Gaming - Page 1172

NVIDIA Editors' Day 2013 - Warner Bros. took the stage at the NVIDIA Editors' Day in Montreal, Canada, where we got a sneak peek into the unreleased Batman: Arkham Origins. Arkham Origins is the next tale in the Batman gaming saga, where it provides gamers with a look at the early, more raw Batman.

NVIDIA technology powers Batman: Arkham Origins, and for someone like me who didn't think the in-game tech from NVIDIA would make a difference, believe me when I say it does, it really does. The video above shows you just how impressive the snow effects in the game are, where it will be thicker in some parts, such as a roof, and thinner in other parts. As Batman walks through it, it will leave footprints and as he fights in the game, it will dynamically shift the snow around.

It was a truly impressive demo to check out, and it is now firmly placed at a must-have for me when it launches.

One of the most anticipated games of this year, Watch Dogs, has been delayed until spring of 2014. Ubisoft announced in the last 24 hours that its open-world title will not be launching this year, citing that it wanted more development time.

Ubisoft said "Our ambition from the start with Watch Dogs has been to deliver something that embodies what we wanted to see in the next-generation of gaming. It is with this in mind that we've made the tough decision to delay the release until spring 2014. We know a lot of you are probably wondering: Why now? We struggled with whether we would delay the game. But from the beginning, we have adopted the attitude that we will not compromise on quality. As we got closer to release, as all the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place in our last push before completion, it became clear to us that we needed to take the extra time to polish and fine tune each detail so we can deliver a truly memorable and exceptional experience."

It's disappointing that Watch Dogs has been delayed, but let's hope that the increased development time gives us an even better game. It might give Ubisoft more time with the next-gen titles to squeeze some more performance and increased graphics, which will filter over to the PC so we all benefit.

During the GPU14 event in Hawaii a few weeks back, AMD touted its new Mantle API as being the great unifier between consoles and PCs and would allow more pc games to see "console like performance and optimization." This really struck a nerve with many PC gamers as they feel that the consoles should catch up to the faster PC gaming market rather than the PC being dumbed down to console levels.

Many of us in the industry assumed that this meant that Sony and Microsoft would be using the Mantle API to power its consoles which run AMD APU processors. Unfortunately that does not appear to be the case. In a recent blogpost, Microsoft said that its upcoming Xbox One console will not run AMD's Mantle API, but would feature the company's own Direct 3D 11.2 API. Additionally, AMD has also pointed out that Mantle will actually be exclusive to the PC.

During a recent interview, DICE's Director, Lars Gustavsson alluded to the company officially supporting Linux with a port of the new Frostbite Engine 3. He said that all it will take is for a single killer game (such as Battlefield 4) to be ported to the free OS and the platform would become as popular for gaming as Windows.

Gustavsson says that DICE wants to create the "Halo" of Linux, referencing the Bungie title that made the Xbox a success overnight. He said that the company will port Frostbite 3 over to Linux and that means that we could see games like Battlefield 4, and other big name titles coming to Linux machines everywhere. A big factor in this will be Valve's SteamOS which has support from AMD and NVIDIA and is needed to get the high-end graphics support needed on Linux.

Valve have teased us quite a bit in the last couple of weeks with its unveiling of the Steam Box, Steam OS and Steam Machines, with the latter being announced with NVIDIA GPUs.

Most thought that the Steam Machines would run AMD GPUs too - like myself - but this wasn't full confirmed, leaving many to believe that maybe, just maybe, NVIDIA had secured a very tight contract with Valve. The Half-Life developer has come out and confirmed that the Steam Machines would indeed support the three primary graphics vendors today.

Valve spokesperson, Doug Lombardi, said: "Last week, we posted some technical specs of our first wave of Steam Machine prototypes. Although the graphics hardware that we've selected for the first wave of prototypes is a variety of NVIDIA cards, that is not an indication that Steam Machines are NVIDIA-only. In 2014, there will be Steam Machines commercially available with graphics hardware made by AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel. Valve has worked closely together with all three of these companies on optimizing their hardware for SteamOS, and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future."

Grand Theft Auto V is breaking all sorts of records, but it's also breaking gamers' hearts by being problematic in GTA Online unfortunately. But it looks like those days could be behind Rockstar, with the latest patch hopefully fixing GTA Online's various issues.

A new update is being pushed out to GTA V that will address issues related to "game progress loss in GTA Online" and other various technical issues. The update is available for the PS3 version right now, with a title update being pushed onto the Xbox 360 version of the game tomorrow "at the latest" according to Rockstar.

The update should fix the issues we reported on a few days ago now, but Rockstar says with the exception of "some specific instances where players purchase a vehicle and the save does not occur due to a cloud save failure." A separate patch will be pushed out to fix those issues. The patch hitting GTA V will fix the following issues:

We all knew that Grand Theft Auto was destined to be huge, just how huge was anyones guess. Today Guinness World Records announced that GTA V has managed to break not one, but six world records in less than one month since its launch. This brings the total number of world records held by the franchise to seven.

Rockstar has reported that Grand Theft Auto V sold more than 11.21 million copies in just the first 24 hours alone and then broke $1 billion in sales in just 3 days, making it the fastest selling video game of all time.

Guinness World Records Editor-in-Chief, Craig Glenday, said: "GTA totally deserves to be recognized as an icon of modern British culture, and we're thrilled to be able to feature the game in the record books. Gaming is no longer a niche hobby, as GTA 5 has proved, and how exciting that it's taken on the might of Hollywood and won! I'm also doubly proud as a Dundonian to welcome this home-grown series back into the Guinness World Records book."

We know that gamers are experiencing all sorts of issues with GTA Online, with Rockstar Games scrambling to fix yet another online game that is in shambles. The developer is trying to find the source of an issue that is seeing users' loss of characters, apartments, in-game cash, rank and more.

Rockstar wants to find the issue,and hopefully recover players' lost data. One of the problems is Rockstar Cloud Services, which the developer suggests gamers don't play GTA Online when Cloud Services are inaccessible. When Cloud Services are down, players can continue playing GTA Online, but with a temporary character, without the ability to save their progress.

Another issue Rockstar has noticed is that the "Retry" button is causing problems, where when a gamer is prompted to retry to enter a GTA Online match when the Cloud is down, some players will see all of their data wiped. Yikes. Rockstar has said that reverting back to GTA V's single-player campaign, and then back into GTA Online does the trick, but this hasn't worked for everyone.

We reported earlier in the week that Valve had trademarked the Half-Life 3 name in the EU, but it turns out this was wrong. It has all been a fake, with the website for the EU trademark office now gone.

Valve Time is right on the ball with this, but I'm sure that there are many out there, myself included, who are disappointed with the news. Just as we were hearing about the Steam Box, SteamOS, Steam Machines and Steam Controllers, we were suckered into believing one of the, if not the most anticipated game was finally coming... but not anymore.

Valve recently unveiled its grand plan for the long anticipated Steam Boxes. Now being called Steam Machines, Valve said that the new gaming consoles will be developed and sold by partners, but the company did mention that it would be making a Steam Box of its own, and 300 lucky Steam users would be getting one to beta test.

No other mention was made about the hardware that we might see packed inside Valve's Steam Box at the time of the initial release, but today we have found out what those beta boxes will contain. Valve says that the first Steam Machine will be a high-end device that features off-the-shelf PC hardware, and will be fully upgradeable like a normal gaming PC.

Valve's Steam Machine will be served up with several hardware configurations with GPUs spanning from NVIDIA's GTX Titan, GTX780, GTX760 and GTX660. CPUs will conside of Intel i7-4770, i5-4570, and some i3 processors. RAM allocation will be 16GB of unknown origin and storage will consist of a 1TB/8GB hybrid SSHD. A 450W 80Plus PSU will handle power delivery, and the entire thing will fit in a case just over 12-inches by 12-inches by 3 inches. No image was issued with the hardware details.

We are finally seeing PC games move into the 64-bit world after what has felt like forever, with Ubisoft's Watch Dogs requiring a 64-bit OS to function. The news comes from the studio unveiling the requirements of its upcoming super open-world game.

Watch Dogs will require a 64-bit OS, a DirectX 9.0c-capable GPU, and 20GB of spare HDD space. Recommended hardware includes a DX11-capable GPU with at least 1GB of VRAM, 4GB of system RAM, and a quad-core CPU. As for GPUs, it's suggested that you use an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 or AMD Radeon HD 5770. If you want to run the 'recommended' level, you're going to require much more power.

Ubisoft recommends 2GB of VRAM, an 8-core processor and at least 8GB of system RAM. Watch Dogs is said to scale very well on multi-core processors, so if you're in the market for a new CPU, you might want to grab that 6- or 8-core processor. With the recommended level, the GPU requirements go up, but not too bad, up to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti or AMD Radeon HD 7850.

I was a massive fan of the original Deus Ex, and I did enjoy Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and now I'm excited for the news of Deus Ex: Universe. It feels like it has come out of nowhere, really.

Edios Montreal's boss, David Anfossi, explains how the Deus Ex universe (heh) is going forward: "The concept behind Deus Ex: Universe is to create an ongoing, expanding and connected game world built across a generation of core games. It's a commitment on our part to deliver meaningful content that expands the franchise on a regular basis and to deliver a deep conspiracy that will span several connected Deus Ex games, creating a more immersive and richer experience than ever before. Deus Ex: Universe will include PC and console games, but also additional Deus Ex games and experiences available in other media such as tablets, smartphones, books, graphic novels, etc. I'm pleased to confirm that we are already into production of the starting point for Deus Ex: Universe with a new game for PC and next-generation consoles."

The image you see above is actually a piece of art from Universe, which depicts the results of "trans-humanism segregation" which will be a very big part of the game.

NVIDIA has partnered up with some of the biggest names in the custom PC business to launch a new 4K gaming initiative. Falcon Northwest, Digital Storm, Maingear, and Origin have all been brought on board to help better prepare gamers for the upcoming wave of 4K games that will be released in the near future.

NVIDIA says that each company will develop a line of PCs that will "be able to play the hottest games" this fall and into 2014 without any issues, at any resolution up to 4K Ultra-HD. The PCs will be known as NVIDIA "Battleboxes" and each will feature an Intel Haswell processor as well as dual or triple GeForce GTX 780's or GeForce Titans in SLI mode.

Pricing for the "Battleboxes" will begin at around $2300 for a basic level build, and from there the sky's the limit. With GTX Titans still retailing for $1000+, we can only imagine how expensive these systems could get. Being able to game on multiple monitors in 4K resolutions, and having a warranty back everything up makes it very worth it though.

Last week, most of the tech and gaming world expected two things to happen. First, we thought that the Steam Box would be unveiled, and it was for the most part. The other big announcement we expected from Valve was an unveiling of Half-Life 3, but unfortunately all we got was a Steam-based operating system and a funky but cool looking controller.

Today, a recent trademark filing was made public that all but confirms the existence of Half-Life 3. On September 29, Valve filled to trademark the name Half-Life 3 in Europe. While the filing of a trademark is nothing new, this could signify that Valve is gearing up for a mass marketing campaign for the third installment in the Half-Life series. Alternatively, this could be another prank by Gabe Newell to troll the Half-Life conspiracy theorists. I will leave it up to our readers to take it as they wish.

Our Tweakipedia test bed is getting a workout tonight, benching (and playing of course) Battlefield 4. As you can see from the screenshot below, our Core i7 4770K is being used at 61%, and ranges up to around 70-75% at times, depending on what is going on.

As for our NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 SLI setup, it is pretty much maxing it out with around 90% average utilization per GPU at 2560x1440 on our ASUS PB278Q monitor. We're going to do some more testing on Battlefield 4, where we'll test out some results at 7860x1440, which should really stress this system out.

We should have a look at the Battlefield 4 performance in an article in the next day or so, so stay tuned, folks! Oh BTW, it's pretty awesome so far! It does feel more "consoley" in the game itself, but the menus and field of view, etc are all improved. You can crank it right up to 120 degrees, which is quite the surprise from DICE.

The next 24 hours is the best time to be a gamer in the existence of the human race, with both the Battlefield 4 Beta and GTA Online launching in the same 24 hour period.

GTA Online launches at 7am Eastern, and is free for anyone who already owns Grand Theft Auto V. Rockstar has provided some guidelines for GTA Online, so that players are ready for some fun. The developer isn't exactly sure when GTA Online will launch, but it should be early tomorrow morning:

Since the first hints of GTA V hit the wires, the tech media world has been buzzing with rumors that the game may never launch on the PC platform. Unfortunately as time progressed, that rumor began to look more and more like reality. The PC gaming community even launched a Change.org petition based around bringing GTA V to PC, which gathered more than 500,000 signatures.

Fortunately, it appears that all of our worries and pleas to Rockstar may have been answered. The website gta5tv.com posted a report over the weekend that suggests the fastest selling game in history will infact be making a deput on the PC. The launch date is said to coincide with the Xbox One launch date of November 22, and apparently the information came straight from the source itself: Rockstar Games.

If you take a step back and look at some recent rumors and leaks, it seems like a November launch is really going to happen. This is good news for PC gamers everywhere as the PC will be able to showcase the most expensive game ever made in a whole new light. GTA V will look amazing on the PC, and is said to feature 2K graphics and will run on DirectX 11.

Horror games seem to be experimented with more than other genres, which is exciting, but Pixel Heart Studios' 'Vanished' seems like quite the idea. Vanished is an audio-only game, featuring no graphics, no images, and no walls - your imagination is where the scares take place.

The world of Vanished is "without light, with no memories of how you got there and no clues on why everything has disappeared." Vanished is free until October 1 for iOS devices, with the game using the iPhone's internal compass and accelerometer to recreate the player's movement.

Players hold their iPhone in the direction they want to 'travel' within the game, touching the screen to walk. If you're in danger in the game, you shake the iPhone to attack. All exploration within Vanished is done within audio cues, as players move, the world "rotates" and provides different kinds of sounds.

This week has been quite packed with Valve-related news, with SteamOS, Steam Box, Steam Machines and the new Steam Controller. Now we have a company that was tied to Valve for the Steam Box, unveiling its new PISTON gaming console on Monday.

Xi3 has teased that "the wait is over" with the date 9/30/13 below it. We should expect the PISTON console to be a variation of the usual PISTON PCs, but in console form. We don't know exactly what to expect, but maybe this will be the first Steam Machine? Especially considering that Xi3 was who Valve reportedly chose to show off prototypes of the Steam Box in its early form.

Well it has happened folks, Valve has made its third and final announcements of the week and unfortunately no mention of Half-Life 3 was made. We did, however, get a thorough rundown of the final piece of the puzzle to a unified Steam gaming experience for the living room.

The final announcement was centered around the all new Steam Controller, a very funky looking peripheral that features not one but two touch sensitive trackpads, an LCD-based touchscreen that doubles as a button, and multiple triggers / buttons. The new Steam Controller is said to work with every game in the Steam library, even the ones that were never designed to support a game pad. Valve says that they achieved this by tricking the game into thinking the controller is actually a mouse and keyboard.