The nominations for the sixth annual Gayming Awards have been announced, with Hades 2 and Date Everything each receiving three nominations across 14 categories.

Supergiant Games' Hades 2 is among the six titles nominated for Game of the Year, alongside Ball x Pit, Blue Prince, Ghost of Yōtei, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and South of Midnight.

Hades 2 and Silksong were also nominated for the Gayming Magazine Fan Favourite Award, along with Date Everything, Dead by Daylight: Steady Pulse, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Lost Records: Bloom & Rage.

Date Everything was featured in the LGBTQ+ Indie Game category, as well as Monster Prom 4: Monster Con, Quantum Witch, Takes of Seikyu, The Beekeepers Picnic, and Spirit Swap.

Winners of the LGBTQ+ Streaming Rising Star Class of 2026, LGBTQ+ Content Creator Superstar Award, and the Gayming Icon Award will be revealed in May 2026.

This year's ceremony includes a new suite of accolades called the Gayming Awards Creator Honours, which "set out to celebrate and uplift LGBTQ+ gaming content creators of all levels."

The Gayming Awards 2026 takes place on June 8 on World of Wonder's streaming service, WOW Presents Plus.

The ceremony will be hosted by last year's LGBTQ+ Voice Actor of the Year winner Erika Ishii and drag artist Dawn.

NVIDIA today unveiled NVIDIA DLSS 5, the company’s most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing in 2018.

DLSS 5 introduces a real-time neural rendering model that infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials. Bridging the divide between rendering and reality, DLSS 5 empowers game developers to deliver a new level of photoreal computer graphics previously only achieved in Hollywood visual effects.

“Twenty-five years after NVIDIA invented the programmable shader, we are reinventing computer graphics once again,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “DLSS 5 is the GPT moment for graphics — blending hand-crafted rendering with generative AI to deliver a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression.”

Since the dawn of GeForce, NVIDIA has strived to deliver the graphics horsepower required for game developers to create incredible, realistic worlds — where lighting, reflections and shadows obey the laws of nature.

From programmable shaders with GeForce 3 in 2001, to CUDA with GeForce 8800 GTX in 2006, to real-time ray tracing with GeForce RTX 2080 Ti in 2018, to path tracing and neural shaders with GeForce RTX 5090 in 2025, NVIDIA has delivered major architectural innovations and a massive 375,000x increase in compute to meet this challenge.

However, the rendering horsepower available to a 16-millisecond game frame remains a tiny fraction of that available to a photoreal Hollywood VFX frame, which can take minutes to hours to render. Real-time rendering cannot bridge the gap to photorealism through brute force alone.

NVIDIA DLSS was released in 2018 as an AI technology to boost performance, first by upscaling resolution, and then by generating entirely new frames. It has been integrated in over 750 games, becoming a gold standard for the industry. Launched at CES this year, DLSS 4.5 uses AI to draw 23 out of every 24 pixels seen on the screen. Today, DLSS is evolving beyond performance to transform visual fidelity in games.

Video AI models have rapidly learned to generate photoreal pixels, but they run offline, are difficult to precisely control and often lack predictability, with every new prompt generating bespoke content. For games, pixels must be deterministic, delivered in real time and tightly grounded in the game developer’s 3D world and artistic intent.

DLSS 5 takes a game’s color and motion vectors for each frame as input, and uses an AI model to infuse the scene with photoreal lighting and materials that are anchored to source 3D content and consistent from frame to frame. DLSS 5 runs in real time at up to 4K resolution for smooth, interactive gameplay.

Google Play has announced a slew of new features to improve the discoverability and purchase appeal of its PC and mobile games.

Google's "buy once, play anywhere" scheme, announced at GDC Festival of Gaming, is accompanied by new paid games and game trials to further tempt the 160 million gamers that use its You tab.

Its "buy once, play anywhere" pricing – live from today – supports players jumping into select paid games across both mobile and PC devices for a single purchase, including Dungeon Clawler, OTTTD, and the Reigns series.

Addressing players, Google said: "To help you more easily decide if you want to buy a game, we're introducing Game Trials, a risk-free way to jump into the full version of a paid title at no cost. If you like it, you can easily purchase the game and pick up right where you left off, with your progress carrying over.

"Game Trials are rolling out soon to select paid games on mobile, and will come to Google Play Games on PC in the future."

Google is also committed to making it easier for players to ask each other game-related questions, though this is currently restricted to English-language Community Posts and only on selected games. More languages and games are coming "soon."

Addressing attendees at GDC Festival of Gaming, VP, Next Generation, Jason Ronald, confirmed "Helix" will deliver "high performance and provide the ultimate player-first experience," and is "partnering closely with AMD to define the next generation of rendering and simulation."

Game Developer reports that the console will be powered by a custom AMD-based SOC, co-designed to support the next generation of DirectX, "bringing intelligence directly into the graphics and compute pipeline" and "deep texture compression."

"There's a ton of work that we can do on the hardware side. There's a ton of work that we can do on the software side, but it's also about how you take advantage of this as developers. And so when we talk about deep texture compression, that includes the latest neural texture compression techniques, but we're also leaning in very heavily into Z standard as well.

Ronald added that Microsoft is "committed to keeping games from four generations of Xbox playable for years to come. As part of our 25th anniversary later this year, we'll be rolling out new ways to play some of the most iconic games from our past." This includes letting players access PC games on its hardware.

Resident Evil: Requiem reached an all-time concurrent peak of 334,214 players during its debut weekend, the biggest in the franchise's history.

According to SteamDB, the game reached this peak on Saturday (February 28), a day after its launch.

This record is over double that of Resident Evil 4 Remake (168,191) and triple that of Requiem's predecessor Resident Evil Village (106,631).

Looking across the franchise on SteamDB, there's been a gradual increase in players for both RE4 Remake and RE Village since February 15, 2026.

Steam is one of several platforms Requiem launched on, including the Epic Game Store, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2.

Requiem has been well received, with critics praising an overall nostalgic return to the franchise's roots. You can read more in our critical consensus here.

The game has been a major financial boost for Capcom, even before launch, increasing sales of legacy titles in the franchise, including Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil Village.