Gaming - Page 952

We've already reported that Project Scorpio enables native 4K 60FPS in Forza 6 with 66% GPU usage with normal Xbox One "High" graphics preset, and also clarified that the game even hit native 4K 60FPS with settings akin to Ultra PC settings. Now the Forza devs at Turn 10 push it even farther by confirming Forza 6 exceeded its Ultra PC in 4K 60FPS on Scorpio.

As Digital Foundry's Richard Leadbetter reports, "the quality settings from Forza Motorsport 6 Apex on PC can be fully invoked on Scorpio. Turn 10 literally ramped up everything to ultra and it just worked, with the game retaining a 4K60 performance level."

Certainly 4K 60FPS with Ultra PC settings took quite a bit of GPU usage, right? Remember Project Scorpio uses a highly customized GPU based on AMD's Polaris architecture, with 6TFLOPs of power and a 1172MHz clock speed. Oddly enough, Scorpio's GPU wasn't even maxed out hitting that insane perf: Scorpio hit 4K 60FPS Ultra PC settings in Forza 6: Motorsport Apex with 88% GPU usage.

Blizzard is working on a few new projects right now, and another key executive has shifted roles to work on one of these mysterious games.

StarCraft II's lead gameplay designer David Kim has left the series to work on a new undisclosed project at Blizzard. Kim announced his departure from StarCraft on the Blizzard forums. Kim's words indicate he's working on a new project outside of the RTS realm, possibly the new Diablo project. "I've reached a point in my career where I've decided to branch out to a different project, to explore, learn, and grow as a game designer. This other project will be right here at Blizzard, so I hope working on this next game will be as awesome as my experience working on SC2 and with the community."

Right now we know that Blizzard is making a "new unannounced Diablo game"--possibly Diablo 4--and started a hiring spree back in March for a game director, senior concept artist, senior character artist, and a lighting artist. All of those roles have been filled and the listings have since been taken down.

With its new 4K-ready Project Scorpio console, Microsoft has certainly brought the power. But what about the games? Any new console needs a host of new games that leverage the full extent of that system's power. Can we expect Microsoft to reveal tons of new first-party console exclusives soon? Probably not, and here's why.

As I said before, I think Project Scorpio was made for developers. With an incredible synergy between hardware and software, developers can tap the console's raw power and striking intelligence to make truly next-generation experiences. With Scorpio's 6TFLOP Polaris-derived GPU, its highly customized 2.73GHz Jaguar evolved CPU, 12GB of GDDR5 system RAM, and the highly efficient software toolsets, APIs, and other resources, developers are armed with the tools they need to bring their visions to life--all without having to make significant compromises in the process. Still, though, the Xbox brand just isn't attractive to a good portion of developers--mainly Japanese devs--and Microsoft has a hard time making exclusivity deals.

Don't expect this to change with Project Scorpio.

Arkane's new Prey game looks quite interesting, and I have a feeling it melds some distinct psychological horror-weirdness with old-school first-person shooter action. That sounds like quite a formula, and Arkane is pretty impressed with what they've built.

In fact, Arkane's Lead System Designer Seth Shain says Prey is quite mind-boggling. "The sheer audacity of what we have dared to build in this game, it's a little bit mind-boggling to me," Shain said in a recent interview with GameTM magazine.

"The fact that we were able to stuff it all into this package called Prey is kind of amazing; it's a testament to the team and the passion of the developers we have here. Everybody shared in this vision and really wanted to see this thing through the end."

Nintendo today announced that it'll hold a Nintendo Direct showcase on April 12.

The Nintendo Direct will mainly focus on ARMS and Splatoon 2, but the Japanese console-maker will also discuss Nintendo Switch and Nintendo 3DS plans as well.

Well Microsoft, you've finally done it. Not content with shoving gambling-style microtransactions in its biggest games (Halo 5 and Gears of War 4), Microsoft unloads a new money-making strategy onto Minecraft, the indie sensation that will soon have its own virtual currency (because why not?!). Minecraft's new strategy culminates with a new storefront and virtual currency combo that will let users buy skins, textures and other content made by their favorite creators.

Minecraft's new digital storefront allows creators and modders sell their user-created maps, mini-games, and skins for virtual currency called Minecraft Coins. These coins can be purchased with real life cash in denominations of 300 MC for $1.99, 840 MC for $4.99, and 1,720 coins for $9.99. Creators earn the lion's share of the sales at over 50%, and 30% goes back to the storefront.

"The idea is to give Minecraft creators another way to make a living from the game, allowing them to support themselves in the creation of ever-greater projects, while giving Pocket and Windows 10 players access to a growing catalogue of fun stuff - curated and supplied by us, safely and simply," Microsoft says.

Microsoft has already proven that Project Scorpio can indeed scale 1080p Xbox One games to full native 3840 x 2160 4K resolution, in part thanks to the console's 6 TFLOP Polaris-derived GPU and the multitude of tweaks, customizations, and adjustments throughout the entire system. But 1080p assets are much, much lighter than native 4K assets, and anyone who games in 4K can tell you those art assets get quite huge. Being a machine made specifically to hit native 4K gaming, Scorpio only takes a marginal performance hit switching to 4K assets.

Just in case you're unfamiliar with how Microsoft's new Project Scorpio works, here's a quick run down. The system is built to scale up Xbox One games from 900p and 1080p to full native 4K resolution, and then utilize native 4K game textures and art assets to match the game's scaled resolution. Xbox One games will need specific patches and adjustments to hit the full 4K experience--textures and resolution--and games built on DirectX 12 will enjoy significantly better CPU performance. We've already seen a tech demo equal to Forza Motorsport 6: Apex (which runs on DX12) hit native 4K 60FPS at normal Xbox One settings (high preset) with only 66% of the GPU used. Digital Foundry confirms that the game can still hit 4K 60FPS even with settings equal to PC's Ultra settings with about 80-100% of the GPU used.

Switching from 1080p assets to 4K textures and assets is one of the major halves of Project Scorpio's 4K-ready gaming, so it's quite important the switch doesn't take away too many resources to accomplish. In fact, swapping to 4K assets only hits Scorpio's performance by 1% in specifically optimized games. According to Digital Foundry's Richard Leadbetter, this hit is negligible: "Turn 10's software architect Chris Tector told me that swapping between 1080p and Ultra HD assets has around a 1% hit to performance. Basically margin of error then."

The days of the SNES might be behind us, but Rose Colored Gaming has unveiled something that will have Super Nintendo fans jumping for excitement: a limited run of transparent SNES consoles, refurbished from slightly damaged consoles.

Rose Colored Gaming takes the hardware out of the broken SNES, and then made acrylic enclosures for them. They explained: "These SNES consoles have been treated to a 100% brand new, hand-built exterior, all while retaining complete original function. Each is assembled by hand with the care and attention to detail that you have come to expect from RCG. The housing consists of laser cut and etched acrylic components which have been drilled, bent, bonded, threaded, & assembled using all new anodized aluminum hardware".

RCG continues: "Many internal components have been slathered in various finishes then etched in order to accentuate items which were never meant to be seen. All hand-built, these units will only be available in VERY limited quantities upon release, with each being treated to a unique serial number".

Ubisoft has lost one of the transformative forces responsible for guiding Far Cry 4's and Assassin's Creed III's development.

After seven years at Ubisoft, ex-creative director Alex Hutchinson has left the company to found his own independent studio. During his tenure at Ubisoft, Hutchinson helped bring major triple-A games like Far Cry 4 (which I liked a fair deal--Pagan Min is pretty awesome) and Assassin's Creed III to the market.

Hutchinson left the publisher to co-found his own indie development studio called Typhoon Studios and "build something new." The dev's departure brings to mind a very interesting question: is Far Cry 5 finished?

Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan reiterates that Overwatch on the Nintendo Switch probably won't happen.

"Getting Overwatch on the Switch is very challenging for us. But we're always open minded about exploring possible platforms," Kaplan said during a Reddit AmA last month.

Now in a recent follow-up with Express Online, Kaplan basically says the Switch isn't powerful enough to support Overwatch's minimum spec.

Now that Microsoft has confirmed it's new 4K-ready Project Scorpio console can indeed hit native 4K 60FPS at Ultra preset, there's been lots of speculation on how much the system will cost. Leading game analysts toss out their predictions, and we weigh each price point to see what makes sense.

First we have the outlandish $700 price prediction from IDC's Lewis Ward, who predicts Scorpio must ship at $700 for Microsoft to make any money.

"I estimate the basic hardware will cost around $650, so if Microsoft wants any kind of margin at all, Scorpio will have to retail for $700 or more," Lewis told Games Industry.biz. The analyst justifies his prediction by pointing at Alienware's VR-ready Aurora PC, which sports an RX 480 GPU and Intel i5-7400, which somehow equates Project Scorpio's specs. "If you look at the Alienware Aurora, which is a solid VR-ready PC, that currently costs about $1,000. I think Scorpio will come in below that, but how much below is unknowable at this point."

BioWare is slowly fixing Mass Effect: Andromeda and patching it to a state that somewhat resembles what it should've been at launch. The game released with tons of bugs, glaring issues, and horrible facial animations, proving it should've been delayed. But why delay the game when you can release it, soak up tens of millions of dollars, and then just "fix" it with patches later?

To BioWare's credit, they have made some pretty distinct changes to the faces in the latest Patch 1.05 update. And like any developer who wants to quickly sweep their mess under the rug, BioWare is keen on you downloading the patch and erasing those wacky faces from the public's mind--so keen that the game's update triggers twice on PS4.

A little bit of explanation here: I'm recording unpatched footage of facial animations to do some non-patch vs patched comparisons, so I don't want to update Mass Effect: Andromeda. Even with Automatic Downloads turned off on PS4, my console auto downloads any updates for any games I start, including ME: Andromeda. So I have to go and manually stop them (yes, I have all automatic downloads turned off on PS4 system settings). When I fire up the game itself, BioWare informs me there's an update and auto-triggers the patch download. So that's twice I had to cancel the update.

Earlier we reported that Microsoft's 4K-ready Project Scorpio console features a customized hard drive with 50% more throughput in order to speedily load native 4K textures and assets. Thinking on this a bit I came to an interesting question: if Scorpio's hard drive is so customized, can we swap the stock HDD out with bigger 2.5-inch hard drives?

Games are getting bigger and bigger, and 1TB might be enough for 1080p titles, but is that enough for Project Scorpio's native 4K textures? Now bear in mind we don't know how massive Project Scorpio's 4K asset and texture packs are for specific games--Xbox One games will need to download 4K asset patches and updates in order to play in native 4K on Project Scorpio--and depending on the type of compression used for these assets, the console's 1TB drive could fill up fast.

So this brings us to a simple question: can you swap out Project Scorpio's customized hard drive in favor of another laptop HDD? Let's take a look at the evidence.

Everything about Microsoft's new 4K-ready Project Scorpio console has been customized to a tee, and the internal components are meant to synergize with one another to fulfill native 4K gaming, faster load times, etc. We've already covered the system's 6TFLOP Polaris-derived GPU and 2.73GHz extremely customized Jaguar CPU in length, but now we should talk about one of the most important improvements: the hard drive.

Project Scorpio is all about pushing native 4K resolution. We've already seen the console is capable of hitting native 4K 60FPS at Ultra settings--a feat that certainly shouldn't be possible, but Microsoft has indeed done it.

Every component has to work together in order to hit that kind of performance, including the system's hard drive. Microsoft has tweaked Project Scorpio's 2.5-inch 1TB hard drive with 50% more throughput to ensure it can speedily load up 4K assets. Remember that Xbox One games will need to download 4K assets and textures via patches to run games in native 4K. Being able to easily load 4K textures--which can be pretty huge--at acceptable speeds is absolutely critical for Project Scorpio, or else gameplay is considerably interrupted.

We've seen Project Scorpio push games like Forza 6 to native 4K 60FPS at only 66% GPU power, but Forza is Xbox's cream of the crop. What about other games? Not surprisingly, Xbox One games that use DirectX 12 have the potential to perform amazingly well on the Project Scorpio Engine.

Microsoft has ingeniously baked in DirectX 12 into the Project Scorpio's GPU's command processor to significantly reduce instruction sets and thus dramatically improve the instruction command processing sent by the highly customized 2.73GHz Jaguar evolved CPU. Essentially Project Scorpio's direct hardware-based DX12 integration should substantially improve game-to-GPU communication and actively reduce CPU overhead. This streamlined efficiency is half of the magic that makes Scorpio tick, and sees the console's components in a kind of uniform synergy.

"We essentially moved Direct3D 12. We built that into the command processor of the GPU and what that means is that, for all the high frequency API invocations that the games do, they'll all natively implemented in the logic of the command processor-and what this means is that our communication from the game to the GPU is super-efficient," Microsoft told Digital Foundry.

After revealing Project Scorpio's specs and confirming the console can rock native 4K 60FPS to the world, it's only natural for Microsoft to toot their own horn a bit. After reporting on the subject for so long, I have to say it's pretty amazing that the company actually hit the performance they promised, and the Xbox team is stoked.

The entire Xbox team is excited about Project Scorpio, but exec Albert Penello declared what Xbox fans around the world must be thinking: the console actually lives up to the hype. "There is so much more to Project Scorpio than just the numbers. It's a huge leap ahead of any other console," Penello said on Twitter.

After digging through reams of Digital Foundry's technical data, I can earnestly say I agree. Project Scorpio is more than its parts, more than its 6 TFLOPs Polaris-derived GPU, more than its highly customized Jaguar evolved CPU, more than its 12GB of unified GDDR5 memory at 326GB/sec: it's about how those parts come together in a truly next-generation harmony that eclipses anything we've seen from the console market thus far, it's about the union to highly efficient hardware and intelligent software to make a "beast" of a system.

Gearbox messes up quite a bit. Between terrible games like Duke Nukem: Forever and abominations like Aliens: Colonial Marines, the studio just can't catch a break--it's really it's own worst enemy. Now the latest screw up has turned into a PR nightmare, and Gearbox is desperate for a way out.

Gearbox Software recently signed a deal with extremely controversial games merchant key reseller G2A.com to release a collector's edition for Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition, aka the massively overpriced remaster that no one asked for. YouTuber Total Biscuit caught wind of this deal, and announced a boycott of all Gearbox games from his coverage if the studio didn't dissolve the deal with G2A. Gamers everywhere spread the news, and with every share Gearbox's rep tanked--tanked further, that is.

So Gearbox did the logical thing and worked on an exit strategy. And it found a strategy that pretty much ensured it would have a justified means of escape from a situation it had dug itself into, and by escape, I mean Total Biscuit would continue covering their games and gamers would approve of the move. The studio-turned-indie-game-publisher told G2A that it would have to basically re-organize its business structure within 30 days or else Gearbox would pull its deal and back out of the agreement.

Since Project Scorpio can hit 4K 60FPS in games like Forza 6 and even 4K 60FPS Ultra with DirectX 12 optimizations, the console clearly shares little with its Xbox One S sibling in terms of raw power. But Project Scorpio may actually share something else in common with its svelte predecessor: size.

We've exhaustively covered Project Scorpio's internals and capabilities, so let's talk about its shape and form for a bit. Now Microsoft's officially released hardware diagram shows that Project Scorpio's components fit together like a glove. The power supply, 4K UHD Blu-ray disc drive, and vapor chamber cooling assembly all snugly conform to the motherboard that houses the system's extremely intelligent 16nm Scorpio Engine SoC silicon. The components themselves are arranged in a kind aesthetic harmony, not unlike the way the console's flexible software pipeline brain is synergized to its brawny 6TLOP GPU muscle.

In an effort to make Project Scorpio games as mind-blowing as possible, Microsoft is giving developers even more access to the console's built-in hardware. Devs can harness the raw power of Project Scorpio's 6TFLOPs of compute power and 1172MHz of Polaris-derived GPU clock speeds, the custom 8-core x86 "Jaguar evolved" CPU, and 67% of the system's beefy 12GB of unified GDDR5 RAM to help optimize their games in a variety of different ways.

According to Digital Foundry's Richard Leadbetter, developers will have access to 67% of Project Scorpio's total unified RAM system memory, or 8GBs of Project Scorpio's total 12GB of GDDR5 RAM. For comparison's sake, devs only have access to 5GB of Xbox One's RAM, and the same amount on PS4 Pro. This extra 3GB of accessible memory is a tremendous advantage that can facilitate boosts across the board for a multitude of optimizations, including resolution enhancements, tighter frame rates, and dramatically faster loading times by treating the extra RAM as an IO cache.

Project Scorpio's system memory isn't just brawny, at 12GB of GDDR5 RAM, but also has the bandwidth to back it up. Scorpio's 12GB of GDDR5 RAM--made up of 12x 6.8GHz modules--is clocked at a respectable 326 GB/sec bandwidth speeds over a 384-bit bus. Remember Scorpio's memory is unified, not dedicated, so both video and system RAM are running through the bandwidth pipeline.

Microsoft has nixed a key game emulator from the Windows Store an in effort to crack down on piracy.

Game emulation is widespread across PC and Android, and even the Windows Store has its sources. But Microsoft is making an earnest effort to push game emulation off the Windows Store, and has since removed apps like NESbox's popular Universal Emulator from the storefront.

Not content with just removing the infringing app, Microsoft now deigns emulators as breaches in the Windows Store terms of service. "Apps that emulate a game system are not allowed on any device family," reads the revised policy mandate.