Warning: This review contains full spoilers for The Pitt Season 2, Episode 5!

We’re now five episodes and a third of the way into The Pitt Season 2. Most other shows these days would have rounded the halfway mark by now, but that’s the joy of watching something that hearkens back to the pre-streaming era of television. There’s still plenty of room left on this runway. Even so, the tone of the series is definitely intensifying as the situation at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center grows more dire, resulting in what is easily the strongest chapter of Season 2 to date.

Episode 5 is great about addressing some of the niggling problems with previous installments, most notably when it comes to the relative lack of focus on Patrick Ball’s Dr. Langdon. As I’ve said before, if this season were to have a main focal character, it should be Langdon, but he’s been purposely relegated to the sidelines by his old mentor. But now Langdon is back in the thick of things, and we start to see the simmering tension between him and Noah Wyle’s Dr. Robby start to boil over.

It’s great watching that mostly silent feud play out in Episode 5, as Robby does everything within his power not to talk to Langdon or be in the same room with him. You can easily sympathize with both men. Robby’s angry dismissal of Langdon was one of the standout scenes of Season 1, and it’s easy to recall the sheer pain and disbelief he felt in that moment. But at the same time, Langdon has paid his dues, and you can understand his frustration at being flatly rejected by a thoroughly unsympathetic Robby.

That all comes to a head in the final moments of Episode 5, as Louie (Ernest Harden Jr.) fittingly becomes the catalyst that forces both men to work together. There’s been the sense all along that the affable Louie’s long string of luck is about to run out, and that finally happens here. Not a bad cliffhanger on which to end the week.

Elsewhere in the ER, Dr. Santos (Isa Briones) is really the star of the show in Episode 5, as the series takes a slightly more humorous approach to her particular plight. The running gag of Santos getting one or two sentences deeper into her dictation, only to be interrupted again by Whitaker (Gerran Howell) or Ogilvie (James Howell), never gets old. But it’s also nice seeing her on the backfoot so much this season, after Season 1 really played up her crusading, righteous doctor side. Paperwork is the bane of us all.

By the same token, it’s fun to watch the insufferable know-it-all Ogilvie continue to get his just desserts. Last week it was almost killing a patient with a reckless extraction; this week, it’s being forced to clean out an elderly woman’s impacted colon.

Ogilvie’s fellow student Joy (Irene Choi) also gets a nice little bit of added attention in this episode. Up until now, Joy has been a fairly one-note character. She’s the scowling, disaffected med student who (understandably) can barely tolerate being paired with Ogilvie. But we get a chance to see a different side of the character when she swoops in to offer a solution to the family shuddering under the burden of crushing medical debt. It’s a happy ending to a depressing subplot, and one that tells us a lot more about who Joy is and why she’s seemingly so detached from it all.

Finally, this episode makes some inroads with Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), a character who so far has been played a little more antagonistically than I’d like. She’s the newcomer disrupting the carefully oiled machine that is the ER, and we’ve been left to sympathize with Robby on that front. But the two characters share a strong scene together where Al-Hashimi rightfully berates Robby for treating her like an underling rather than a colleague. It’s subtle, but it helps turn the character in a more favorable direction. Hopefully, that trend continues in the coming episodes.

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I have played enough of these to be picky, which is exactly why this list exists. Not everything cheap is worth your time, and not everything premium deserves your wallet. This week quietly delivers both value and personality across four platforms, with a few curveballs that reward curiosity. Jump right to the deals with this link.

What's on My Radar Today?

Anyone who reads my stuff on the reg knows I'm an absolute sucker for the gaming axiom that is "friends who slay together, stay together." Horizon Hunters Gathering already looks like my jam as a (PC or PS5) co-op action spin-off set in the Horizon universe. Three like-minded players must team up to cull droves of Dinobots in hunts that lean hard into coordination, roles, and replayability. Think: tactical encounters, rotating mission types like machine incursions and cauldron dives, and a progression system that encourages experimentation rather than rote grinding.

Apparently, there is also a fully canon story campaign and a shared hub where squads prep, customise and plan their next machine (read: monster) hunt. Cross-play and cross-progression are mercifully a thing. If the idea of Terminator taxidermy with mates sounds even remotely appealing, there's an upcoming beta you can sign up for right now. Do it. I'll see you in the mix.

Larian Studios’ multi-award-winning fantasy RPG, Baldur’s Gate 3, is set for its own TV series on HBO, and will be helmed by The Last of Us co-creator Craig Mazin.

As reported by Deadline, a television adaptation of the acclaimed game set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe is in development at the network, and interestingly, will be a continuation of the story from the Baldur's Gate 3 game. The television show will reportedly take place after the events of Larian's RPG and follow the characters players grew to love over time as they grapple with the aftermath of its world-changing ending.

The series will be helmed by Craig Mazin, no stranger to adapting video games to live action, following his work co-creating HBO's The Last of Us with Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann. A huge fan of Baldur's Gate 3, Mazin told Deadline that "After putting nearly 1000 hours into the incredible world of Baldur’s Gate 3, it is a dream come true to be able to continue the story that Larian and Wizards of The Coast created".

"I am a devoted fan of D&D and the brilliant way that Swen Vincke and his gifted team adapted it", he continued. "I can’t wait to help bring Baldur’s Gate and all of its incredible characters to life with as much respect and love as we can, and I’m deeply grateful to Gabe Marano and his team at Hasbro for entrusting me with this incredibly important property."

By taking on this project that has no ties to any other Baldur's Gate game in the pipeline, Mazin will have free rein over what story he wishes to tell, but we do know that it will include both existing and brand new members of the BG3 cast. Shadowheart? Karlach? Astarion? Who are you most looking forward to seeing on your television screen? Mazin reportedly plans to reach out to the cast of the games to sound out how best to approach their roles in the TV show, and if they'd want to be involved, something The Last of Us did with Merle Dandridge reprising her role as Marlene, for example.

Of course, the ending of Larian's multiple game of the year award-winning RPG can vary massively depending on how you chose to play the game, so it will be highly intriguing to see how Mazin and co. go about choosing which ending is canon for them.

It may well be a while yet before we see Baldur's Gate arrive on the small screen, with Mazin still attached to complete production on The Last of Us, which is gearing up for its third, and maybe final, season.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.

Whether you’ve been playing PC games for years or you’re building your first gaming PC, picking the right graphics card is probably one of the most consequential choices. It doesn’t help that now there’s three companies making graphics cards, which means there are more options out there than ever before.

But there are a lot of reasons to pick an Nvidia graphics card over one made by AMD or Intel. For one, whether you love it or hate it, Nvidia has plenty of software and features that are exclusive to its graphics cards, whereas things like FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) from AMD will work no matter what GPU is in your system. Features like DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, make an Nvidia graphics card an attractive choice.

Nvidia also has the most powerful graphics cards on the market right now, especially at the high-end. There simply is not another graphics card that can match the RTX 5090 in pure performance. But even when it comes to more affordable graphics cards like the RTX 4060 Ti, the AI upscaling offered by DLSS can really help stretch the performance, and can even push into higher resolutions than you would otherwise be able to.

It's still important to figure out what resolution you want to play games at, because that’s going to change what type of graphics card you want to go for. If you want to play all the newest PC games at 4K with all the settings maxed, you’re going to need a much more powerful card than someone that just wants to play World of Warcraft at 1080p.

TL;DR: These Are Best GPUs

Graphics Cards Basics

While graphics cards are extremely complicated devices, shopping for one doesn’t need to be that much of a hassle. As long as you keep an eye out for some simple specs, you should have a pretty good idea of what you’re getting into.

The most obvious thing to look for is whether or not your graphics card is actually part of the current generation. You don’t want to miss out on performance or features, especially if you’re spending hundreds of dollars on just one part of your computer. With Nvidia graphics cards, this is actually extremely easy, just look at the two numbers following the ‘RTX’ or ‘GTX’ in the graphics card’s name. Nvidia just launched its newest generation of graphics cards, which are labeled with '50.' If it’s ‘40,’ that’s the previous generation from 2022; ‘30’ and ‘20’ are the two generations before that.

Don’t get me wrong, getting a 30-series or 20-series card will still provide an excellent gaming experience, with the RTX 3080 still able to power most games at 4K without breaking a sweat.

But what about the second two numbers? Well, take a look at the RTX 5090, the top-end graphics card on the market. Then, take a look at the RTX 4050, which is only a laptop GPU, but is way weaker. The scale typically goes from 50-90, with the higher number meaning a more powerful graphics card. Nvidia does sometimes add extra letters or words at the end of its graphics cards, with ‘Ti’ and ‘Super’ being common variants. This typically means a slightly more powerful card. For instance, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is going to be slightly more powerful than the RTX 5070. The basic rule of thumb is that, after the number, any extra letters or words typically indicate a faster graphics card.

When it comes to specs, graphics cards have a lot of numbers and lingo to swallow, which can definitely be overwhelming. But if you just want to slot a GPU in your rig and forget about it, you don’t need to pay attention to every little detail.

The amount of VRAM you need is going to largely depend on what resolution you want to play your games at. If you want to play games at 4K, you’re going to want as much video memory as you can afford. There are games that will eat up upwards of 20GB of VRAM at that resolution if you let them, so the sky really is the limit. For lower resolutions like 1080p, however, you can get by with 8GB of RAM, though I would recommend going with a 12GB or 16GB card if it’s in your budget. An 8GB card will get you through most games, but there is a growing number of AAA PC games that need more memory.

There are some other specs you can look at if you really want to, like clock speed, CUDA core count and Streaming Multiprocessors – what Nvidia calls its compute units – but those largely just get better as you get a more high-end graphics card either way. Compute Units are essentially the same as CPU cores on a processor, and each one contains 128 CUDA cores. So, the RTX 5080 with its 84 Compute Units, contains a total of 10,752 CUDA cores. Just keep in mind that directly comparing two graphics cards of different generations by the core counts alone won’t tell you how much of a performance jump it’ll be.

Once you’ve picked the graphics card you want, you need to make sure you have a power supply that can handle it. You can usually check the box your graphics card comes in to get an idea of how much power the card requires, and if not, Nvidia has it listed out on its website. My advice would be to check the required power for your graphics cards and then get a power supply that can provide just a bit more wattage. For instance, if your graphics card recommends a 450W power supply, I’d get a 550 or a 650W unit just to be on the safe side.

1. If You Just Want the Best: RTX 5090

2. Best for 4K (for Most People): RTX 5080

3. Best for 1440p: RTX 4070 Super

4. Best for 1080p: RTX 4060 Ti

5. Best on a Budget: GeForce GTX 1660 Super

Upcoming Nvidia Graphics Cards

The first wave of Nvidia Blackwell graphics cards are all here, and it seems like that's all we're going to get for now. Usually, Team Green would follow up its first wave of graphics cards with refreshed "Super" variants. However, nothing in the world of PC gaming hardware is normal right now, and it looks like the Super lineup has been canceled in the face of high RAM prices and AI datacenter demand. Right now, it looks like we'll be waiting for the RTX 6090 whenever that comes out – likely sometime in the second half of 2027.

What Is DLSS?

Deep Learning Super Sampling, or DLSS is an AI upscaling method that uses Nvidia’s Tensor Cores to improve image quality. The Tensor Core will take visual data from the frame being rendered, along with motion vector data, in order to accurately upscale the image to a higher resolution. This process results in an image that looks pretty close to the native resolution, but with a much higher frame rate.

In its early days, DLSS needed to train the AI model on each game it would support, with developers needing to upload data to Nvidia. However, DLSS has gone through several iterations, and now it does not need to be trained on individual games. Instead, if a developer wants to include DLSS in their game, they can just inject Nvidia’s API into the game. This means more games can support the technology, without having to wait for Nvidia’s training on each game.

With DLSS 3.0, Nvidia added Frame Generation to the equation. This technology takes the visual data from two frames, along with motion vector data from the game engine and motion information from its own hardware, and creates an entirely new frame that’s sandwiched between the two original frames. This would introduce a lot of latency, but Nvidia requires its Reflex technology to be enabled before Frame Generation can happen. Reflex essentially syncs the graphics card and the processor, eliminating the need for the CPU to queue up frames for the GPU to render later.

Nvidia updated to DLSS 4.0, then later 4.5, which introduced multi-frame generation and a new upscaling model. The new frame generation lets RTX 5000 graphics cards use AI to generate up to three frames per rendered frame, greatly improving framerates. The new DLSS also moves the upscaling algorithm to a transformer model, which allows for much better image quality, though with a slight hit to performance. But, hey – that's what frame generation is for, I guess.

Together, Frame Generation and Reflex greatly improve your frame rate, but there’s a catch. Because so much of it relies on motion data, you already need to have a decent frame rate for Frame Generation to work smoothly. So, this technology is best used for folks that can already get 60fps or more and just want to push to a higher frame rate.

What Is Ray Tracing?

Ray tracing is just a way to render light realistically. It does this by taking a light source, then simulating each ray of light as it bounces around the scene. It’s a simple concept to be sure, but it ends up requiring a ton of compute power to pull off. Any light being cast potentially has thousands of rays of light, each of which will bounce around hundreds of times, multiply that by needing a new frame 60 times a second, and you can imagine how much power you need to pull it off.

That’s why ray tracing in video games needs specialized hardware to pull this lighting method off without grinding your framerate to a standstill. Luckily, Nvidia has been working this hardware into its graphics cards since the RTX 2080 in 2018.

Fast forward to today, and even with that dedicated ray tracing hardware being built into every mainstream graphics card – not just from Nvidia – we still need to limit ray tracing in order to maximize performance. There are only a few games that support full ray tracing, or ‘path tracing,’ with most other games limiting the ray tracing elements to a certain part of the scene, like shadows or reflections, and also limiting the amount of bounces calculated for each ray of light.

It’s an expensive way to generate lighting, but it looks incredible, especially in games that rely on lighting for atmosphere. In Metro Exodus, for instance, the accurate lighting often leads to darker environments, amplifying the intense atmosphere the game already has.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

Embark Studios has opened up about how it will make the second Expedition in Arc Raiders more enticing after the first left its community wanting more.

The developer behind the popular sci-fi extraction shooter updated fans with a blog post on its website. Included are a February 25 sign-up date and a March 1 departure date for the account reset event, as players are told to look forward to more worthwhile rewards before sending their beloved Raiders into the unknown and starting from scratch.

Even if you were someone who accidentally stumbled into a showing of Stray Kids : The Dominate Experience at an IMAX theater, by the end of it you'll come away with either a K-pop catchy melody carved into your frontal lobe, a newfound respect for concert stagecraft, or a new and unnerving crush on at least one of the band's members. Quite possibly all three. Whether you're a new arrival on K-pop island, or own 263 photo cards and have an Instagram account devoted to Hyunlix theories, Stray Kids : The Dominate Experience delivers.

The real audience for this is the army of Stray Kids fans, known as Stay, and recognition of that is threaded through every song and soundbite. Stray Kids : The Dominate Experience is a concert movie meticulously put together from footage from the K-pop group's 2025 SoFi stadium performances, together with short interviews with each of the eight members and just a dash of behind the scenes footage. It's not a glimpse into the dark underbelly of the K-pop industry, there's no grand narrative beyond “Stray Kids work really damn hard and it's paying off,” and for anyone who says there's not enough grit and too much polish, well, I like my diamonds to shine.

Whoever your bias is, you won't be disappointed. My beloved Felix showcases his deeper than the Mariana Trench vocals and bares his soul, bias wrecker Hyunjin is saucier than a whole condiment aisle in a grocery store, Changbin's rapping is even more impressive on stage, Han continues to be cuter than a bucket of squirrels, and Lee Know and Seungmin's Cinema performance is a standout moment. Someone in the otherwise well behaved screening audience couldn't help but shout "daddy!" as Bang Chan talked about looking after the rest of the members, and there was an audible pained groan at one point while I.N was wearing a crop top. Each member spotlight is a mix of prepared gloss and earnestness that you don't often see from Western groups, and that ultimately managed to disarm even this cynical Brit.

I'm not going to spoil the entire set list for anyone who hasn't found it online (or was even lucky enough to see it live) but it's the rollercoaster ride through the many moods and styles of SKZ you want it to be. Maniac and LALALALA were particular highlights, but I also got a new appreciation for some of the more neglected tracks on my personal Stray Kids Bangers playlist. Domino, I did you dirty and I apologize.

By the time the encore hit the IMAX theater I was watching in, it was hard to differentiate the cheers and singing from screen to seat. The front rows got up and danced, and the light sticks were brandished with pride like a sword salute to a beloved general. Even if you think this is just a masterclass in marketing for the upcoming tours for Karma, then well played, because I am now willing to commit actual felonies to secure tickets to one of their North American shows.

Stray Kids : The Dominate Experience arrives in theaters on February 6.

Rachel Weber is the Head of Editorial Development at IGN and an elder millennial. She's been a professional nerd since 2006 when she got her start on Official PlayStation Magazine in the UK, and has since worked for GamesIndustry.Biz, Rolling Stone and GamesRadar. She loves horror, horror movies, horror games, Red Dead Redemption 2, and her Love and Deepspace boyfriends.

Amazon just wrapped up its second season of Fallout on Prime Video earlier this week. That means you can finally binge all of the episodes now if you've been waiting to do so. Unlike the first season, however, Amazon has quickly followed up season 2 with a 4K steelbook preorder. The artwork and product details aren't final yet, but you can already put your order in for the steelbook or the DVD.

Amazon has yet to announce any sort of release date for the physical editions of season 2.

The Fallout Season 2 4K Steelbook Is Up for Preorder

Ubisoft has reportedly canceled a multiplayer, cooperative Assassin's Creed title that has been in development at French studio Ubisoft Annecy.

This comes from a report by French publication Origami, which IGN has independently translated. According to the report, the project was codenamed "AC League", was originally conceived as a DLC for Assassin's Creed Shadows, and would have potentially taken place in the same feudal Japan era. The DLC would have involved four assassins joining forces to take on a series of scripted missions with up to four players that would have ultimately concluded the story told in the game's (canceled) Season Pass. You may have already heard of AC League if you pay close attention to Assassin's Creed gossip, as it was previously rumored last year in a report from Insider Gaming.

The project, Origami reports, was apparently fairly ambitious and was intended to serve as a baseline for future multiplayer features throughout the series, such as a return to a hybrid solo/multiplayer playstyle as existed in Assassin's Creed Unity or Black Flag (a remake of which has been rumored for some time now). However, as the AC League project progressed, directors at Ubisoft Annecy reportedly began to question whether it made sense to attach League to Shadows, as they worried it would take too long to make, and came up with a different plan that turned it into a small, standalone title borrowing pieces of the Assassin's Creed: Shadows open world. Development on this progressed with an intended invite-only alpha planned for May of 2026.

Unfortunately, AC League was allegedly just the latest victim of the ongoing upheaval at Ubisoft. For several months now, the company has been undergoing a massive restructure alongside major cost-cutting measures, canceling numerous projects, closing studios, and reorganizing its creative houses. It was to this restructuring that AC League fell victim, with leadership at Ubisoft Annecy being informed just last week that AC League was being canceled.

However, there is still a sliver of hope for the project, Origami reports. Apparently, a handful of Annecy employees have been selected to transfer the technical advancements the team made back into the company's proprietary Anvil engine, with the goal of eventually making it easier to add replayable multiplayer modes to future Assassin's Creed titles that would be less expensive to develop. Unfortunately, that leaves more than a quarter of the 270 individuals working at Annecy without a project at the moment, leaving a lot of lingering anxiety that layoffs may be coming next.

IGN has reached out to Ubisoft for comment.

Ubisoft's quarterly earnings will be reported next week, and all eyes are on the company to see if it can pull itself together amid some drastic financial times. Upon last reporting, the company had thrown out its previous fiscal year guidance for new, significantly reduced financial expectations, reflective of the fact that the company just closed two stories, laid off a lot of employees, and canceled six projects. It's also handed off its three biggest franchises to Vantage Studios, a newly-created business entity owned by Ubisoft but with a 25% stake from Tencent to help keep the lights on.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Article translation courtesy of Blythe Dujardin.