Game Tech News

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...re-640x354.jpg

Now that Nvidia’s top-end GTX 1080 Ti is in-market, enthusiasts have begun testing, to see just how much performance they can wring out of the core. So far, the GPU has proven to top out around 1.9GHz in best-case scenarios, with a typical boost clock of around 1.6GHz. But how far can that be pushed?

That’s what the folks at Tom’s Hardware wanted to know, so they built a custom water cooling loop to see how far the GTX 1080 Ti can be pushed. Well, that, and because they weren’t particularly pleased with the GPU’s overall noise level under load. Custom water cooling loops aren’t something I’ve gotten to play with very often, but I have built one when I tested the CryoVenom R9 290 just over three years ago (we used the same rig for testing a pair of Asus Poseidon GTX 780s as well).

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...ow-640x353.jpg

Son' games in the near future. These games won’t be limited to the PS4 — they’ll also be available for streaming to compatible PCs.

Sony says*PS4 games as well as existing PS3 games will be available via one subscription and promises to share more details as the service moves closer to launch. The service will include cloud saved games, allowing you to begin a game on one device and pick it up on either a different PS4 or a PC — meaning you could conceivably play a game on a living room PS4, retire to your PC if the TV was needed for something else, then pick it up again on the big-screen later, without interruption or problems.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...TW-640x353.jpg

Nintendo’s Switch has been flying off store shelves and is on track to hit the company’s target of two million devices shipped within March. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has also been extremely popular, selling almost as fast as the handheld itself.

According to game and research firm SuperData, information its received from various sources indicate the Switch has shifted 500,000 consoles in this country alone, with 360,000 shipping to Japan, 85,000 units in the UK, and 110,000 in France (a full country-by-country breakdown was not available). These figures only reflect the first week of sales, which puts Nintendo well on its way to hitting its two-million Switch target.

The initially strong response to the Switch seems to have been significantly driven by one game: Zelda: Breath of the Wild. According to SuperData, they estimate 89% of Switch owners have bought the title, with 1.34 million copies sold to-date. This doesn’t even include the Wii U version, though if analyses of that platform’s performance are accurate, it’s easily the worst way to experience the game.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...da-640x353.png

With this latest installment in the Mass Effect franchise, BioWare has moved the story 2.5 million light-years away from the controversial ending of the original trilogy. Thanks to*a lengthy development period, a new engine, a new crop of consoles, and a fresh narrative start, the expectations of fans are fairly high. We’re all dying to see if BioWare delivered the goods.

Here’s the story: After a 600-year journey, ships from the Milky Way are arriving in Andromeda in the year 2819. The Citadel races (Humans, Turians, Asari, and Salarians) have sent tens of thousands of individuals to colonize planets in a different galaxy, and these poor souls are largely unaware of the giant robotic space squids that their friends and family were inundated with back home. Sadly, things aren’t so rosy in Andromeda either.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...ld-640x353.jpg

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is an amazing game by all accounts, with an incredibly high sell rate (as of last week, something like 93% of Switch owners bought BotW). Much has been written about the game, from how turning off Wi-Fi may improve performance to an in-depth comparison of how it plays against the Wii U version. But there’s one potential issue to be aware of, should you choose to hand the game to a different player to start from scratch.
If you try to start another BotW playthrough without first creating a new account, you’ll lose all of your saves, permanently. To be fair, Nintendo does warn you if you try to start a game, saying: “Overwrite previous save data?” But that’s simply not as clear as the company might think it is. “Overwrite previous save data,” could mean autosaves. It could mean that mission checkpoints and the list the game keeps of what you’ve accomplished in the game will be reset. It can also mean that every single save you’ve created, both manual and automatic, will be deleted — and apparently that’s exactly what it does mean, according to Kotaku’s Jason Schreier.

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...-1-640x360.jpg

If you want to save your progress in BotW while still letting someone else play the game from scratch, you’ll have to create a new account every time you do it. What makes this somewhat confusing for players is that I’ve encountered various games that employed all of those definitions when asking if you want to start a new game. Not all at once, mind you, but in general. A vastly better message would be: “Starting a new game without first creating a new account will erase all of the saved games associated with this account.” It’s slightly longer, granted, but it also clearly communicates both what the user needs to do and what will happen if they don’t do it. Schreier himself notes that he initially misinterpreted the message, and he’s someone who plays games for a living.


more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...-2-640x353.jpg

I’ve got a shelf full of computer history books, many of which I love and have reread several times. But I wanted to write one that focused on the first real computer I grew up with, the one that eventually led me to the tech industry and journalism: the Atari 800.

We’ve covered vintage computing many times before on ExtremeTech. I wrote a retro gaming feature back in 2010 (and a 2017 rewrite of that is in the works and will be ready real soon now). But I’ve always wanted to do a deep dive on Atari’s 8-bit computer, its peripherals, and most importantly, its games. It was an astounding machine. It was the first real gaming PC, one with graphics coprocessors and hardware sprite animation. It blew the contemporary competition out of the water, and was even superior in some respects to the Commodore 64 — also a great early computer, but one that lacked some of the Atari 8-bit’s innovations despite coming out three years later.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...-8-640x360.jpg

Ever since the Nintendo Switch launched, there have been issues reported with its left Joy-Con controller. Teardowns and analysis confirmed the source of the problem. Unlike the right Joy-Con, which had its own separate antenna, the left Joy-Con’s antenna was part of the circuit board and partly shielded by the player’s hand.
Nintendo has fixed the problem with the left Joy-Con by implementing a small piece of conductive foam at the corner of the Joy-Con, as shown in the image below:

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...am-640x284.jpg


That small bit of conducting foam is apparently resolving the problems with connectivity for just about everyone, as reported by Cnet.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...ed-640x353.jpg

For the last few years, there’s been an ongoing debate about the benefits and advantages (or lack thereof) surrounding DirectX 12. It hasn’t helped any that the argument has been bitterly partisan, with Nvidia GPUs often showing minimal benefits or even performance regressions, while AMD cards have often shown significant performance increases.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...EA-640x353.jpg

Earlier this week, Mass Effect: Andromeda launched to a somewhat muted response. Beyond the interface issues and lackluster animations frequently cited by critics, the Xbox One and vanilla PS4 suffer from performance issues as well. Now, we have a better idea of how well the PC version holds up.

The Digital Foundry team gave the early stages a run-through on a high-end gaming PC, and found some substantial improvements. Not only can existing graphics cards handle the game running at 4K at 30fps, but the 1080p60 option is solid as well. Compared with the 1080p30 target on the base PS4 and the 900p30 target on the Xbox One, both configs are superb if you have the hardware to handle it.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...re-640x353.jpg

For years, GameStop has managed to maintain a significant lock on the physical games sale business, even as online sales of games and consoles became more popular online. The company’s current business model may have hit the hard wall of shifting consumer tastes according to its own fourth quarter results.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...re-640x353.jpg

Blizzard’s StarCraft and the follow-up expansion Brood Wars are considered two of the greatest real-time strategy (RTS) games ever created. First released in 1998, the original game had three related campaigns between races (Terran, Protoss, and Zerg) that played dramatically differently from one another. This was a significant departure from earlier games like Warcraft: Orcs and Humans or Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, which had little practical differentiation between the races.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...re-640x354.jpg

Razer’s Razer Blade Pro has been the company’s go-to high-end machine for gamers wanting a desktop replacement, and the company has tweaked its high-end configuration for 2017. The jumps aren’t huge, but the new system will offer a Kaby Lake Core i7-7820HQ (2.9GHz base, 3.9GHz Turbo) as opposed to the older i7-6820HQ (2.7GHz base, 3.6GHz Turbo). It also ships with DDR4-2667 instead of DDR4-2133.

The other major claim to fame for this laptop is its support for THX. To achieve that, the Razer Blade Pro had to meet certain standards for color resolution, color accuracy, and video playback (on the video side). The audio jack on the Razer Blade Pro also had to be certified for THX, which means conforming to that standard’s guidelines for crosstalk, distortion, frequency response, and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...TW-640x353.jpg

Last Friday, Nintendo pushed a patch for the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild that’s said to significantly improve performance when playing in both handheld and docked mode. The only actual patch notes are:
“Adjustments have been made to make for a more pleasant gaming experience.”

That’s a very short note for the improved experience you get. Kotaku took the game for a test-drive and reported significantly improved frame rates in Korok Forest, which normally had substantial dips. Jason Schreier tested the Switch in docked mode (important, since that mode reportedly had issues at the upscaled 900p resolution).

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...VR-640x360.jpg

Not enough resolution is one of the most common complaints about the current crop of VR headsets. They’re all more or less roughly 1080p (or 2K), split between the two lenses. So I was really interested when Aukey came out with the Cortex 4K VR headset at $399.99 — substantially below the Rift or Vive. However, while specs are one thing, real world performance is another. I’ve been taking an Aukey Cortex 4K through its paces. So far, my test results have been mixed.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...ch-640x360.jpg

Nintendo’s new hybrid handheld / living-room console is inevitably going to suffer more damage than its strictly living-room relatives; you don’t see too many people lugging a PlayStation 4 around with a built-in display, after all. A new report suggests that the Switch has problems over and above some intrinsic fragility, with multiple users reporting that their Switches are warping, particularly those that have been used in docks for most of their life cycle.

The reports started from a Reddit user, _NSR, according to TechnoBuffalo and as shown below:

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...ddit-Image.jpg


In and of itself, that looks like bad luck, or a defective system rather than a systemic flaw — but reports from other users have started coming in as well. It looks as though there are a number of Switches showing signs of warping, including one owned by TechnoBuffalo author Joey Davidson.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...re-640x353.jpg

Last week, the Total War: Warhammer team released a new patch, codenamed Bretonnia. While they didn’t specifically discuss any kind of new features in the patch notes, testing shows that the update significantly improved performance on AMD’s new Ryzen microprocessors.

PCGames.fr tested the new 1.6.0 patch, and found a consistent 10 percent improvement on all three Ryzen 7 processors, as shown below:

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...rWarhammer.png

Intel microprocessors were reportedly unaffected by the patch. The size of the improvement suggests further proof for AMD’s claim that Ryzen’s lower-than-expected performance in some titles was caused by a lack of game code optimizations.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...re-640x353.jpg

When Nvidia launched the GTX 1080 Ti at the end of February, it short-circuited its own highest-end product, the 6-month old Nvidia Titan X, thanks to higher clocks and a much lower price tag ($700, compared with $1,200). Now, Nvidia is rectifying that issue with a full-fat GP102 part — the Titan Xp.


more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...io-640x353.jpg

Microsoft finally announced some of the specifics of its upcoming Project Scorpio refresh, and the implications for the Xbox One product line are enormous. This isn’t just a refresh or a doubling-up of existing resources, like Sony used with the PS4 Pro. This is something altogether different, and Microsoft doesn’t seem to be just gunning for the PS4 — it’s taking on the PC market as well.

Project Scorpio tech specs

Project Scorpio will feature 40 ‘customized’ Radeon compute units (2,560 cores, presumably) clocked at 1172MHz. The clock speed boost alone is 1.37x higher than the Xbox One, while the GPU’s core count has increased by 3.33x.

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...oC-640x360.jpg

The new Project Scorpio SoC, built on TSMC’s 16nm FinFET proces. Image by Digital Foundry

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...ry-640x360.jpg

Now that we’ve discussed the basic technical specs of Project Scorpio, Microsoft’s follow-up to the original Xbox One, it’s time to cover some of the ancillary information, like 4K support, 1080p goodies, and VR functionality. Microsoft and Sony are pursuing different strategies with their new refreshed hardware, so it’s worth exploring what each platform offers (at least, as of this writing).

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...e2-640x353.jpg

AMD launched an entire refresh cycle of its midrange graphics cards today. While our review focuses on the RX 580, AMD is also shipping new SKUs for the RX 460 and 470, as well as a new part, the RX 550. Let’s step through what’s changed for these chips, and what the updates mean for gamers in these market segments.

RX 560 and RX 570

The RX 560 and RX 570 are both iterative improvements of the RX 460 and RX 470 GPUs AMD launched nearly a year ago. Both Anandtech and Hot Hardware included the RX 570 in their reviews, and it broadly shows the same pattern as the RX 580 — which is to say, performance is improved by ~12*percent, the GPUs are quieter (thanks to improved cooling solutions relative to AMD’s reference designs on the RX 470 / RX 480), and they throttle much less. The flip side is that these GPUs do burn more power. Anandtech’s review implies that the RX 570’s power curve is a bit better than the RX 580s, meaning the gap between the stock RX 470 and a custom, overclocked RX 570 is about 10 percent smaller than the equivalent gap between a stock RX 480 and an overclocked RX 580. Since the RX 570 is also clocked lower than the RX 580, this fits our theory that Polaris is slamming into the top of its frequency curve. We don’t know how much headroom is left in these chips, but we’re fairly certain tapping it will burn larger and larger amounts of power relative to measured performance improvement.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...34-640x353.jpg

Every time AMD or Nvidia launches a new GPU family, there’s a scramble to see whether certain features can be unlocked for other GPUs, or if cards can be updated to support higher clocks and voltages. In the old days, it was occasionally possible to buy a midrange card and unlock the additional GPU cores that had been reserved for the top-end models. Even today, there are sometimes performance gains to be had when swapping between BIOSes for different card models. Exactly how well this works and which BIOSes you can swap varies from company to company and card to card.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...on-640x360.jpg

In July 2016, we first covered the Mini Classic NES, later officially called the NES Classic Edition. It was a tiny Nintendo with original controllers, 30 preloaded games, and an original controller. As information leaked out, it became clear this thing was really going to be something special, with excellent game reproduction and multiple graphics modes, plus some saved game options that didn’t exist when the NES first launched.

My significant other is a fan of classic Nintendo and I never got to play most of the games from the NES generation, since my family didn’t think that was an appropriate use of time when I was growing up. So when Nintendo announced the platform, I planned to snap one up immediately. Once the Classic NES launched, I parked myself on websites like BrickSeek and NowInStock, visited local stores, and promised to get a console in time for Christmas. Once it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, I promised to snag one after the holiday, when I was certain demand would fall.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...re-640x353.jpg

When AMD launched its Radeon Pro Duo a year ago, it was clearly an attempt to simultaneously drive VR development and carve out a niche for a high-end Radeon solution that could drive each eye from a separate GPU. At the same time, however, the $1,500 price tag and limited VRAM (just 4GB per GPU) were less than ideal for a four-digit development board.

AMD has announced a new Radeon Pro Duo this week, and despite wearing the same name, it’s a very different GPU under the hood. This Pro Duo is based on Polaris with 32GB of RAM in total (16GB per GPU), 2,304 stream processors, a 1243MHz engine clock, and 224GB/s of memory bandwidth per GPU. This suggests that AMD had to slightly lower the total memory clock, since the standard RX 480 offers 256GB/s of memory bandwidth per GPU.

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...et-640x788.png

Specs on the new Radeon Pro Duo

This GPU is derived from the Radeon Pro WX 7100, which means it has just 128 texture units instead of Polaris’ 144 TMUs. Total board power is down dramatically, to just 250W total, compared with 350W for last years’ dual Nano solution. There’s no way the new Radeon Pro Duo would outperform last year’s model — the dual Nano solution offered nearly double the cores, twice the ROPs, and twice the texturing performance — but none of that matters if you don’t have enough VRAM on-board to handle workloads. You aren’t going to see performance improvements no matter how powerful the rest of the GPU is.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...R6-640x353.jpg

SK Hynix has announced the introduction of the world’s first GDDR6 modules, with a data rate of up to 16Gbps and a theoretical bandwidth of 768GB/s of bandwidth if paired with a 384-bit I/O bus. SK Hynix’ own press release suggests such a product is coming within the next 12 months, in fact, when it states “SK Hynix has been planning to mass produce the product for a client to release high-end graphics card by early 2018 equipped with high performance GDDR6 DRAMs.”

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...O4-640x353.jpg

Fallout New Vegas is arguably the best of the three modern Fallout games. The plot of the game takes inspiration from the original, Black Isle version of Fallout 3 (codenamed Van Buren), and it builds on elements of the in-game universe that were introduced back in Fallout 2. At the same time, there’s no denying that New Vegas is beginning to show its age. The game launched in 2010, but the Gamebryo engine it is built on is even older, and there’s only so much mods can do to improve a title (Gamebryo also gets a little grumpy if you try to keep stuffing visual improvements and improved textures into FO3 / FNV). The Fallout 4 engine may not have been the clean leap from Gamebryo that we hoped it would be, but it does offer much-improved visuals, and one modder is already working on implementing Fallout New Vegas within Fallout 4.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...xe-640x353.jpg

If you’re on the fence about the Nintendo Switch, you might just change your mind by the time the weekend rolls around. On April 28th, an updated version of Mario Kart 8 is being released on Nintendo’s new hybrid console, and it’s getting rave reviews.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...re-640x353.jpg

When AMD launched Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 earlier this year, it recommended that reviewers test with Windows 10’s power plan set to “High Performance,” as opposed to the “Balanced” configuration we typically prefer for testing and that Windows uses by default. Now, the company has released a new chipset driver that will add and automatically activate a power profile that gives Ryzen more control over its own power states.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...oC-640x360.jpg

Microsoft is working to build buzz behind the scenes for its upcoming Project Scorpio and what that console can do in 4K. The company has a heavy lift in front of it — Scorpio is more powerful than Sony’s PS4 Pro, but Sony has a 12-month first mover advantage and approximately double the Xbox One’s install base. That discrepancy is having real impacts on Microsoft’s ability to land exclusive titles for its console, and exclusives are still an important part of how consoles differentiate from one another, even if they aren’t as important as they used to be.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...ch-640x360.jpg

When Nintendo announced the Switch, many weren’t quite sure what to make of it, or how much of an opportunity it represented. The platform’s hybrid living room / portable mode was something new and the launch lineup was frankly anemic. Fortunately for Nintendo, all of these issues have proven minor hiccups rather than show-stopping problems. The Switch ($299.99 at Amazon) is reported to have sold 2.74 million units in March, with Nintendo claiming it now expects to ship up to 10 million Switches this year. The Wii U, for comparison’s sake, sold 13 million consoles throughout its entire run.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...XL-640x354.png

A few years back, Nintendo launched a low-cost follow-up to its 3DS. The 2DS was a slate instead of a clamshell, and it dropped the 3D capabilities Nintendo built into the 3DS, all while selling for a lower price ($129 at launch compared with $170 for the 3DS at the time). Now, Nintendo has released a new budget-oriented version of its 3DS XL, the New 2DS XL.

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...-2-640x636.jpg

The New 2DS XL drops the slate form factor that the 2DS favored and returns to a clamshell design. As the name implies, the “2DS” still can’t handle the stereoscopic 3D effects that the 3DS uses — though these were generally limited to eye candy and minimal changes, unless you consider high battery life consumption to be a feature. Otherwise, the hardware between the New 3DS XL and New 2DS XL is identical, though not always laid out in the same fashion.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...on-640x360.jpg

Sony shared good news last week as part of its quarterly report. The company has shipped a full 60 million PlayStation 4 and PS4 Pro ($399 at Amazon) consoles. The company also sold 2.9 million devices in the past three months, up from 2.3 million devices shipped in the same period last year. That’s a significant achievement given the PS4 is now a mature console, and it implies Sony has had good luck with its PS4 Pro hardware refresh cycle.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...-8-640x360.jpg

Back in the 1960s, Alka-Seltzer found an incredible way to double its sales volume. It involved no new products, no dramatic advertising campaigns, and no celebrity spokespeople or clever jingle. The company simply started showing two tablets dropping into water, rather than just one. This didn’t quite double sales, but it did send them soaring — and the rest, as they say, is history.

Nintendo seems to be betting that it can sell the Switch similarly, despite having previously forecast that supplies will remain constrained through the end of the year. In an investor Q&A session, Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima gave some additional information on what Nintendo plans to do through the end of the year and how it’s thinking about its new console property.
According to Kimishima, Nintendo is on track to build more than 10 million Switches this year, up from 2.74 million shipped in its last fiscal year (Nintendo’s fiscal year isn’t aligned to the calendar year).

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...ey-640x353.jpg

Last year, Bethesda ruffled many feathers by announcing that reviewers will no longer get early access to new games. So with this week’s release of Prey, the reboot of the tumultuous franchise of the same name, Bethesda can’t rely on pre-release reviews to help move copies. Their solution? Bring back the good ol’ days of the pre-release demo!

If you’re curious about how well Prey looks and plays on consoles, you can see for yourself with the “Opening Hour” demo on both PS4 and Xbox One. We’ve spent some time with the demo running on the PS4, and found it to be entertaining if a bit hammy at times.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...os-640x353.jpg

The term “mixed reality” has been thrown about a lot as of late, but pinning down a precise definition has proven elusive. After spending the day at Stanford University’s SCIEN-hosted workshop, which was full of augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) luminaries, it appears the one thing everyone can agree on is there isn’t a standard definition for either term. Let’s see if we can do a bit better.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...rn-640x354.jpg

AMD made a number of concrete announcements at Computex, building on what we heard from the company last week and the week before at its Financial Analyst Day. AMD has confirmed that its Epyc server family, which we’ve covered several times in the last few weeks, will launch on June 20th. AMD doesn’t expect a quick server ramp — CEO Lisa Su has told investors that the company will bring up production over the next few quarters — and has set a goal of retaking 10 percent of the data center business. To put that in perspective, Intel’s data center business was worth $17.2 billion in 2016. Even a 5 percent revenue share, half of AMD’s current target, would be worth about $215 million per quarter to AMD, and those are high-margin dollars that improve the company’s overall financials.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...te-640x353.jpg

Seagate and Microsoft have teamed up before to offer Xbox-branded external storage options, and the storage manufacturer has recently refreshed its product line to match the style of last summer’s Xbox One S. Beyond that, however, these new drives also offer a several-month subscription to Microsoft’s new Xbox Game Pass subscription service.

We haven’t covered Game Pass before, so let’s take a moment to do so. Game Pass is, to some extent, an answer to Sony’s PlayStation Now game-streaming service, but there are some key differences between the two. Like the Sony program, Microsoft’s has a monthly fee attached — $9.99 — but unlike Sony, these games aren’t streamed to you as you play them. Instead, you download them directly, which is where Seagate comes in.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...re-640x353.jpg

There’s always been a tug-of-war between pirates, developers, and the purveyors of various DRM solutions. Over the years, we’ve seen a variety of DRM schemes come and go, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Over the last few years, one system, Denuvo, has developed a reputation for being difficult to crack. At one point pirates thought the system might be uncrackable, and while that’s since proven untrue, Denuvo is still used by some games for at least short periods of time as a way to boost sales. Now, there’s a three-way argument over Rime, an adventure-puzzle game released on May 26, over whether the Denuvo DRM baked into the title is slowing down the game.

According to the cracker, known as Baldman, Rime implements Denuvo by conducting hundreds of thousands of “trigger” events per second to ensure that the version of the game being used is, in fact, legitimate, as described below:

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...uvo-640x77.png

Rime’s developers, it should be noted, take some exception to this. According to Cody Bradley, lead producer on Rime for Grey Box, there’s only a small performance hit associated with Denuvo, and the only thing the application is doing is ensuring that the copy protection associated with Steam or Origin is still attached to the game.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...et-640x354.jpg

You’d think the question of how to connect headsets to game consoles would be a settled issue by now, given that voice chat has been a standard feature of Xbox and PlayStation games for years. Nintendo, however, has never supported such options in the same way. Prior to the Switch, voice chat was implemented on a per-game feature in selected titles. Earlier this year, Nintendo announced that it would use a smartphone app for many of its basic matchmaking and lobby functions, as well as for handling voice chat capabilities. The third-party peripheral manufacturer Hori has released a diagram showing how its new, Splatoon 2-themed headset will work, and the diagram isn’t exactly simple.

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...am-640x354.jpg

Hori is clearly trying to inject some custom design into the process — the squid-shaped splitter echoes some of Splatoon’s themes — but there’s no denying how bass-ackwards this entire setup is. You’ve got a splitter for a smartphone and the Switch (Buy now on Amazon), with a third cable for the headset. To be clear, you don’t have to have the headset, unless you want to be able to hear your teammates and the game audio at the same time. But these aren’t compromises Sony and Microsoft ask players to make.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...ne-640x353.jpg

A brace of news reports this week highlighted an interesting scenario in console world (and arguably for PCs as well, though I’ll address that separately). First, Sony executive Jim Ryan was openly dismissive of backwards compatibility as a major focus or feature for the PS4, noting that few console players actually took advantage of the feature when it was available and that it wasn’t seen as important within Sony.

more...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-conte...re-640x354.jpg

Just over five years ago, BioWare released Mass Effect 3, the final title in the original Mass Effect trilogy and the most controversial of them all due to its various endings and how player choices did — or, more accurately, didn’t — impact the endgame outcome. BioWare would later take the unprecedented step of patching the game’s ending in an attempt to placate angry fans. But while the game was controversial, it also did quite well, with over 6 million copies sold by January 2017.

It would’ve been extremely difficult to follow up the plot of Mass Effect 3 with a new sequel that took place with the original cast of characters, and BioWare opted not to try. Instead, the next ME game would focus on an entirely new galaxy with new alien species, a fresh cast of characters, and a plot arc that only tenuously connected to the original Mass Effect universe.

more...