Gaming - Page 1180

This morning we are learning more about the cloud network that will accompany the Xbox One console. The Xbox One's cloud network will feature three consoles worth of storage and CPU processing power, for each connected device. This means that developers have a much larger canvas on which to build on.

The information comes via Jeff Henshaw, Microsoft's group program manager of Xbox Incubation and Prototyping, who recently revealed the cloud network specifications in a recent interview with OXM. "For every Xbox One console we're provisioning the CPU and storage equivalent of three Xbox Ones on the cloud," Henshaw revealed in a recent interview with OXM.

"We're doing that flat out so that any game developer can assume that there's roughly three times the resources immediately available to their game, so they can build bigger, persistent levels that are more inclusive for players. They can do that out of the game." Henshaw continued.

Here at TweakTown, we're bringing you every latest bit of information on the next-gen consoles, as that is going to be the war of all wars for technology in the coming years. We've seen the Xbox One unveiling event, written an article asking just what was Microsoft thinking, and had a massive article reporting that EA's Vice President said that the PS4 and Xbox One are a generation ahead of the fastest gaming PC on the planet.

What can trump all of this? The German government coming out and stating that the Xbox One is a monitoring device. The Federal Data Protection Commissioner for Berlin, Peter Schaar, has said "Under the heading, game device 'Microsoft pushes a monitoring device in the market. The Xbox continuously records all sorts of personal information about me. Reaction rates, my learning or emotional states. The are then processed on an external server, and possibly even passed on to third parties. Whether they will ever deleted, the person can not influence".

This isn't far fetched, as the Xbox One has a camera built-in and is built to capture and recognize the face of its users. Microsoft are pushing the Xbox One as an all-in-one entertainment system, that can be voice and gesture controlled. Consider the fact that the Xbox One can be turned on by a voice command, meaning that the microphone on the Xbox One is always listening, always waiting.

Microsoft is "confident" that the new Xbox One won't suffer from the same Red Ring of Death problem that the Xbox 360 originally suffered from. This is good news for gamers who suffered at the hands of the RRoD as it was frustrating and often just months after purchase.

Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft Studios, says that Microsoft learned a lot from the Xbox 360 launch and put it towards future Xbox products. He notes how the Xbox 360 Slim, or Trinity, had a very low rate of failure.

Yesterday I wrote an article on EA's CTO Rajat Teneja who said that the upcoming next-generation consoles are "a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market." The article received massive feedback on Facebook, Twitter, and even made the front page of Reddit. I want to use my last article of the week to explain why I feel Teneja got it wrong.

Several commenters were very quick to point out that the APU has a speed advantage over discrete GPU's as the APU does not have to send data over a PCIe bus then back to the CPU, which adds massive latency. While it is true, I must point out that no AMD APU on the market, or being rumored, can come close to the benchmark scores put up by even one generation old flagship GPU's, such as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680. The massive number of cores combined with large amounts of RAM are just not feasible for an APU.

APU's really shine when it comes to mid-level performance in laptops, and productivity machines where the power consumption and extreme performance levels of a discrete GPU are not warranted. Don't get me wrong here, I am an AMD fan boy from way back and have to admit that I do like the APU architecture. I also have to admit, that the current APU technology is just not on a level that can compete with mid-range to ultra-high-end discrete GPU's.

Hot on the heels of its underwhelming Xbox One announcement, Microsoft has stated that it plans to continue Xbox 360 sales for the next five years with a 25 million unit sales goal for the period. With sales totaling 77.2 million units to date, that means the company will have to sell 1.25 million units per quarter until 2018.

This announcement comes via an interview with Xbox's Interactive Entertainment Business Senior VP, Yusuf Mehdi. While current sales numbers may be able to sustain those goals, Redmond is going to have trouble pushing that many units once US, UK and Asian markets see the release of the Xbox One. The company plans to bolster 360 sales with a "Huge Announcement" at the upcoming 2013 E3 show, according to the report.

Microsoft Game Studios executive Phil Spencer recently told GameSpot:

We've already had an idiotic statement by EA saying that the PS4 and Xbox One are generation ahead of the fastest gaming PC's, but now we have Microsoft saying that backwards compatibility on consoles is... backwards.

Microsoft Interactive Entertainment president, Don Mattrick, talked to the Wall Street Journal stating that there are no plans for any form of backwards compatibility on the Xbox One, where he says "if you're backwards compatible, you're really backwards". Mattrick has said that only 5% of customers play titles on a new system, and because of this, the thought of backwards compatibility was thrown away.

I don't see why Microsoft build up a multi-billion-dollar industry around the Xbox 360 (without thinking of the Xbox) and then throw all of those consumers to the side for the next-gen console. If they wanted to look like the good guy here, and they really need to right now with the various holes in their ship (Windows 8, Surface, PC sales), then they would've included full backwards compatibility for their entire Xbox 360 library.

We've looked at the specifications between the next-gen consoles, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but it looks like the PS4 might come out as the graphical champion. The PS4 features 50% more graphical horsepower than Microsoft's Xbox One, which is a huge advantage for Sony.

Both consoles share the same AMD architecture, built on AMD's HD 7000 GCN architecture. Microsoft however, have opted for a different configuration of the GPU that includes just 12 Compute Units that provides 768 shader processors (SPs) or ALUs. Sony have powered ahead, cramming 18 Compute Units that provide a total of 1152 shader processors giving them a huge 50% lead in graphical performance.

When it comes to compute performance the PS4 is around 33% faster than the Xbox One with the PS4 capable of 1.84 TFLOPS compared to 1.23 TFLOPS on the Xbox One. Normally this would see the PS4 with better looking games, or games that aren't as efficient, but developers are working with the same AMD architecture between the consoles, so that won't be the case here. What I think we'll see is Microsoft have more tuning behind the scenes in terms of the operating system, so it might multi-task better, but the PS4 will have more grunt.

Now that both next-gen gaming consoles have been announced, EA has been issuing a flurry of press releases detailing games that we can expect on the consoles. Today's announcement sees Need for Speed Rivals coming to both the newly announced Xbox One and the PlayStation 4.

Need for Speed Rivals will make use of the Frostbite 3 game engine, allowing the game to use stunning graphics and continue to blur the line between virtual and real. The game is being developed by EA's newest studio, Ghost Games, and is being built with help from Criterion Games.

Need for Speed Rivals is bringing with it several new features, most interesting of which is AllDrive. The developers explain:

The entire world is talking about the upcoming PlayStation 4 and Xbox One at the moment, and rightfully so. It has been many years since we have had a console hardware refresh. Unfortunately some of those involved with the new console seem to have slipped into some sort of false reality.

In a comment on LinkedIn, Electronic Art's Vice President and CTO Rajat Teneja said that Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are "a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market." He went on to say "The compute capabilities of these platforms and the data transfer speeds we can now bank on, essentially removes any notion of rationing of systems resources for our game engines. Our benchmarks on just the video and audio performance are 8-10 times superior to the current gen. gaming pc systems."

I am going to speculate that Mr. Teneja was speaking about the semi-custom AMD APU that is running in both systems, and that part of his rationing is based on both chips having Unified Memory Access.

I was very underwhelmed with the Xbox One event, and even more so with Call of Duty: Ghosts. I expected it to launch up to the same playing field of Battlefield 4 (or even at least BF3) when it comes to graphics, but I was very disappointed.

I didn't watch the trailer again because I wasn't interested, but I've done some reading since and found that someone noticed there was a very big mistake when it came to Ghosts' lighting system. As you can see from the below image, the sun is to the right, and there are sun shafts to the left, indicating that the sun is beaming down from the left. Well, this is a huge problem as it shows that Infinity Ward have been creating Ghosts from the ground up, ready for next-gen consoles, with a fake trailer.

If Infinity Ward were trying to impress their fans, I understand, but one would think the company is big enough they don't need to use graphical tricks to impress. Why not just make their graphics engine great, instead of trying to fake it.

Last night we bought you a live blog of the Microsoft Xbox One event, where we shared some details at the time of the specifications of Microsoft's next-gen console. Now we have some more details, not all, but more details on their console, which we'll show you below:

So, we have an AMD-made custom APU which features an 8-core processor and undisclosed DirectX 11.1-capable GPU. We have Blu-ray capabilities this time around as Microsoft chose to not push an all-digital console, and a very capable next-gen Kinect camera which captures 1080p video at 60 FPS. How does that directly compare against Sony's PlayStation 4?

So comparing them against each other, we find both the Xbox One from Microsoft, and Sony's PlayStation 4 are pretty much on par. We have 8-core CPU's, 8GB of RAM, and a DX 11.1-capable GPU. Connectivity wise we have USB 3.0 on both consoles, Wi-Fi 802.11n, new controllers, new cameras and 4K support.

The new Xbox One is quite the machine, especially its new Kinect sensor. The Kinect sensor, which is now included and a required part of the Xbox, will respond to voice commands, even when off. It was pretty cool when the Xbox One turned on simply by saying "Xbox on."

But then reality set in. This means that the Xbox is always listening to you, even when off. It has the ability to understand and process what you're saying when the device is off. And this is where the privacy concerns set it. Now, let's be clear: We aren't saying Microsoft is recording everything that the Xbox One hears, but it isn't out of the realm of possibility.

We highly doubt that Microsoft would ever use the Kinect to spy on consumers. We're more worried about a possible virus or malicious actor gaining access to the Kinect sensors that will be on every Xbox One. After all, the new Xbox uses a PC architecture and runs a Windows kernel so it's not beyond the realm of possibility that this could happen.

Today has been a big day for gaming news! First we got to take a look at the new Microsoft Xbox One and now Electronic Arts has confirmed Battlefield 4 will be coming to both the PlayStation 4 and newly announced Xbox One. This wasn't a completely unexpected announcement and we expect to see more of Battlefield 4 at Microsoft's E3 event June 10.

EA notes that players who pre-order Battlefield 4 will be treated to the Battlefield 4 China Rising premium digital expansion pack for free. China Rising DLC brings with it four multiplayer maps with new vehicles and hgih-tech military equipment. If you're a true die-hard, EA is offering hte Battlefield 4 Digital Deluxe with bonus in-game items, China Rising, and access to the BF4 mutliplayer beta.

Microsoft of course want to take the time during their next-generation console, the Xbox One, to talk games. FIFA, Madden NFL, NBA Live and UFC are all to launch on the Xbox One from EA and will be "revolutionary" and "fundamentally change the way you play".

EA Sports Ignite, an all-new gaming engine is unveiled from EA for the Xbox One. The graphics are getting ramped up, and now we're going to see some next-generation gaming from EA and their sports games. Ignite features 'true player motion' for some fluid looking characters in-game, the advanced processing power in the Xbox One allows the games from Ignite to have much smarter artificial intelligence (AI).

Microsoft Studios' Phil Spencer took the stage to unveil Forza Motorsport 5 for the Xbox One, which looks so delicious you could lick the rubber directly off the road within the game. Forza 5 will be available at launch, and will be teased further at E3 next month.

The day is nearly here, where we see the next-generation Xbox unveiled by Microsoft. We still don't know what to refer to it as: Xbox, Xbox 720, Xbox Infinity or Durango. Up until this point, no one knows what it is going to be called, and we don't have pesky insiders to tell us.

From what I've seen of Microsoft's strategy over the past twelve or so months, I'd like to see them flatly call it "Xbox" with no numbers near it. Then, two years from now, they could update it and release another next-gen console, making this Xbox the "2013 Xbox", just how the iPad naming goes. I expect it to pump out nothing less than 1920x1080 (1080p) at 60 FPS (frames per second). We should see Microsoft steer more toward an 'entertainment unit' rather than a pure gaming console, too.

What else should we see? Let's discuss that:

Nintendo has decided to take a different approach to this year's E3. Instead of doing something massive at E3 for the journalists, Nintendo will be allowing consumers to play various unreleased Wii U games at 100 Best Buys around the United States. We think this is a rather interesting approach that could work out for the company.

Instead of relying on journalists, Nintendo is going directly to the customers to let them check out whats coming next. Word of mouth often works the best, so if Nintendo can convince people that the upcoming games are great, it could really work well for Nintendo.

If your local Best Buy is one with Nintendo's offering, you'll be able to get a first-hand experience of what TweakTown will be doing at E3: waiting in lines to try out the latest games. Details for the event are still slim, so we can't tell you which Best Buy ocations are participating, what games will be shown off, or when exactly it will be taking place.

While Google I/O may have been in the news a lot this week, NVIDIA's Shield handheld console has taken the prize as most talked about. First, the company opened up pre-orders to its newsletter subscribers, and then the device was spotted on ABC's Modern Family sitcom.

This morning NVIDIA announced that it has opened up Shield pre-orders to the general public three days ahead of its previously scheduled date of May 20. For $349 early adopters can secure their all-in-one Android gaming console at Gamestop, Newegg, Canada Computer, or NVIDIA's own pre-order site.

Shield sports a 5-inch capacitive touchscreen with 1,280x720 resolution, NVIDIA's Tegra 4 CPU which supports a maximum resolution of 3200 x 2000 pixels so games can be played at full HD on a TV. Other specs include 16GB of storage, mini-HDMI, micro-USB 2.0, GPS, Bluetooth 3.0, a microSD card slot for storage expansion, 802.11n Wi-Fi, integrated speakers, and a headphone jack.

Ubisoft continues to tease the upcoming Assassin's Creed game. Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag will take place across islands and boats and will be launching on the next-generation PlayStation 4. Ubisoft has actually commented publicly about how happy they are with the PlayStation 4 and what it is allowing them to do.

Assassin's Creed 4 will also be available on current-generation consoles, which means you won't be forced to upgrade to experience the game. However, the experience will likely be much better on one of the new consoles. Let us know what you think of the trailer and if you're excited for Assassin's Creed 4 to come out.

Google I/O is only days away, and the stream of teases isn't stopping anytime soon. Today, brings the news of Google Play Games, which has been seen in the just-updated Google Play Services that is being distributed around the place.

There's been teases of a game-related unveiling at Google I/O, but Android Police have done the detective work for us, showing off some game-related goodness. There are things such as leader boards and matchmaking services are activities that a future application can trigger, as well as achievements and invitations.

Google Play Games will intertwine with Google+, which will give it a nice social aspect, but is it enough? Can Google do it better than Apple's Game Center? Time will tell, and that time is getting shorter and shorter with Google I/O fast approaching.

Battlefield 3 players will be saddened by the news that Battlefield 3 servers continue to be hit by a distributed-denial-of-service attack, rendering multiplayer basically unplayable. DICE has announced that, despite their security measures, the attack is continuing. They note that they are working around the clock to mitigate the impact.

We previously reported how Battlefield 3 and Battlelog servers were under attack. At the time, it wasn't clear the nature of the attack, but it is starting to appear to be just a malicious attack to prevent users from playing. As noted by the DICE team above, no user data is involved.