After a week of playing on nothing but Panther Lake laptops, it's safe to say that Intel has its gaming mojo back

Intel have had a bit of a wild ride as of late. In many ways, the past two years have been some of the roughest in the company's history: a massive, multi-billion dollar quarterly loss back in 2024 was enough to cost then-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger his job, and their flagship Core Ultra 200S desktop chips have fallen flat in games, ceding even more ground to archrival AMD.

There are still some bright spots, however. After the relative success of Intel's Lunar Lake laptop processors in 2024, their successor family of Panther Lake CPUs - or to use the official name, Core Ultra Series 3 - is being heaped with praise from nearly all quarters. Not least thanks to the integrated Arc B390 GPU, which on paper, promises the same gaming power as a discrete Nvidia RTX 4050. Having a few of these laptops on hand, I decided to test Panther Lake's chops for myself by spending a full week with them as my everyday games machines.

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Former Forza Horizon devs reveal Clutch, an open-world racer that blends classic battles for first place with the gadget-infused spectacle of action movie car chases

Maverick Games, the studio helmed by Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown, have revealed the story-led open-world driving game they've had in the works for a few years now and that's no longer being published by Amazon. It's called Clutch, and blends traditional Horizon-style road and street racing with a story that works in some action movie-esque chases with the police.

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Subnautica 2 update kicks off creature tweaks by making Marrowbreaches and Nibblers more dangerous, but easier to outfox

Last week, Subnautica 2 developers Unknown Worlds held their hands up and said that players seeking a means to kill dangerous fish was down to the survival game's tools for avoiding and outfoxing such creatures not feeling as effective as they should. Cue tweaks to creatures and their behaviour aimed at addressing the issue, which have started to arrive with Sub 2's latest hotfix.

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Nvidia unveil their first all-in-one laptop processor, with support for DLSS, ray tracing, frame gen, and all those other RTX features you love and hate

After years of whispers around Nvidia maybe, possibly, perhaps getting into CPU-making, they’re making it official with RTX Spark: a fully integrated laptop SoC (System on a Chip), coming to thin 'n' lights in Autumn this year.

Unsurprisingly, given the source of Nvidia’s trillions, RTX Spark has a big focus on agentic AI work, the official descriptions of which are so inducive of malaise that I can’t even bring myself to copy them in from the press release. But there is plenty of note for those who’d use their lightweight laptop to play games, as the SoC’s graphics processor is based on the same Blackwell architecture as Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50 series of standalone graphics cards. That means it’ll support DLSS 4.5 upscaling, Multi-Frame Generation, ray tracing, Reflex, and G-Sync, all hitherto unseen (or at least extremely rare) on what is essentially integrated graphics. Unless you count the Nintendo Switch 2. And round 'ere, we don’t.

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This week in PC games: Summer Game Fest, the Gothic remake, and the policing of furry Chicago

Last week, I blithely commented that the Maw was "taking a break", because we had too much else to do besides feeding our resident cosmic newsbeast. We have now paid a grievous price for my negligence. Friends, I am horrified to report that the Maw has broken containment and eaten Geoff Keighley, the face of Summer Games Fest. In the process, it may also have devoured the very concept of the future.

Time has lost its gradient, and the harvest may never come. Without Geoff, there will be no barrage of hundred-thousand-dollar game trailers and announcements on June 5th, to spin us through the shambles of another year. There can be no Highguard 2. There will be no surprise celebrity cameos, for surprise requires change. In vain shall the children of Gamers ask, "what precise ratio of smart-casual is Mads Mikkelsen favouring right now?" I offer the below list of new PC game releases largely in memoriam for a "this week" that may never truly unfold.

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Fable's delay into 2027 is the right move, but it'll make looking through the window bars at GTA 6 on consoles slightly more painful

Ah, the Fable reboot isn't coming out in 2026 after all, then. Rumours had suggested the wind was blowing in that direction and Xbox exec Matt Booty chose to interrupt last Friday's chill vibes to confirm that a delay to February 2027's now been set in stone, ripping the plaster off ahead of the impending Summer Geoff Fest. While almost certainly a shrewd move on Playground Games' part, Fable's slip from the autumn slate still sucks if you're, say, on the platform this November's flashiest arrival isn't hitting yet.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for stumbling upon a ruined church, squirrelled away among the hawthorns behind a currently active church in the neighbourhood. I was flabbergasted – I've walked past that churchyard a thousand times without noticing. In this case, I just happened to take a different route around the cemetery. The old church is roofless and barred, but I managed to thrust my phone through a grill and take pictures of a peaked mausoleum, squat in the middle of the transept crossing, together with the coruscating beehive thumbed into the arch of one window. Magic. Anyway, here are some articles about mostly videogames.

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