Gaming - Page 1152

Assassin's Creed: Unity has been confirmed to be running at 900p at 30FPS on both the Xbox One and PS4, according to Senior Producer Vincent Pontbriand in an interview with VideoGamer.

Pontbriand said: "We decided to lock them at the same specs to avoid all the debates and stuff". Weirdly, the new Assassin's Creed title is not held back by the GPU side of the AMD-powered APU found inside of both of the consoles, but the CPU side of the silicon. Pontbriand explained: "Technically we're CPU-bound. The GPUs are really powerful, obviously the graphics look pretty good, but it's the CPU [that] has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen, all these systems running in parallel".

"We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating, because we thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything AI-wise, and we realised it was going to be pretty hard", he continued. "It's not the number of polygons that affect the framerate. We could be running at 100fps if it was just graphics, but because of AI, we're still limited to 30 frames per second".

It looks like we can expect Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes to hit the PC on December 18, according to multiple Russian sources who attended their local video game exhibition, IgorMir.

We know that both Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain are coming to PC, with series creator Hideo Kojima officially announcing the Steam versions of the game just a couple of months ago. Ground Zeroes is a prologue to the full deal: The Phantom Pain, and is already out on the PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is due out on the aforementioned platforms, and PC, in 2015.

Rebellion has just updated Sniper Elite 3, with the game now joining the ranks of AMD's Mantle compatible games. The Head of Programming at Rebellion, Kevin Floyer-Lea explained that switching to a different API, is important not only for the gaming industry, but gamers, too.

Sniper Elite 3 runs on the Asura engine, with Rebellion having to find a way to bake Mantle support in with the assets the developer had made for the DirectX version of the game. With Asura being a cross-platform title, it was easier than some engines, but a big task nonetheless. The Mantle-powered version of Sniper Elite 3 lowers the CPU overhead, thanks to more efficient calls within the Mantle API. You can see in the image below, that the Mantle version of the game uses less CPU power, but also provides increased FPS.

We can see that using the Intel Core i7 3770K processor at stock speeds (3.5GHz), the DirectX 11 version of the game uses 23% of the 8 available threads, and provides 88FPS. The Mantle version of the game on the other hand, uses 21% CPU - 2% less than DX11 - and provides 100FPS, just over 10% added performance. Not bad, considering its free performance for Radeon users.

Monolith's new Shadow of Mordor is pushing PCs a little harder in the graphics department, but the effects are good enough to require a 3.7GB download of the games Ultra HD texture pack. This texture packs increases the in-game graphics with higher resolution textures, recommended only for GPUs with 6GB of VRAM, like NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan.

But as it stands, there is an issue with the texture pack, as users are reporting that even with the Ultra preset for textures enabled, the game still runs on High quality. There aren't many GPUs on the market with 6GB of VRAM (or more) on them, apart from a select group of Radeon HD 7970s and R9 290Xs, and a couple of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 780 and 780 Ti, apart from the company's higher-end GTX Titan series.

The game has a built-in benchmark which is easy for comparing your system against friends, and to see the averages, etc increase with an upgrade to your system. We will have benchmarks using Shadow or Mordor shortly, so check back over the weekend.

It wasn't long ago that NVIDIA used its GAME24 event to officially unveil its new second-generation Maxwell-based GPUs, the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970, but also celebrated PC gaming for 24 hours across the world.

NVIDIA had over 1.3 million gamers from over 120 countries jump into the live stream for the various streams NVIDIA had going, from a 24-hour modding competition, to the Maxwell launch itself, to a DotA 2 tournament, and more. 1.3 million gamers tuning in over 24 hours show that NVIDIA pulled something popular here, so it'll be interesting to see another event in the near future from the company.

Star Citizen has raked in over $55 million in crowdfunding since it went live last year, which has seen the game enter the Guinness Book of World Records "not as the largest crowdfunded game of all time, but as the largest crowdfunded anything of all time", according to Roberts Space Industries' founder and Wing Commander's father, Chris Roberts.

Funding for the space simulation game began last November, with a $6 million Kickstarter project. When Star Citizen reached $50 million in funding, Roberts said: "Ship sales and new members of our community are the two main fund raising sources". Roberts talked about the success of Star Citizen, and its seemingly endless campaign which just isn't running out of steam, he reiterated to fans that "there is no venture capitalist wanting a massive return in three years".

This is great news for gamers and fans of the game, as well as backers and funders of the game, as the profits aren't all for RSI, but Roberts said that his "intention is for all the money we bring in before launch to be spent on development". RSI now has a team of over 280 people, with Roberts adding: "It is the community, from the existing backers who continue to support the game, to new members who join every day who are setting the level of ambition and budget for Star Citizen".

After the mess that was the launch of Battlefield 4, EA is taking a much different, and more appropriate path for the launch of the Visceral Games-developed Battlefield: Hardline. The company delayed it into 2015, but it looks like it could be for a good reason.

At the Tokyo Game Show, Game Revolution talked with Ian Milham, the Creative Director of Visceral Games. Game Revolution asked Milham whether the game will be 100% ready at launch, as most games these days don't seem ready for their big launches, with pretty much every big game launched lately enjoying its fair share of problems. Milham replied with: "What you're basically asking is, 'Is you're game going to work?' and the answer is yes, it's gonna work. We actually started on this more than a year before Battlefield 4 came out".

He continued: "We've been working with the DICE guys for a long time; some of our engineering work is actually in Battlefield 4 and things they've been doing since then. It's in pretty great shape now and all that work is gonna come into what we're doing". Milham also added: "We already had one very successful beta, we're going to have another beta on every platform we ship on. We take shipping a working game pretty seriously. So, yes, the game will work".

Ryse is going to hit the PC soon, after being an Xbox One exclusive and launch title for Microsoft. The Crytek developed game is now being compared between the Xbox One and PC in a new video, which you can watch below.

I watched that video, and to me, I didn't see much of a graphical change between the two. I did notice massively increased frame rates on the PC, and reduced motion blur, but only slight upgrades in terms of texture quality and animation. Digital Foundry are behind the video, noting that they were playing with the preview build of Ryse for PC, which isn't the complete version gamers will receive soon.

Richard Leadbetter of Digital Foundry explained that he found the PC version can improve in two very obvious areas: resolution and frame rate. Leadbetter said: "The PC version we tested-a two-level press demo-offers the opportunity to resolve these issues conclusively. Slotting a Radeon R9 290 into our Core i7 3770K PC overclocked to 4.3GHz, Ryse's spectacular opening renders beautifully at a native 1080p, with a flawless 60fps update. A 30fps cap is included in the options, but crucially, Crytek allows PC users to run fully unlocked - and given the right hardware, the impact is spectacular".

Project Cars is shaping up to be one of the best, if not the best-looking racing game of all time, but how will it look on the now current generation consoles?

Slightly Mad Studios, the developer behind the game, has said that they are aiming for 1080p at 60FPS on both the Xbox One and PS4. Andy Tudor from Slightly Mad Studios talked with Eurogamer recently, where he said that even though the recent work-in-progress versions of the Xbox One version of the game were "not quite 1080p at the moment" the studio is "still aiming to get there".

Tudor continued: "Towards the end of the game you're always optimizing, and during development it's a rollercoaster. Sometimes you look at the game and think oh god, that's not working, that's not working. But other days you hit 60 fps, and it's awesome". Tudor also explained that the "physics underneath runs at 600 times a second" and that the developer calculates "the input you're doing on the controller 250 times per second". Project Cars slides onto gamers' rigs and consoles on November 18, arriving on SteamOS and Wii U next year.

Over the weekend we reported, as many others did, that Microsoft had delayed the launch of its Xbox One console in China, but the company has just announced that this is wrong. Microsoft has said that it is launching the Xbox One in China on September 29, just six days from now.

General Manager of Xbox China, Enwei Xie, said in an official release: "After receiving government approval for the first wave of games, we will launch with the first 10 games now and continue our work to bring more blockbuster games and a broad offering of entertainment and app experiences to the platform in the weeks and months to come. With extraordinary effort and seamless cooperation across parties, we are incredibly excited to deliver Xbox One to fans in China and we welcome them to the Xbox family".

Which ten games will be on offer for the Chinese launch of the Xbox One? We will see Forza Motorsport 5, Kinect Sports Rivals, Powerstar Golf, Zoo Tycoon, Max: The Curse of Brotherhood, Dance Central Spotlight, Neverwinter Online, Rayman Legends Trials Fusion, and Naughty Kitties from Chinese developer Coconut Island released on September 29. Xbox boss Phil Spencer has said: "This milestone is significant for both our partnership with China and our global expansion plan. Every new market launch is unique and we're grateful to our fans for their patience and enthusiasm throughout the process".

Steam gamers will enjoy the new Steam Discovery Update that Valve is pushing out right now, which adds "functionality and features designed to optimize the Steam shopping experience as the number of new titles on Steam increases".

Valve has softly announced that there are now over 100 million active Steam accounts, with an additional 1300 new titles being added to Steam in the last nine months alone. Valve, with the Steam Discovery Update, is offering a smarter Home page, which will be "offering recommendations based on past purchases, recent playtime, and recommendations by friends".

Valve has also improved Steam Search, with a new feature called Curators, which allows anyone to become a Curator, recommending games and allowing people to follow them, and their recommendation on titles. Alden Kroll of Valve said: "We have made great efforts to increase the number of titles we can publish on Steam, which means more choices for customers. This update introduces multiple features and functionality to help customers explore Steam's growing catalog and find the games they are most interested in playing".

Rockstar Games had a support article on their website, which has since been ripped away, teasing some new features for the new version of Grand Theft Auto V coming to the Xbox One, PS4 and PC. One of these features was something never-before-seen, a first-person mode for both on foot and vehicles.

The full list included: "a brand new first person mode for vehicles" something that "shows off the interior of the vehicle, including working speedometers, tachometers, dash lights and more". This is a big, big change, as GTA V has countless vehicles that the developer would need to re-work the internals of. Better yet, Rockstar teased that there would be "a brand new first person mode while on foot" which changes the game, completely. A first-person mode on foot would propel Grand Theft Auto V to completely new heights, especially with the precision offered on a mouse for the PC.

The news was confirmed just today, with the RockstarGTAV account on Twitter teasing "First person #GTA V #PS4 #XBOXONE #PC". Other new features for the upcoming re-release include "a wealth of new easter eggs and random events for Story Mode", possible animals roaming Los Santos, player transfers from the Xbox 360 and PS3 releases of GTA V offering free new weapons and a free garage in GTA Online, and a "newly overhauled character selection screen".

Video games are a big part of most of our lives, but most forget its origins. Generations of gamers will grow up thinking that consoles started it all, with the likes of Xbox and PlayStation, but the seeds were planted before some of these gamers' parents were even born. Now, in Frisco, Texas, we can expect a new videogame history museum to be opened, known as The National Videogame Museum.

The National Videogame Museum will be opened in Frisco, Texas, which is part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. The board of the Frisco Community Development Corporation voted last week, unanimously approving the terms to open up the museum. The board has teamed up with travel and tourism authorities to raise $100,000 for startup costs, with the Museum founders agreeing to match dollar-for-dollar.

By April 2015, the Museum will start a capital campaign in order to raise money to expand out the facility. We should expect The National Videogame History Museum to approach major industry sources, such as the aforementioned console makers, and large publishers in order to get donations to get the construction started. The collection that the Museum holds is already large, with the Classic Gaming Expo starting in 1999 which gets filled up easily, and it's only 7000 square feet.

NVIDIA Editor's Day 2014 - Ubisoft is a very close partner of NVIDIA, with the hardware giant helping the software giant in most of its games, including the soon-to-be-released Far Cry 4. In Monterey Bay last week, we were greeted with an early peek at the GeForce GTX 980, as well as a slew of games, one of which was Far Cry 4.

We found out that Far Cry 4 will be utilizing a bunch of NVIDIA technologies, with an injection of features that will ensure that the PC version of Far Cry 4 will stand far and away from the console versions, current-generation consoles included. We have HBAO+, PCSS, TXAA, God Rays, Fur, and Enhanced 4K Support, as well as NVIDIA's just-announced MFAA, DSR and much more.

Starting with HBAO+ or horizon-based ambient occlusion, a technology that improves on ambient occlusion, which provides a much more realistic shadow around objects that occlude rays of light.

NVIDIA Editor's Day 2014 - NVIDIA has now officially launched its new Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 GPUs, but at its Editor's Day event last week in the beautiful Monterey Bay, California, the company reiterated its stance on PC gaming.

The company has said that out of the 330 million or so PC gamers in the world, around 200 million of those game on GeForce GPUs, which is a huge number of gamers on NVIDIA hardware. One of the driving forces behind this, is that PC gaming is now considered a sport, thanks to eSports titles like League of Legends, StarCraft and many more.

The amount of eSports tournaments has grown considerably from 2000, where only 10 tournaments took place, to 279 in 2008. Between 2008 and 2012, that number has grown exponentially, to 1151 eSports tournaments last year. Professional eSports gamers are making some serious cash, and there are more people than ever tuning into live streams, with 40,000+ in live attendance at some of these events.

We all know Halo is for the most part, an Xbox exclusive, but Microsoft is pledging better PC support, where is does the first-person shooter stand on the PC? Executive Producter on the game, Dan Ayoub, explains: "We've definitely heard the questions about PC. Right now we're a couple months out from the Xbox version's release, and that's our main focus right now. That's quite honestly where all our headspace is right now".

Considering that Halo: Master Chief Collection is close to release, one would've thought there is no better time than now than to release it onto the PC. But, with four games with one of them receiving a complete graphical overhaul, it might have been too much for the company: releasing an Xbox One version, and a PC version.

Ayoub added: "From a technical standpoint, you look at the architecture of the Xbox One and there are some similarities to the architecture of a modern PC. That certainly makes that sort of cross-platform development easier. But beyond that the ease goes away. Master Chief Collection is massive. We have to coordinate four games, 100-plus maps, a lot of new cinematics, and Halo 2 Anniversary". Microsoft seems to be all-in with Halo on Xbox, with Ayoub saying: "We wanted to do a great job on console. The anchor of Halo: Master Chief Collection is the ten-year anniversary of Halo 2 on console. So our approach was to focus primarily on console as a result of that".

The researchers of Villanova University and Rutgers University have published a study where there have made a comparison using the sales of violent video games with criminal statistics across the United States. Interestingly, it was discovered that contrary to a certain belief, the number of criminal activities seems to drop at the time when AAA titles like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty are released.

The co-author of this study Patrick Markey said, "Various measurements of video game use are related to decreases in violent crime such as homicide." Markey has been studying about this issue for a while, and according to him such games earn a bad reputation among some people, the belief is that violence is something that young men enjoy. But he also pointed out that doesn't mean that violent games encourage people to be violent in the real-world.

He added, "We always have to be careful with correlational data. Correlation doesn't mean causation. But we haven't just looked at sales of games and violent crimes. We have taken into account trends in the data. We remove stuff that typically happens, like a spike in murders during summer and high sales of games near the Holidays, and it's still negative. To me what is most amazing is that is never positive. It is always statistically negative."

Microsoft has confirmed it will pay $2.5 billion to purchase Mojang, the company responsible for Minecraft. Minecraft has sold more than 54 million copies across the world, and the three founding executives of Mojang will reportedly leave the company. The game is the top paid app for both the Google Android and Apple iOS, and with only 4 employees, brought in $287 in revenues during 2013

"At Microsoft, we believe in the power of content to unite people," the company said in a press statement. "Minecraft adds diversity to our game portfolio and helps us reach new gamers across multiple platforms. Gaming is the top activity across devices and we see great potential to continue to grow the Minecraft community and nurture the franchise."

News of the acquisition sent shockwaves through the Minecraft community, with many gamers worried about which direction Microsoft would take. Meanwhile, Microsoft hopes to draw gamers mobile platform instead of focusing on the Xbox One or PC.

Destiny shook up the gaming industry after launching earlier this week, topping $500 million in sales to retailers during launch day. The game title was made by Bungie and published by Activision, with hype surrounding the game building over the past few months. Sales to retailers doesn't provide an exact tally of game sales to consumers, but indicates retailers expect it to continue to be a sought after game title.

"Since the beginning, we've been confident that our investment and belief in Destiny would pay off," said Eric Hirshberg, head of Activision game publishing. "But not many people believed we'd be able to say it did so on day one. We have more confidence than ever that Destiny will become one of the iconic franchises of this generation, and Activision's next billion dollar brand."

Video game blockbusters are big money, with gamers often preferring to continue playing storylines as they develop over multiple titles. Some analysts predict Destiny could sell 10 million units to consumers before the end of the year, indicating it could become a major influence to help push console sales.

The Microsoft Xbox One and Nintendo Wii U game platforms saw sales bumps in August, but still couldn't compete against the Sony PlayStation 4 in the United States, analysts recently noted. The Xbox One saw a 14 percent month-over-month boost to account for 150,000 units sold, while the Wii U saw tremendous growth of 11 percent year-over-year up to 65,000. Although the PS4 had a 14 percent month-over-month drop, the console still racked up 175,000 units sold in the same timeframe.

"We expect PS4's [August] sales to again exceed those of the Xbox One," said Michael Pachter, Wedbush Morgan analyst. "[PS4 still outside Xbox One] despite the June introduction of a $400 Xbox One without Kinect and the August release of a $400 Madden NFL 15 bundle that includes a download code [for Madden], essentially bundling the game for free."

Although the Wii U and Xbox One both saw boosted sales figures in August, it must be troubling that neither platform can still compete on the sales chart against the PS4. Since the PS4 and Xbox One were released in November 2013, it has been domination by Sony's console - and despite a price cut and more console/game bundles, this will continue to be a slugfest.