I T ( ) E - U N I T E D

Jan 23, 2010

Maximum PC reviews the ATI Radeon HD 5970

And calls it "the undisputed performance champ."

AMD’s Radeon HD 5970 takes the performance crown, and now offers DirectX 11 GPUs top to bottom.

Jan 22, 2010

This makes sense

Some good news for Versus in the next L4D2 update. From the L4D blog:

The infected team, when it has less than four human players, will get bots. No word yet on how that will affect the respawn timer.

Auto-spawning during finales is done, over, kaput.

On the auto-spawning issue, Valve waxes sarcastic:

Even though it's pretty obvious from the L4D forums that EVERYONE LOVES auto-spawning in finales, we figured, what the hell-we'd just go ahead and remove auto-spawning anyway.

Simple but substantial improvements. It's what Valve does, even when they should have done it a long time ago.

Jan 21, 2010

Lots of info on Nvidia's Fermi

From hardwarecanucks.com, an (almost) exhaustive preview of the specs and capabilities of the GeForce GF100. I'll throw up a few random bits to get the juices flowing:

Framerate comparison in Far Cry 2 (DX10)

Tessellation Performance

For those of you wondering what the tests above represent, the first three on the left show tessellation performance with an increasingly higher level of geometric complexity. The next two focus on situations that use a combination of geometry processing and DirectCompute operations to render a high-resolution scene and finally the last test is run on a direct draw call from Unigine’s tessellation engine.

We know from experience that while ATI’s 5000 series was the first on the market with DX11 compliance, it has some serious issues rendering scenes with more advanced DX11 features. NVIDIA meanwhile made an investment towards geometry performance which should vastly improve DX11 performance.

Prospectus

The increased rendering efficiency does seem to go a long way in making the GF100 a viable solution for the future but let’s put this into context for a minute. This is one complicated GPU and as such has proven to be extremely hard to produce in sufficient quantities as is evidenced from it being MIA in the current marketplace. Meanwhile, the overall complexity and integrated cache contribute to that massive 3 billion transistor count which leads to a cause for concern on the power consumption front as well. So, while we do know more than we did last month about the GF100, there will still be some fine tuning needed on NVIDIA’s part before its ready for primetime. What we can say is that we are confident the 512 core GF100 should consume under 300W under load.

On the plus side, the GF100’s architecture really does seem to be a departure from the GT200 in terms of scalability. As was discussed in the Modular Architecture section, NVIDIA is aiming to have a chip that can efficiently scale down for appropriate markets. This will eventually lead to a long line of GF100 derivatives and finally replace the endlessly renamed G92-based cards of yesteryear. To make matters even better, this new class of cards will fall under the umbrella of NVIDIA’s Unified Driver Architecture program so they will be able to continue releasing one driver for all of their products.

Still no official word yet on price, final clock speeds, memory sizes, and availability, but you'll still go blind reading all of it.

BioShock2: clarification on activations

From a community manager on the 2K forums:

Hey guys,

As many of you are aware, yesterday Steam's pre- purchase program began and the specs for BioShock 2 were posted along with that announcement.

These specs were taken from the retail packaging of BioShock 2. And since bullet points on the back of the box don't always explain the full story, here is a little more detail about what that means.

BioShock 2 is using a standard Games for Windows Live activation system, much like other games you have played in the past. That doesn't mean you always have to be online to play or save the game - you can create an offline profile for the Single Player portion of the game (you just won't earn achievements and you can't play Multiplayer, of course.)

We are using SecuROM only as a disc check method for the retail copy of BioShock 2. That is it's only use.

I am now checking the final plans for BioShock 2's specifications for Steam - and I'll get you a more complete answer by the end of the week. I have also been compiling a feature that will help answer a host of questions about BioShock 2 on the PC, including a podcast and screenshots of the PC version, and that should be out within a few days as well.

I'm sorry for the confusion, and I hope to clear it up entirely for you soon.

-Elizabeth

AvP "killmoves" trailer

I have to say it: the visuals look a bit dated to me.

Games.on.net has a decent multiplayer preview here. Take note:

Luckily for the Predator, who finds himself relatively un-armed at the start of each round, melee combat is particularly important to all three races. There are three moves representing a scissor-paper-rock configuration – block beats light attack, heavy attack beats block, and light attack interrupts a heavy attack. The marine, however, doesn’t have a heavy attack… but then again, you can’t block his bullets.

'I think there was an expectation that the marine was the underdog but actually he’s not. He has two thirds of the melee system – he can block and he can counter and he also has a really impressive arsenal,' Paul [Mackman, the game's producer] explained.

'And if you nail (the melee system), you’ll have made a big step in mastering the game. You can then build on that by mastering the maps and so on and so forth – but melee is definitely the key.'