Game Tech News

This week, Microsoft at last confirmed the Windows 10 upgrades we’ll all be receiving in a few short weeks will come with an important feature: Once you upgrade to the new version of Windows, your authenticated copy of Windows 10 will provide you with a key that can be used to perform clean installs rather than an in-place upgrade. After this initial process, you won’t have to keep your old key, drop a CD in the drive, or otherwise mirror the original Windows installation.



This suggests Microsoft will effectively allow people to redeem previous Windows keys for new Windows 10 iterations, which will then be tied to whatever version of the OS you’re qualified to own. There’s no word yet on what happens if, for example, you redeem a legitimate Windows 7 key for a new Windows 10 key, then upgrade the underlying hardware in the box. Gamers with legitimate copies of Windows 7 or 8/8.1 may want to do any upgrades they intend to make before actually installing the new version of Windows 10 — it’s possible that upgrading the hardware post-OS install will lock the key to a particular platform and make it more difficult to swap components in the future.

When Microsoft launched its last software-as-a-service push with Office 365, it simultaneously introduced requirements that made reinstallation and upgrades more onerous than they had been previously. Specifically, it became (temporarily) against the terms of service to remove the software from one installed system and put it on another. The company later modified this wording after consumer pressure, but the terms and conditions surrounding Windows 10 and its upgrade / reinstallation policies still haven’t been clarified.

Phil Spencer promises unified Xbox One, Windows 10 gaming experience

Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced it will support PC Gamer’s efforts to host a PC gaming-themed event at E3. For years, PC gaming has been all-but ignored — Valve’s Steam has hauled in hundreds of millions of dollars over the last ten years, while Microsoft’s efforts to build a credible Windows Store or its own Games for Windows Live platform have been wretched by comparison. Xbox head Phil Spencer has made it clear he wants to change this and outlined a plan to offer Xbox as a multi-platform gaming brand that would extend across both PCs and the Xbox One itself. Details on the plan are still vague, though Microsoft has promised that Windows 10 device owners who own Xboxes and compatible networking hardware will be able to stream games from Xbox to PC across local networks.




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When Windows 10 debuts next month, it’s going to deliver the first full DirectX update since Windows 7 debuted six years ago. For more than a year, AMD and Nvidia have been advertising that various older GPU families would support DirectX 12 at launch.

Recently, however, there’s been some confusion over what level of support Intel, AMD, and Nvidia will offer for the new API and which products will run the upcoming games that rely on it. The current confusion seems to have been caused by comments from AMD’s Robert Hallock, who acknowledged that the various AMD GCN-class GPUs support different feature levels of DirectX 12. This has been spun into allegations that AMD doesn’t support “full” DirectX 12. In reality, Intel, Nvidia, and AMD all support DirectX 12 at various feature levels, and no GPU on the market today*supports every single optional DirectX 12 capability.

DirectX feature levels and point updates are not the same thing

The first thing to understand is that DirectX feature levels aren’t the same thing as DirectX point updates. A point update (DirectX 10.1, DirectX 11.1 / 11.2) is an additional set of standardized capabilities that allow developers to perform certain tasks more efficiently or offer specific capabilities. DirectX 10.1, for example, implemented new standards for visual quality, new shader instructions, and support for cube map arrays. It wasn’t a significant enough update to define an entirely new version of DirectX around it, but it was a large enough step to warrant its own extension.

A DirectX feature level, in contrast, defines the level of support a GPU gives while still supporting the underlying specification. This capability was first introduced in DirectX 11. Microsoft defines a feature level as “a well defined set of GPU functionality. For instance, the 9_1 feature level implements the functionality that was implemented in Microsoft Direct3D 9, which exposes the capabilities of shader models ps_2_x and vs_2_x, while the 11_0 feature level implements the functionality that was implemented in Direct3D 11.”

The chart below is a partial example of DirectX 11 feature levels, just to illustrate the point:



The purpose of the feature level function is to allow developers to target a single API rather than developing separate codebases in parallel to ensure that a game can run smoothly on multiple generations of GPU hardware rather than writing separate code for DX12, DX11, DX10, and so on. A DirectX 11 GPU with feature level 9_3 couldn’t magically perform DirectX 11 effects, but it could run games in DirectX 9 mode without the developer needing to write an entirely separate engine implementation to allow for it. That’s how games like Civilization V were able to run in either DX11 or DX9 modes from a common codebase.

AMD, Intel, and Nvidia: Who supports what?

One of the problems with identifying which GPUs support which features is the confusion between DirectX API support and feature level support. This support page from Nvidia, for example, details how Fermi and Kepler GPUs can support DirectX 11.1 at feature level 11_0. The reason Kepler and Fermi don’t support DirectX 11.1 at feature level 11_1 is because two of the capabilities required for 11_1 aren’t available on the GPU. Nvidia goes to some pains to point out that the 11.1 DirectX update actually adds support for some capabilities Fermi introduced in 2010.

The following Microsoft slide details exactly which DirectX 12 feature levels are supported by which hardware iterations:



It’s not clear why Microsoft lists Kepler as supporting DirectX 11_1 while Nvidia shows it as limited to DirectX 11_0 below, but either way, the point is made: *DirectX 12 support is nuanced and varies between various card families from every manufacturer. AMD’s GCN 1.0 chips include Cape Verde, Pitcairn, Oland, and Tahiti and support feature level 11_1, whereas Bonaire, Hawaii, Tonga, and Fiji will all support feature level 12_0. Nvidia’s various 4xx, 5xx, 6xx, and 7xx families will all support DirectX 12 at the 11_0 or 11_1 feature level, with the GTX 750 Ti offering FL 12_0 support.


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A few days ago, Steam announced that it would begin offering refunds to anyone who wanted them, provided they fulfilled a few minimal requirements. Specifically, if you spend no more than two hours with a title and haven’t owned it for more than two weeks, you can have a refund, no questions asked. The policy has garnered praise for being pro-consumer. But there are some clear negatives for developers who are faced with a surge in refunds with absolutely no answers as to why people are suddenly returning their title.

Kotaku has rounded up these reports, which show refund rates climbing by 30-70%. One of the problems with Steam’s policy, from a game developer’s perspective, is that there are dozens of titles on Steam that can be beaten (or mostly beaten) within the two-hour window. Sure, there are plenty of games you won’t even scratch in two hours — but smaller, indie titles tend to offer bite-sized gameplay and simpler mechanisms. Even games like Left 4 Dead 2 could be mostly beaten within a two-hour window if you’ve played the first one and focus on the campaigns you like the most.


Data courtesy of Kotaku

The larger problem, however, is that creators have no idea why people suddenly don’t want their games — and when your return rate has gone from basically zero to a whopping 87%, that’s a serious problem. It’s not just a question of revenue (most of the sales figures given point to sales of 10s to dozens of copies at the most), but one of customer service. When customers don’t communicate to indicate why they don’t want a game, the creator is left wondering if they ran into a technical problem, if a puzzle was too difficult, or if some other aspect of the product offended or annoyed someone.

Developers have also witnessed some downright strange behaviors, like one person reportedly buying seven copies of a title, then returning five of them. Apparently it’s also fairly easy to download a copy of a game and then return it. If a game doesn’t use DRM in the first place, apparently the title will still play.

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Microsoft has announced a new Xbox One model sporting a larger internal hard drive and a redesigned controller with a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack, confirming rumors that had been roiling ahead of E3 next week.

The new system, which features a matte black finish, will be available for $399 with Halo: The Master Chief Collection included, starting on June 16. The entry-level 500GB system will stay at its current price of $349, a price Microsoft has now officially made permanent after first introducing it as a 2014 holiday promotion and extending the cut as a "special promotion" after that.

Unlike the PS4's DualShock 4, the original Xbox One controller only worked with headsets specially designed for its proprietary inputs; standard 3.5 mm headsets needed a $25 adapter, which won't be necessary with the new controller. Microsoft says the new controller also features improved audio quality and a higher maximum volume, as well as "fine-tuned bumpers for more consistent performance anywhere along the full surface of the bumper."

The redesigned controller will be available for individual purchase in silver, black, and a new camouflage design. Microsoft didn't mention a specific price in its announcement, but Xbox One controllers typically go for $60.

Microsoft previously offered an Xbox One with a 1TB hard drive as a $499 limited edition promotion packaged with Call of Duty Advanced Warfare and a gold-highlight controller. All Xbox One and PS4 systems can also have their storage expanded via external USB hard drives.

The new Xbox hardware's announcement comes amid reports that Microsoft is planning to add DVR functionality to the Xbox One "probably this year"—all that extra storage would certainly be handy for recording high-definition TV shows. There are also reports circulating that Sony is planning to launch a PlayStation 4 with a 1TB hard drive in the near future.

Alongside the new console hardware, Microsoft also announced a USB adapter that will let Xbox One controllers work wirelessly on Windows 10 PCs with full support for in-game chat and audio pass-through. The adapter will cost $25 on its own or come packaged with a controller for $80 starting this fall.

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Leaks around AMD’s next-generation Radeon (now dubbed the Radeon Fury, though we have no official brand confirmation on that moniker) have popped up in quick succession in the past weeks. This latest data points to a triple-GPU launch, with variants of the card debuting in air-cooled, water-cooled, and a slimmed-down version of the card that will offer most of its performance at (most likely) a significantly lower price.

The leak in question comes from WCCFTech, which has a decidedly checkered reputation where these issues are concerned. Given this, if you normally take a pinch of salt with your rumormongering, I’d recommend a tablespoon, just to be on the safe side. That said, some of this data lines up with what we’ve seen elsewhere and independently heard ourselves. Fiji, if our own sources are accurate, will debut in three three different SKUs:



Let’s start at the top and work our way down. The 64 compute units and 4096 cores are expected, while the ROP and TMU counts are plausible, if unconfirmed. The R9 290X packs 64 ROPS and 176 TMUs, so we can safely assume that Fiji would increase its ratios on both counts. Nvidia certainly pushed the envelope on both metrics with Maxwell, but then it had fewer ROPS to start with. The rumor of three separate part variants is something we’ve also heard from our own sources, and it stands to reason that AMD might push the core (and possibly memory) clocks higher with the new water-cooled hardware as opposed to the air-cooled variants.

Whether the actual listed clock speeds are accurate is another question altogether. One thing I learned when I reviewed a water-cooled CryoVenom over at PC Magazine is that the Hawaii silicon is capable of hitting substantially higher clocks, provided you can cool the chip. That card was capable of 1225MHz, compared to a stock frequency of 947MHz. Given the amount of time AMD has had to tweak the design, it’s possible we’ll see the company launch hardware above the 1GHz threshold or offer the option to intrepid overclockers.
The power consumption figures, however, are… well, “surprising” is the kindest word I can think of. We know already that engineering boards sport dual 8-pin connectors and are rumored to draw up to 375W at the wall. It wouldn’t be at all surprising for AMD to improve on this figure between engineering silicon and final hardware, but a drawdown from 375W to 300W is enormous for this late stage. This is one of the weakest links in the table as published.

Finally, we’ve got no word on the lower-end GPU with 3584 cores. While I’ve theorized that AMD would likely create such a card, the news to date has mostly focused on the high-end variants, not this new chip.


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Earlier today, Oculus held a press conference in advance of next week’s massive E3 gaming event. For the most part, this awkward one-hour stage show was spent discussing the minute details that differentiate the final hardware from the prototypes. But the most interesting news coming out of this event, by far, is the fact that Oculus has decided to partner with Microsoft.

The first segment of the press conference was mostly spent making promises about how comfortable the VR helmet is. We’re told over and over that it’s incredibly lightweight, and we’ll wear it “like a baseball cap.” It’s understandable that comfort and design are huge points of pride, but the presentation was more than a little off-putting. The new Oculus Rift hardware will be available for industry folks to try first-hand next week, so I’m left scratching my head as to why Facebook‘s VR team is giving us such a hard pitch.

In addition, the final hardware will feature a dial for fine-tuning the spacing of the OLED screens, comes with detachable earphones, and offers better compatibility for people with glasses. These are smart usability improvements, but these announcements are better suited for a press release — not as major on-stage selling points.

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Earlier today, Microsoft kicked off E3 with an incredibly solid stage show. It delivered loads of new games, unveiled the crazy “Elite” customizable controller, and it even announced an early access program called “Xbox Game Preview.” But the most interesting part of today’s event has to be the introduction of local 360 backwards compatibility on the Xbox One.
Announced as “native” backwards compatibility, it’s safe to assume that the Xbox team has developed a 360 emulator for the Xbox One. We’ve been promised 100 working titles when this feature goes public during the 2015 holiday season, so it’s unlikely that Redmond will be diving into the source code, making serious tweaks, and recompiling the games natively for the AMD hardware in the Xbox One.

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Ouya got a lot of people excited when it raked in more than $8 million on Kickstarter in 2012. The premise was simple — make a small, inexpensive console running on Android with a game store populated with exclusive content and titles ported from Android. It sounds interesting, but Ouya hasn’t found success and today the company has been bought out by gaming accessory maker Razer.

A previously leaked memo from Ouya indicated it was in dire straights and looking for a buyout offer. The deal hasn’t been announced by either company yet, but acquisition management firm Mesa Global has confirmed it acted as financial advisor to Ouya during its sale to Razer. It’s listed right there on Mesa Global’s info page next to Google-Songza and other deals. Details are slim until one company or the other makes a statement, but it seems profoundly unlikely that Razer would choose to continue making the Ouya console.

The Ouya was reasonably cutting edge when it was announced in 2012. It packed a Tegra 3 ARM chip, 2GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage. That was basically the specsheet for Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, which was released around that time. However, the Ouya didn’t come out until almost a year later. That’s not bad for a hardware Kickstarter (many take ages to deliver), but by then the hardware was already getting old. That same piece of hardware is still all Ouya has, and it’s still $99. It has not been selling well.



Ouya also had problems with game selection. There were only a few notable exclusive games for Ouya, and those eventually expanded elsewhere. Ouya’s storefront was completely outside the Google ecosystem. That meant even if you owned a game in the Play Store, you would have to buy it again from Ouya if you wanted to play it there. The upshot is that Ouya got the commission from all those sales rather than giving it away to Google. This might be what Razer is interested in.

Razer is mostly known for making gamepads, keyboards, mice, and other accessories. However, the company recently released a $99 Android TV box (Forge TV) with some legit gaming capabilities — that’s the same price as the ancient Ouya hardware, by the way. Android TV is part of the Google ecosystem, so all your content and games from the Play Store will transfer over (limited by compatibility). Razer might like to run its own store on the side with content it earns money from, not that such a thing is likely to be successful.

This feels like Razer simply swallowing up Ouya for its patents and back-end technology. It doesn’t really have much other value. The Ouya brand has been largely forgotten by gamers after it failed to bring about the gaming revolution that was promised. So the Ouya console is probably finished, but this is just the nail in the coffin — it was already dead.

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Now that the E3 press events are out of the way, we have a firm idea of what the gaming landscape looks like for the next year or two. The major events were brimming with games of all sizes, and the near future is looking extremely bright. So today, I want to highlight ten of the most impressive games at E3, and help you figure out which titles are worth keeping an eye on.



Rise of the Tomb Raider

Crystal Dynamics’s follow up to 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot is looking gorgeous. It seems that the dev team took all of the criticisms to heart, and this title will focus much more on — ya know — raiding tombs. Unfortunately, Microsoft locked up timed exclusivity, so only Xbox One and Xbox 360 players will get to enjoy Rise of the Tomb Raider this year. Hopefully, the limited number of platforms will allow for more time spent optimizing for performance.



Super Mario Maker

This incredible game lets you make, share, and play Mario levels using tile sets from Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and New Super Mario Bros. Based on everything we’ve seen so far, Nintendo is executing beautifully on a concept that will easily appeal to both the NES generation and the Minecraft generation. More importantly, Nintendo is finally making good on using the tablet controller.



Gears of War 4

We got our first glimpse at the new Gears of War this week, and it’s a real looker. This is the first game being developed in-house at Microsoft, and it’s the first Xbox One installment in the series. This relatively new team has a lot to prove, but the first impression was quite positive. We won’t be playing this game anytime soon, but the potential here is huge. Hell, this might even be enough to close the sales gap.



Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

It was sad to see Uncharted 4 get pushed back into 2016, but this new footage looks truly outstanding. The folks at Naughty Dog are well known for their technical prowess, so I’m confident that they’ll be able to deliver stunning visuals with a (mostly) solid frame rate. 1080p locked at 60fps is most certainly too much to hope for here, but it’s a safe bet that it will graphically outshine all other PS4 releases to date.



The Last Guardian

When people talk about troubled game development, this title inevitably comes up. Originally planned as a PS3 release, The Last Guardian has been in the works for nearly a decade now. Sony finally showed off the game running on the PS4, and it looks great. However, the heavy lifting here is definitely being done by the second-to-none art direction — not the tech. It probably isn’t going to push the PS4 to its limits, but that’s fine by me. I’ll just be happy when (if?) we actually get to play it.

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At a major launch event timed to coincide with E3, AMD announced its new lineup of Radeon Fury GPUs. As expected, the company formally declared that the leaked “Fury” brand name was legitimate and that the upcoming GPU would feature 4GB of HBM memory and 4096 cores in total. What was less expected were the three SKUs the company announced and its claims regarding performance per watt improvements and capabilities of the next-gen GPU. Fiji, now known as the Radeon R9 Fury, will pack one heck of a punch if the hardware performs as advertised.

First up, there’s the water-cooled R9 Fury X. The GPU is entirely water-cooled — AMD showed off the loop,*sans*the top cover, and it relies on a combination of a CoolerMaster radiator block, Nidec fan, and a reported decibel level of just 32db, compared to 45db (AMD claims) for the GTX Titan X. That’s a huge advantage for AMD if testing proves out the gains, given that the decibel scale is logarithmic, not linear. Furthermore, AMD has told us that the GPU’s target temperature is just 50C (end-users will have the ability to set their own manual targets if they so desire).

This version of the card will pack two 8-pin PCIe connectors, but power consumption is much lower than that, at an estimated 250-275W per board. The dual eight-pins are provided solely for extra overclocking headroom. The R9 Fury X will pack three DP 1.2 connectors and one HDMI connector (no word yet on whether that’s HDMI 2.0 or not). The GPU can drive up to six displays from a single card provided that a DP 1.2 hub is used. The second Radeon Fury GPU is an air-cooled variant in the same 7.5-inch form factor, but AMD generally glossed over this card, including its spec sheets and final capabilities.

The real star of the show was the tiny R9 Nano — a six-inch GPU that packs a significant performance improvement over the R9 290X, but in a fraction of the space. One of the major advantages of these new cards is the ability to squeeze a lot more GPU into an equivalent area. The R9 290X is a 11.5-inch GPU, compared to just 7.5-inches for the Fury X and Fury (both the air and water-cooled versions are the same length). Nano shrinks this down to six inches, and according to AMD executive Richard Huddy, the card could be even smaller than that — but not while fitting into a full-sized PCI-Express slot.

We’ll have images and additional details on the cards up as soon as possible, but it’s fair to say that the Radeon R9 Nano stole the show. AMD is projecting a 1.5x performance-per-watt gain for Radeon R9 Fury X over the R9 290X, but the figures for the Nano are even higher — 2x higher performance/watt compared to R9 290X. Unlike the Radeon R9 Fury X, the Nano won’t be available until later in the summer. AMD declined to name an exact release date for either it or the upcoming dual GPU Fury card, which is also scheduled for release later this year. We know that clocks won’t be as high on Nano, but its power consumption will also be significantly better.

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