Guides

Screen tearing, stuttering, and input lag are the three enemies every PC gamer fights at some point. The technologies designed to fix them, V-Sync, G-Sync, and FreeSync, each take a different approach. And each one trades off input lag differently, which is why competitive players obsess over which setting to leave on or off. Understanding … Read more

Capping your FPS can make games feel smoother because it locks your frame times to a steady rhythm that your monitor can actually display, instead of letting frames arrive in an uneven stream that produces microstutter and tearing. When your GPU stops racing to render hundreds of unused frames, every frame that hits your screen … Read more

You press jump, and your character floats upward half a beat late. You flick your mouse for a headshot, and the crosshair drags behind your hand. That muddy, disconnected feeling is input lag, and once you notice it, you cannot un-notice it. Our team has spent the last several years tuning PCs, consoles, and peripherals … Read more

You launch your favorite game on a new PC, confident your 80-hour save is waiting in the cloud. Instead, Steam throws a red banner: “Steam was unable to sync your files.” If Steam Cloud sync is not working for you in , you are far from alone. Thousands of players hit this wall every week, … Read more

Crashing to desktop, missing textures, and corrupted saves are some of the most frustrating issues a PC gamer can face. Before you uninstall and re-download a 100GB game, there is a faster fix that solves the problem most of the time: you verify game files so the launcher can replace anything that is broken. This … Read more

Proton is Valve’s open-source compatibility layer, built on top of Wine, that lets you run thousands of Windows-only games on Linux through Steam Play with no manual configuration. Released in 2018 alongside the Steam Deck’s early development, it solved the long-standing chicken-and-egg problem that had held Linux gaming back for decades. Before Proton, getting a … Read more

Linux gaming has come a long way since the days of hunting for a handful of native ports. Thanks to Valve’s Proton compatibility layer and the Steam Deck, the majority of your Steam library will run on Linux right now. But not every game works, and buying a title only to find it refuses to … Read more

When a Windows game refuses to launch on your Steam Deck or Linux PC, the single most effective fix is choosing the right Proton version for that specific title. Start with Proton Stable (the version Steam picks by default), move to Proton Experimental if Stable fails, then try Proton GE for stubborn cases, and finally … Read more

I bought my first MacBook back in 2018, and the very first thing I tried to do was install the games I’d been playing on my old Windows tower. Half of them weren’t available. The other half ran like they were being powered by a potato. After years of testing, troubleshooting, and writing about this … Read more