Starting with tomorrow’s release of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 for PC, we’re working to add more benefits to playing with an account for PlayStation Network. The Last of Us Part II Remastered (coming April 3, 2025), in addition to God of War Ragnarök and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, will all soon be adding in-game content unlocks for PlayStation Network account users.
An account for PlayStation Network will become optional for these titles on PC. Players who still opt to sign into a PlayStation Network account will also enjoy added benefits like trophies and friend management. Details on new benefits for players who opt to sign in with an account for PlayStation Network can be read below.
Game creators at PlayStation Studios will continue to work on bringing more benefits to players who sign up for a PlayStation Network account, so be sure to follow studio channels for more information. You can find more details on account sign-in at our website. Thank you to our PlayStation PC fans around the world for your support.
Softears, formally known as Softear Acoustics, is a Chinese IEM brand that was conceptualized in 2014, with a studio started in Shenzhen in 2017 before moving to Chengdu in 2019 where it operates an independent R&D lab and its own production facilities—not too different from FiiO’s industrial park that we visited recently. If some of this sounds familiar to you then you are probably too involved with IEMs and may need to take a break for your own mental health. Jokes aside, some of this story is also shared by MOONDROP, arguably the most famous IEM brand among the younger audiophiles today. Both MOONDROP and Softears operate out of the same industrial park and share some resources too. I understand that MOONDROP’s CEO invested in Softears early on with the goal of helping the latter be a higher end, R&D-centric brand that puts out more premium products. In return, MOONDROP might use a Softears-developed driver in its IEMs or have some Softears personnel help with the R&D and manufacturing of some products. Softears is even considered as a sister brand of MOONDROP in this regard, although it operates fairly independently when it comes to its own products. This is also why I’ve had no issues getting MOONDROP samples in for review, yet had to wait until today for our first Softears product review.
One of my goals attending the Shenzhen International Audio Show recently was to finally meet Softears. The brand had a booth at the show—in a completely different section from MOONDROP, for anyone wondering—and had a few different products for people to try out. The Enigma, which is Softears’s new flagship, immediately got my attention and it was easily one of the best IEMs I’ve tried at the show. Understandably, Softears was reluctant to send out the expensive Enigma for review, but they did offer the brand’s previous release in the form of the Studio4. This set released in March 2023, making it almost ancient in a world where IEMs release and get discontinued within a calendar year at times, if not sooner. However, this is part of what makes Softears different from the norm—its IEMs have a longer product life cycle and get supported far beyond your typical IEM brands even contemplate. This also means any Softears product has undergone a longer R&D phase too, with a clear purpose that needs to be fulfilled before it is deemed ready.
The Studio4 is a four balanced armature driver set that is developed with studio recording, music mixing, and stage monitoring in mind. It’s effectively an IEM analog of the Sennheiser HD 490 PRO we saw recently, and has a different role to play. Yet it has quickly become a favorite among audiophiles for its sound signature and tuning to where you will see the Studio4 near the top of many reviewer/influencer ranking lists, and it often gets recommended by the average IEM enthusiast too. I heard the Studio4 at Shenzhen and was immediately interested as a result of its comfortable fit and clean, yet engaging sound. Knowing that show floor conditions can be tricky, I of course agreed to their offer of a review sample to be able to try this out under familiar conditions. Note that there is also a newer “Starry Version” of the Studio4 that released recently, using clear resin shells and a sparkly blue faceplate, which seems to be exclusive to HiFiGo as of the time I write this review. Both versions should be otherwise identical elsewhere, including the sound which matters more, so this review should be representative of either in those metrics. Thanks to Softears for providing a review sample to TechPowerUp, and let’s begin this review with a look at the product specifications in the table below.
Specifications
Softears Studio4 In-Ear Monitors
Shell:
3D-printed medical-grade resin shells and faceplates
Cable:
Four-strand cable with oxygen-free copper conductor
Driver Unit:
Four balanced armature drivers
Frequency Range:
5 Hz–40 kHz (1/4′ free field, -3 dB)
Sensitivity:
123 dB/Vrms @1 kHz
Impedance:
12 Ω @1 kHz
Cable Connectors:
3.5 mm TRS plug to source + two 0.78 mm 2-pin plugs to IEMs
Intel’s relatively new lineup of Arc B-series “Battlemage” desktop graphics cards consists of B580 and B570 GPUs—these affordable models have been warmly welcomed by reviewers and customers alike. PC hardware enthusiasts—with larger wallets—will be pondering over possible future launches of mid-tier or higher-end SKUs. Industry insiders have not picked up on much chatter regarding possible successors to Team Blue’s mid-range Arc “Alchemist” A770 and A750 GPUs. The speculation machine has been fired up again, following the appearance of three new “Battlemage” PC IDs. Intel’s Linux kernel has been updated with these new additions—as discovered by Tomasz Gawroński (aka GawroskiT), earlier today.
A brief sentence outlines “3 new PCI IDs for BMG,” with no further or follow-up information included. Several industry watchdogs believe that Intel’s graphics hardware division has moved on from creating new Xe2 “Battlemage” products—Team Blue representatives have officially admitted that their Xe3 “Celestial” architecture is complete, and its engineers have already started work on the Xe4 “Druid” GPU IP. Instead, the three new identifiers could be linked to a late December leak. At the time, Quantum Bits claimed that Arc B580 variants with larger pools of VRAM were in the pipeline—these “Arc Pro” cards are supposedly workstation-oriented models. Insiders reckon that a product launch is planned for later in 2025.
AMD Radeon engineers are spending newly allocated extra time on optimizing their upcoming FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4) technology—industry watchdogs believe that a finalized version will launch alongside the initial lineup of RDNA 4 graphics card, now scheduled for release in March. Recently, David McAfee—Vice President and General Manager of Ryzen and Radeon products—revealed that his colleagues were working hard on maximizing performance and enabling “more FSR 4 titles.” Insiders have started theorizing about how the current landscape of FSR 3.1-compatible games will translate with next-gen “AI-driven” upscaling techniques—several outlets believe that a freshly patched PC version of The Last of Us Part I is paving the way for eventual “easy” updates.
Kepler_L2—an almost endless fountain of Team Red-related insider knowledge—picked up on a past weekend VideoCardz report, and proceeded to add some extra tidbits via social media interaction. They started off by claiming that Team Red’s: “RDNA 4 driver replaces FSR 3.1 DLL with FSR 4.” When queried about the implication of said development, Kepler believes that all FSR 3.1 game titles will become ready to support FSR 4 on day one. The upgrade process—possibly achieved through a driver-level DLL swap—is reportedly quite easy to implement. According to the insider: “yeah, it should just work.”
A few days ago, we reported on the US reading a massive 500 billion US Dollar package called “Stargate Project” to build AI infrastructure on American soil. However, China is also planning to stay close behind, or even overlap the US in some areas, with a one trillion Yuan “AI Industry Development Action Plan”. Translating into around 138 billion US Dollars at the time of writing, the Chinese AI plan is similar to the US Stargate project: develop AI infrastructure through data center expansion and AI accelerator scale-up. Unlike the Stargate project, led by private initiatives and OpenAI at the helm, the Chinese AI Industry Development Action Plan is an entirely state-sponsored initiative that will fund firms like Baidu, ByteDance, Alibaba, and DeepSeek with additional AI accelerators (or sanction-abiding GPUs) to create more advanced AI systems.
Over the past few days, DeepSeek, a branch of a Chinese hedge fund, has not only open-sourced its R1 reasoning model but made it entirely free to use for everyone. This has challenged moat of Western competitors like OpenAI, pushing its CEO Sam Altman to offer an O3-mini reasoning model for up to 100 queries per day for the ChatGPT Plus user tier. Not only did DeepSeek provide a model equally intelligent to OpenAI’s best, but it also offered it completely free. This has stirred up the tech community quite a bit and showed that Chinese companies are not much behind Western competitors. With this AI action plan, the Chinese government wants to push its domestic AI makers even further ahead and allow them to overtake cutting-edge model development potentially. Of course, getting GPUs for these projects remains an intricate task, but with export control loopholes and domestic AI accelerator development, the AI arms race is picking up quite a bit.
Yes, the title is correct. One of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5090D “China” edition GPUs, not the regular RTX 5090, managed to run at 3.4 GHz under liquid nitrogen. With a staggering 575 W default TDP, Tony Yu, ASUS China’s general manager, has performed physical modifications that allow the card to run up to 1000 W TDP. The RTX 5090D is a China-exclusive variant with virtually no difference from the regular RTX 5090, just limited general AI capability due to US export regulations. ASUS China used its top-end Astral OC variant for this stunt, which, as we proved in our review of the regular ASUS RTX 5090 Astral OC, has some pretty good chip binning, allowing the card to reach the highest overclock. We pushed the regular RTX 5090 Astral OC GPU on air to 3086 MHz, a +277 MHz over the stock boost setting. However, the RTX 5090D equivalent under LN2 manages to reach 3,390 MHz at peak loads, which is a +581 MHz difference.
For memory, the overclock is equally impressive with 34 Gbps. Regarding performance, the LN2-overclocked RTX 5090D surpassed stock performance by approximately 16%. During benchmark tests, the GPU outperformed multiple previous-generation graphics cards, including a dual RTX 3090 Ti configuration in Port Royal and a quad GTX 1080 Ti setup in Fire Strike. Power consumption figures indicate that 1,760 W was used in total for a rig with ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090D, which is paired with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D on the ASUS ROG X870E Hero motherboard. This roughly yields a 1,000 W power consumption by the card, which has seen its PCB get physical modifications to output such high power.
We have with us the ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 OC graphics card, which debuts the new ROG Astral brand for ASUS. Designed to provide the best of ASUS thermal engineering and industrial design, the ROG Astral brand is positioned a notch above the ROG Strix brand, providing the company’s best air cooling solution, a premium set of materials, and the new Quad Fan Force arrangement of no less than four fans. Aesthetically, ROG Astral graphics cards pair well not just with ASUS ROG Strix series motherboards, but also the more premium ROG Maximus and ROG Crosshair lines. The GeForce RTX 5090 is designed to crunch through any of today and tomorrow’s games with maxed out settings, at 4K Ultra HD.
The Blackwell graphics architecture powering the RTX 5090 introduces neural rendering, a breakthrough new concept where generative AI works more collaboratively with classic raster 3D graphics. You’ve had a taste of generative AI, and its ability to conjure up photorealistic images and videos. Now imagine AI drawing parts of your 3D scene in real time, complete with geometric detail and ray tracing effects. Making this possible is API-level standardization that allows games to access Tensor cores, and the ability for the GPU to accelerate a generative AI model and render games in tandem, thanks to a new hardware scheduling component called AMP.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect about Blackwell is that GPUs in its generation do not introduce a new foundry node, all chips in the RTX 50-series are built on the existing TSMC 4N process, which is an NVIDIA-specific variant of the 5 nm EUV node. Whatever generational improvements in efficiency you see are purely thanks to advances made by the graphics architecture itself, and a re-architected power management system.
The RTX 5090 is based on the GB202 ASIC, a massive 750 mm² slab of silicon featuring over 92 billion transistors, 192 Blackwell streaming multiprocessors, a PCI-Express 5.0 x16 interface, and a mammoth 512-bit GDDR7 memory interface, belting out 1.79 TB/s of memory bandwidth. The trend across the RTX 50-series is large increases in bandwidth thanks to GDDR7, because neural rendering and the new DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation are memory sensitive technologies. The RTX 5090 is carved out of the GB202 by enabling 170 out of those 192 SM, and enabling 96 MB out of the 128 MB on-die L2 cache available. This results in 21,760 CUDA cores, 680 Tensor cores, and 170 RT cores, across 11 GPCs, and this doesn’t even max out the GB202. The card comes with 32 GB of 28 Gbps GDDR7 memory.
The Blackwell graphics architecture introduces a new generation streaming multiprocessor with concurrent FP32 and INT32 capability across all its 128 CUDA cores, shader execution reordering with awareness for neural shaders, and the new 5th Gen Tensor core that’s capable of FP4 data formats for 32x the throughput of the original Tensor core. The new generation RT core has the hardware groundwork for Mega Geometry, the ability to give ray traced object significantly higher poly counts, or those many triangles onto which rays should interact with. DLSS Multi Frame Generation is a technology that uses AI to predict not just every other frame following a conventionally rendered one, but up to three frames following it, effectively quadrupling frame-rates (or at least the smoothness of output).
The ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 OC doesn’t just come with a heavy cooling solution that fits into the dimensions of the previous generation RTX 40-series ROG Strix graphics cards, but also dials things up a notch with the introduction of a fourth fan arranged along the tail end of the backplate where you normally expect a cutout to be, for airflow from the third fan to go through. This fourth fan acts as a “pull” fan, increasing the overall airflow volume of the heatsink by around 20%. There’s plenty of tastefully executed dual-tone surfaces, rich metal alloy textures, and ARGB LED lighting. Innovations you expect from ROG Strix series cards are also here, such as dual-BIOS, case fan headers, and ARGB headers. ASUS is giving the RTX 5090 a factory overclock of 2580 MHz compared to the 2410 MHz reference GPU Boost frequency. The cooling solution is tasked with ensuring higher boost frequency residency and lower noise. Since this is the company’s most premium air-cooled custom design RTX 5090, ASUS is pricing it at USD $2,800, an astounding 40% premium over the NVIDIA baseline price.
A set of newly leaked benchmarks has revealed the performance capabilities of NVIDIA’s upcoming RTX 5080 GPU. Scheduled to launch alongside the RTX 5090 on January 30, the GPU was spotted on Geekbench under OpenCL and Vulkan benchmark tests—and based on the performance, it might not make it among the best graphics cards. The tested device was an MSI-branded RTX 5080 labeled as model MS-7E62. This setup had AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor, which many consider one of the best CPUs for gaming. It also included an MSI MPG 850 Edge TI Wi-Fi motherboard and 32 GB of DDR5-6000 memory.
The benchmark results show that the RTX 5080 scored 261,836 points in Vulkan and 256,138 points in OpenCL tests. Compared to the RTX 4080, its previous version, the RTX 5080 has a 22% boost in Vulkan performance and a small 6.7% gain in OpenCL. Reddit user TruthPhoenixV found that on the Blender Open Data platform, the GPU got a median score of 9,063.77. This score is 9.4% higher than the RTX 4080 and 8.2% better than the RTX 4080 Super. Even with these improvements, the RTX 5080 might not outperform the current-gen top-tier RTX 4090. In the past, NVIDIA’s 80-class GPUs have beaten the 90-class GPUs from the previous generation, but these early numbers suggest this trend might not continue for the RTX 5080.
The RTX 5080 uses NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell architecture, with 10,752 CUDA cores spread across 84 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) versus the 9,728 cores in the RTX 4080. It has 16 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 256-bit bus. NVIDIA says it can deliver 1,801 TOPS in AI performance through Tensor Cores and 171 TeraFLOPS of ray tracing performance using its RT Cores.
That said, it’s important to note that these benchmark results have not been fully verified so we should wait for the review embargo to lift before concluding.
NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5090 is the fastest graphics card ever released. It comes with a whopping 32 GB VRAM, and support for multi-frame generation, which achieves hundreds of FPS easily. We also managed to disassemble the card, and our review includes performance testing without upscaling or frame generation, too.
The time draws near to Reign in Hell when DOOM: The Dark Ages releases May 15, 2025, on Game Pass, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and PC. Preorder your copy today! For PC players, check that your setup is battle-ready by consulting our PC Requirements below, including listings for Minimum, Recommended and even Ultra 4K settings.
A NEW GENERATION OF IDTECH id Software’s most ambitious title yet, DOOM: The Dark Ages pushes new standards in visual fidelity and performance with the power of idTech8. Taking full advantage of modern hardware on all platforms, idTech8 ushers in a new era of gameplay performance and visual fidelity featuring all-new dynamic interactive ray-traced lighting and shadows, higher-fidelity image quality, increased gore and destruction and so much more. With the largest environments ever in a DOOM game, DOOM: The Dark Ages delivers an epic experience full of worlds to explore, hordes of demons to destroy and an action story worthy of the Slayer’s legend. Whether soaring through the air with his dragon or smashing giant Titan-sized demons using his Atlan mech, the Slayer is taking on his biggest battles yet – all beautifully rendered and running at a buttery-smooth 60 frames per second on all platforms.
System Requirements MINIMUM (1080p/60 FPS/Low Video Settings)
OS: Win 10 64Bit / Win 11 64Bit
CPU: AMD Zen 2 or Intel 10th Generation @3.2Ghz with 8 cores / 16 threads or better (examples: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X or better, Intel Core i7 10700K or better)
GPU: NVIDIA or AMD hardware ray tracing-capable GPU with 8 GB dedicated VRAM or better (examples: NVIDIA RTX 2060 Super or better, AMD RX 6600 or better)
CPU: AMD Zen 3 or Intel 12th Generation @3.2Ghz with 8 cores / 16 threads or better (examples: AMD Ryzen 7 5700X or better, Intel Core i7 12700K or better)
GPU: NVIDIA or AMD hardware ray tracing-capable GPU with 10 GB dedicated VRAM or better (examples: NVIDIA RTX 3080 or better, AMD RX 6800 or better)
CPU: AMD Zen 3 or Intel 12th Generation @3.2Ghz with 8 cores / 16 threads or better (examples: AMD Ryzen 7 5700X or better, Intel Core i7 12700K or better)
GPU: NVIDIA or AMD hardware ray tracing-capable GPU with 16 GB dedicated VRAM or better (examples: NVIDIA RTX 4080 or better, AMD RX 7900XT or better)
Note: DOOM: The Dark Ages requires a hardware ray tracing-compatible GPU to play on PC, including Minimum Specifications. Details on Path Tracing specifications will be revealed at a later date.
DOOM: The Dark Ages launches May 15, 2025, on Game Pass, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC. Play up to two days early with Early Access by preordering DOOM: The Dark Ages Premium Edition.