively letters pages that fostered a sense of community. Very rarely, however, did anyone keep hold of their magazine collections. Lacking the cultural gravitas of music or movie publications, they were mostly thrown away. While working at Future Publishing as a games journalist in the 1990s, I watched many times as hundreds of old issues of SuperPlay, Edge and GamesMaster were tipped into skips for pulping.

While a gaming PC might cost more than an equivalent game console (a lot more, if you want enough power to run new games at the highest visual fidelity), you can save a lot of money on the games themselves if you're mindful. And most PC gamers do, according to a new consumer survey. The data says that only about a third of players on the PC will buy a game at its full, initial retail price (stretching into $70 USD for AAA games at this point) while the rest will wait for a sale or a bundle. The data comes from a consumer survey performed by secondary market Ultra and Atomik Research. According to aggregate answers from 2,000 PC gamers, only 36 percent of them will buy a new game at full price, while 32 percent will wait for a sale or a bundle (like the Humble Bundle).

In the world of console video games, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo stand as titans. Its distribution platform, Steam, may not be the only place to buy and play games on the PC, but it's easily among the largest, oldest and most iconic. Today marks Steam's 20th anniversary. Valve is celebrating by slashing prices on its self-published games, offering most of its catalog for 90 percent off, except Half-Life: Alyx. The sale's landing page doubles as a cheery retrospective of Steam's last two decades.

In the immortal words of CJ, "Ah, s#$%, here we go again." If you've been keeping up with the tech news in the last year, you no doubt know that "Artificial Intelligence" is the next big thing -- heck, you can even use it to search for info from PCWorld's archives. That kind of growth potential has investors salivating and engineers scrambling for hardware. Unfortunately, it looks like consumer-grade GPUs are a great way to boost your processing power for AI computations…just like they were for crunching numbers for cryptocurrency. If that sounds familiar, it's because the crypto boom in the late 2010s and the start of the pandemic in 2020 created an absolute nightmare for anyone who wanted to buy a GPU.

Yes, PC gamers, Nvidia still cares about you. So said CEO Jensen Huang in a roundtable interview with reporters in Taipei. After a week which saw Nvidia's value increase to $1 trillion on the back of AI data center hardware, followed by a Computex keynote that had barebones appeal to PC gamers, many were wondering if the company still cared about gaming anymore. The answer, Nvidia's CEO says, is yes, yes indeed. In the company's eyes, that priority can be seen in the AI products that Nvidia focused on first. In response to a question from PCWorld asking if gamers were right to feel like an older child jealous of the newborn AI baby, Jensen jokingly feigned insult.

Next week I am going to build a gaming PC. I've done it once before and wrote an article about what a nightmare the process was – although the issue turned out to be with the USB stick I used to install the motherboard update patch and … well, don't get me started. The thing is, I figured it out because when you have played PC games for as long as I have, you know that figuring technical stuff out is a key part of the experience. While games consoles have always been pure plug-and-play experiences, PC games have definitely not. When I started playing in the early 1990s, they came on multiple floppy discs – The Secret of Monkey Island was on eight – and you had to keep swapping them in and out of the drive, like feeding a voracious robot.

On Wednesday morning, I saw a tweet from games magazine PC Gamer that made me leak from the eyes with laughter. It contained a video, in which a wide-eyed, pained-looking cartoon trombonist struggled to hit the notes of Beethoven's Fifth while the composer himself stared sombrely out of the screen in evident disapproval. It is a golden comedic combination of terrible music, fart noises, earnestness and absurdity. This is the video game Trombone Champ, and it has since gone wildly viral. I've been playing rhythm games for more than 20 years, from Beatmania to Guitar Hero to Amplitude via fun musical contraptions in Japanese arcades, and I take them embarrassingly seriously.

I already own two 27-inch 1080p gaming monitors with decent refresh rates (Acer and ViewSonic), but they're several years old and due for an upgrade. I wouldn't have purchased an M9 monitor to replace either of them; the $899 price point is rather steep when a lower end monitor can easily get the job done. Still, the better colors, brightness and higher refresh rate on the M9 made a subtle difference when I gamed compared to the older models I already had. It's a welcome addition to my current gaming setup, especially when I play competitive modes.

Six years after its initial release, Stardew Valley has sold more than 20 million copies. Creator Eric Barone shared news of the accomplishment in an update posted to the game's press site and an interview with PC Gamer. "The 20 million copies milestone is really amazing," he told the outlet. But what's even more impressive is the increasing pace of Stardew Valley's sales. It took four years for the game to sell its first 10 million copies.