Game Tech News

From the get-go, Sony’s PlayStation 4 has been selling well. It’s only been about a year and a half since it launched in November of 2013, but Sony announced today that the PS4 has sold over 25 million units worldwide. We still don’t know the exact number of Xbox Ones sold to consumers, but if the estimates are correct, the PS4 has now sold more units than the Xbox One and Wii U combined.

In the second quarter of calendar 2015 alone, Sony sold about three million PS4s worldwide. In that same time frame, Microsoft shipped 1.4 million Xbox consoles (both 360s and Ones). Unfortunately, Redmond doesn’t disclose the breakdown of those sales. However, the folks over at Ars Technica have assigned a ballpark estimate of 0.95 million Xbox Ones sold in Q2. And Nintendo? The Wii U sold a paltry 0.47 million units.



But what about the big picture? How many consoles have been sold to date? With over 25 million PS4s, over 10 million Wii Us, and an estimated 14.32 million Xbox Ones sold by the end of June 2015, the PS4 holds over 50% of the current-gen console market. At this point in the cycle, it’s safe to say that the PS4 has unambiguously won the battle for sales and consumer support.
While the PS4 has the most horsepower of the existing consoles, that’s not nearly enough to explain the massive sales gap. Microsoft made a number of egregious mistakes leading up to the Xbox One launch, and wasted a lot of the good will it created during the Xbox 360’s lifespan. Redmond has since made huge improvements to its console strategy, but it still hasn’t quite been enough to win back a significant portion of the audience it took for granted.


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Microsoft announced at Gamescom today that the Xbox One’s Windows 10 rollout will take place in November. We’ve known that the upgrade was coming for a while, alongside DirectX 12 support, but Microsoft had previously declined to put a date on it. The new Windows 10 launch will debut alongside a new UI that apparently diverges from the Windows 8-style layouts that Microsoft has used since the Xbox One launched in 2013. Other new improvements include a new OneGuide design, a Store makeover, and support for Universal apps created with Windows 10.

If you like Cortana, you’ll also have the option to enable her on the Xbox one, and the new universal platform really could go a long way to transforming what the console is capable of. Cortana will also allow you to talk to the console if you have a Kinect, though it’s not clear how many Xbox One owners actually do. Given the way Microsoft’s sales spiked after it killed the mandatory Kinect bundle and began shipping other versions of the console, it’s likely that less than 50% of buyers actually bothered to shell out cash for a glorified paperweight. Finally, of course, there’s the new Chatpad, the Xbox 360 backward compatibility (hopefully in much better shape than it was a few months ago, when Eurogamer tested it), and full DVR support coming to the platform.




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During the last console generation, HD remasters became a popular trend among many of the major publishers. PS2 and original Xbox games were given a fresh coat of paint, and re-released to the world. While the reaction to this trend wasn’t universally positive, it was more-or-less accepted because of the significant jump in fidelity between 480p and 720p. This time around, the situation is a bit more complicated, and the bloom is off the rose.

The PS4 and Xbox One have been out for about a year and a half now, and the number of significant exclusive releases has been pretty slim. To help pad out the line-ups, a massive wave of ports from the 360, PS3, and PC has hit both the PS4 and Xbox One. And since the vast majority of the original games were released in high definition to begin with, the “HD remaster” moniker doesn’t really make sense anymore.

While some releases are definitely more impressive than others, the definitions aren’t particularly clear here. At this point, the line between “port” and “remaster” is significantly blurred. Even if you’re upping the resolution, improving the textures, and reworking the net code, those two terms are used interchangeably more often than not.

And while this generation of consoles has started to become more PC-like with x86-64 CPUs and standard AMD GPUs, PCs are starting to function more like consoles with DirectX 12 and Mantle. The definitions are changing rapidly, and it leaves most of us more than a little confused — even when it comes to day-one releases of multi-platform games.

So, why are some ports nearly spotless while others are train wrecks? Are the PS4 and Xbox One really just dolled-up midrange PCs? These kind of questions pop up frequently in tech/game enthusiast forums, and it usually devolves into a screaming match. I wanted to bypass the noise, and hear the story directly from the devs themselves.

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview developers from two game studios: Iron Galaxy and BlitWorks. Both of those studios are well-known for delivering ports on numerous different platforms, so their first-hand knowledge of this complicated field is exactly what I was looking for. Without further ado, let’s hear from the boots on the ground.

BlitWorks interview

Grant Brunner: Can you give some background on BlitWorks, and what your company does?
Tony Cabello: Well, basically, we’re specialized in porting games. With all the founders being involved in the game development industry for almost twenty years — we have a very deep technical background. Miguel, my partner, he’s a legend in the emulation scene. He did System 32, the Mega Drive, the Dreamcast, and a lot of other work.
Miguel Horna: Neo-Geo, Capcom System II & III, Sega Model 2.
TC: So, we started offering porting services. And over time, we are adding more services like publishing and remakes. Although it’s difficult to say what is a remake and what is a port, because there’s a fine line between them.
GB: There’s a common opinion in the enthusiast community that because the PS4 and Xbox One are using AMD CPUs and GPUs, it’s easy to port to and from the PC. Does this idea actually hold water based on your experience?
TC: Yes and no. The architecture is fairly similar to a PC, but a few details make a big difference. You have to fully understand each component in order to get the best performance. It’s easy to do a port, but it takes a lot of effort to get the max performance of each console.

This is where the traditional big difference between consoles and PC remains — on consoles you have low-level access to all the hardware. The OS runs in a reserved set of cores and memory, so there’s no overhead from it. You have specific memory mapped regions. You have very fine-grained control of what is going to be cached or how you build the display list, and things like that. There’s almost no graphics driver in between. You are feeding the commands directly to the GPU, and this requires a very different mindset.

And also, it’s important that you have very powerful tools. I mean, the profilers and the debuggers on the consoles are spectacular compared to what you get on PC. And this allows you to fully understand what’s going on. If the game is running slowly, you can always know why.

GB: Since Mantle and DirectX 12 are allowing developers to get closer to the metal, does that mean good things for PC-console ports going forward?
TC: Yeah, sure. The new APIs are following that direction. And, basically, they are getting things out of the drivers, so they are allowing you low-level access. In the end, all the GPUs are more similar nowadays than a few years ago[…]
GB: And in terms of CPUs, both PCs and consoles are doubling down on more cores with less of a focus on clock speed. Is that trend a positive thing when you’re porting games to and from these different platforms?
TC: Right. The trend really helps because the mindset is closer than back in the day with the Cell processor — it wasn’t exactly in the trend. Each core had specific memory, and there was a DMA [direct memory access] across the different cores. I mean, it was a very different architecture than a set of general purpose cores that you can find in current CPUs.
MH: That’s why the Xbox 360 was thought to be easier to program [than the PS3]. Because it had three general purpose cores[…] it was more like a PC. PS3 has a main CPU, but then the other CPUs are using a different instruction set, different memory, and everything has to be communicated by DMA. So it was very hard to work with it.
GB: So if the PS3 is on one end of the difficulty spectrum, is there a platform on the other end? Something incredibly easy to port to and from?
TC: I would say the PS4 and Xbox One[…] everything else falls in between like the Vita and the 3DS. They’re in between because they have different challenges. They are less powerful, but still, they use a normal architecture.



GB: BlitWorks has ported games with a very strong focus on precise timing (Meat Boy, Necrodancer, OlliOlli). Are those kinds of games harder to execute on properly than, let’s say, a menu-driven RPG?
TC: Yeah, every time you have to deal with real time, a lot of unexpected things happen. On every platform, you’ll find a different bottleneck that keeps you away from 60 frames per second. Actually, 60 frames is very difficult. It’s so tight — it’s 16 milliseconds. If anything unexpected comes, you’ll miss a frame. And it’s so easy to miss a frame in the middle of an animation, and [ruin the smoothness].

For instance, in Spelunky, we hit some particular rendering issues on the Vita. People complained because it made the game harder to play during specific moments. Being a hard game already, people got upset. So, we had to further optimize the game, and keep a solid 60 frames per second since it was affecting gameplay.
MH: In games like OlliOlli, any alteration on the timing can make you miss a trick. The common issue with this particular game is when using TVs that do excessive signal processing. Either you activate the game mode on the TV set or you’re going to have a hard time getting used to compensate the lag in your brain, as you will have to press the buttons a few milliseconds in advance. Necrodancer is also a good example, as it has a calibration screen at the start of the game in order to compensate the lag for you.
GB: What about compensating for different controllers? Button positioning, dead zones, and the overall feel is different between controllers. Do you ever have to make tweaks to make the game feel “right”?
TC: Yeah. In every game, we have to do some degree of fine tuning of controls. This is a very subjective topic, and it’s not always clear what to do, so both our testers and the original game creator exchange very valuable feedback so the intended feel is preserved. But there’s no simple rule, just play and see how it feels.
MH: When you have a touch game for Vita like OlliOlli, and you want to port it to PS4… The menus were only built to be used by touch, so we have to create that new menu system so it can be navigated with gamepads.
GB: On the BlitWorks website, there is a page dedicated to something called “Unsharper.” You folks call it a “semi-automatic tool for converting C# code into C++.” How large of a role does automation play in a typical port from BlitWorks?
TC: Well, we started this tool because when we ported FEZ, we used an already existing tool for converting from C# to C++. This tool missed some features, and we had to finish the port manually by filling the gaps in the generated code. But with bigger games, like Bastion, on which we’re working now, this way would have been impossible. The amount of code is much bigger, so we needed to automate the conversion. The manual part is still there, but it’s not the same amount of work we did with FEZ which was very, very time consuming.
GB: Do you do the manual changes before or after the automation process?
TC: The tool is generating C++, and we do the manual changes on the C# side, so we’re constantly converting to see the improvements. The tool is actually a compiler if you look at it this way. What we do is, we adjust the C# to fit the requirements of our compiler, which is not perfect, and does not support everything.
GB: Is there anything about game ports (or the porting process) that you think ExtremeTech readers should know about?
TC: Well, what I would say is that ports can be very technical, but good ports always carry a lot of product level kind of work — adjusting the controls, getting a proper UI, getting smooth graphics. In a sense, a good port is like going back to the time when the game was being developed, changing some of the assumptions, and reworking the affected parts.
I think this is the biggest difference from doing something like an emulator which is a 100% technical thing. You just have to get the game to behave the way it did originally. In porting, there’s a lot of care about the product — exactly like when the game was developed originally, but on a different platform.
MH: If you do ports like… an automatic machine, your ports aren’t going to be good. They need a lot of care — a lot of attention. A lot of love from the team to make the port in the best possible way.

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If you’ve been hoping for a 4K Blu-ray upgrade to show off a swank new 4K television, Christmas 2015 should be the highlight of your year. According to Victor Matsuda, the Blu-ray Disc Association’s Global Promotions Committee Chair, 4K Blu-ray discs will be available for the holiday season, along with a bevy of new technologies and additional features. In addition to supporting 4K resolutions, the new discs include support for multiple types of high dynamic range (HDR) lighting, and a new “digital bridge” feature.



The digital bridge feature is the physical media world’s method of offering the kind of digital convenience that streaming services sell standard. According to an interview with Matsuda, the digital bridge will offer two functions: copy and export. “Copy” permits a bit-for-bit copy to be stored on an authorized media drive, while “export” allows a file to be transferred to an authorized media device. It’s not clear which devices will be considered “authorized,” and whether or not the licensing terms will allow for transcoding into different formats for playback on specific devices. The fact that two different standards have been created for fundamentally similar practices suggests that “copy” may be for storing copies of a movie directly on an Ultra HD Blu-ray (that’s the official 4K name) while “export” could allow a film to be shifted to a tablet or smartphone.

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When Microsoft first announced the Xbox One, it claimed developers and gamers could take advantage of Microsoft’s unique cloud infrastructure to boost game performance or create special effects that a single Xbox One couldn’t possibly handle. The company never said much about the feature after that, though we saw a glimmer of it last year, when Titanfall ran the game’s AI on Microsoft’s cloud servers. Now that’s changing, thanks to Crackdown 3. The upcoming game was shown off at Gamescom this week and its multiplayer mode has a rarely tapped capability: full environmental destruction.

Environmental damage isn’t new to gaming. It’s been featured in titles like Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Battlefield 4, and the Red Faction series using the GeoMod 2.0 and 2.5 engine. What sets Crackdown 3 apart, however, appears to be the degree of damage players can inflict on a structure during the game’s multiplayer mode, as well as the sheer amount of computational power Microsoft is going to throw at the problem. According to Dave Jones, the creative director on Crackdown 3, the goal is to make the entire game world fully destructible.

“We thought: what about if, for the first time, we make the whole world fully destructible?” Jones told Ars Technica. “We asked ourselves simple questions, such as ‘why don’t my bullets go through walls when I shoot them?’ or ‘why can’t I step through big holes I’ve made in those walls?’ It’s a very different way of thinking about games. If there’s a guy behind the wall, I can just shoot him through the wall, shooting both the wall and the guy to bits. That’s the way we think game worlds need to evolve.”
Crackdown 3 is relying on a backend developed by Cloudgine, a company dedicated to developing cloud-based rendering and offload technology. During the tech demo, Jones showed how increased environmental destruction required more computational power. That need was communicated back to Cloudgine, and more servers were brought online to deal with the increased demand. The extra workload apparently averages out to roughly six Xbox One’s worth of number crunching, though that can burst as high as 13. The number 20 has also been batted around, though this may represent a maximum workload scenario with a full set of players blowing bits of the game into smithereens simultaneously.

Cloud offload could be the future of gaming

While it’s true that the Xbox one isn’t as powerful as the PlayStation 4, don’t be fooled into thinking cloud offload is just an attempt to paper over differences between the two consoles. If Crackdown 3 requires 6-13 Xbox One’s to render full environmental destruction in real time, that still works out to 4-10 PS4s, depending on the workload in question. The Crackdown team still needs to demonstrate that their solution can scale and perform under pressure, but assuming that it can, we could be seeing the beginning of a new model of game development.

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One of the biggest expected announcements at SIGGRAPH this week has been delayed: The Kronos Group has yet to release its Vulkan API. Fortunately, Imagination Technologies has taken over, and has released a tech demo to make the months of waiting more bearable. Gnome Horde demonstrates the impressive performance advantages that this low-level API provides compared with other graphics APIs.

The video below shows a consumer tablet outfitted with a GPU PowerVR G6430. The right half reproduces this scene using OpenGL ES, and the left half uses Vulkan.

The large number of objects to render stresses the hardware, and this is especially noticeable when the camera zooms out. At that point, OpenGL collapses, with CPU utilization above 90% and frame rates in the single digits. The greater control granted by Vulkan allows the scene to optimize its programming so the CPU load is shared between all cores and the frame rate never falls below 30 fps.

This performance increase is not free, as the post of Imagination says it comes at the expense of more work by the programmer: “All of the features require implementation in code, so the use of Vulkan does come with added code complexity compared to OpenGL ES. However, Imagination is committed to continuing full support for OpenGL ES for a long time to come alongside developing a new Vulkan API driver for PowerVR Rogue GPUs. Devices with the new Vulkan API should bring new optimization opportunities and increased efficiency to application developers.”

This also means that OpenGL will not disappear, and developers will be free to choose to program their projects at a high-level using OpenGL, or choose Vulkan to further optimize their code — although you can safely assume all the main game engines will add support for Vulkan.


It seems clear that the new API will allow the arrival of hitherto unthinkable games to mobile devices and budget graphics. There are other low-level APIs that come with*the same promises: Microsoft DirectX 12 and Apple’s Metal. The advantage of Vulkan is that as a free API it will be available on any platform that wishes to adopt it. Google has recently confirmed Vulkan support in the new versions of Android, and other platforms that will also support Vulkan include*Windows and Linux, especially Steam OS (Vulkan seems to be Valve’s secret weapon).

We don’t have definitive dates for the release of Vulkan, or for its integration with Android, but Kronos is still planning to release it later this year.

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Ask a gamer what they think of downloadable content (DLC) these days, and you’re as likely to hear a torrent of blistering language as anything positive. The process of releasing content piecemeal over time has been extremely controversial in the gaming community. Publishers have embraced the concept despite the mixed reaction of gamers. It’s now common practice for AAA games to release several follow-up areas or adventures, and access to such is often sold as a “Season Pass.”



DLC, as often viewed by gamers

One of the most controversial aspects of DLC has been on-disc DLC that ships as part of the core game, but that players must pay a fee to unlock. Dragon Age: Origins was criticized for this when it launched in 2009 — as soon as you reached your camp, NPCs essentially attempted to sell you a DLC package from within the game itself. In a recent interview with GameSpot, EA executive Peter Moore declared that gamer hostility to DLC was “nonsense,” and caused by a fundamental misunderstanding of how game development works. When asked how EA reconciles the tension between gamers who generally dislike DLC and publishers that increasingly depend on it for revenue, Moore responded “Well a lot of that resistance comes from the erroneous belief that somehow companies will ship a game incomplete, and then try to sell you stuff they have already made and held back. Nonsense.”
That answer might seem dismissive, but there’s quite a bit of truth to it.

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Ever since Microsoft announced DirectX 12, gamers have clamored for hard facts on how the new API would impact gaming. Unfortunately, hard data on this topic has been difficult to come by — until now. Oxide Games has released an early version of its upcoming RTS game Ashes of the Singularity, and allowed the press to do some independent tire-kicking.

Before we dive into the test results, let’s talk a bit about the game itself. Ashes is an RTS title powered by Oxide’s Nitrous game engine. The game’s look and feel somewhat resemble Total Annihilation, with large numbers of on-screen units simultaneously, and heavy action between ground and flying units. The game has been in development for several years, and it’s the debut title for the new Noxious engine.



An RTS game is theoretically a great way to debut an API like DirectX 12. On-screen slowdowns when the action gets heavy have often plagued previous titles, and freeing up more CPU threads to attend to the rendering pipeline should be a boon for all involved.

Bear in mind, however, that this is a preview of DX12 performance — we’re examining a single title that’s still in pre-beta condition, though Oxide tells us that it’s been working very hard with both AMD and Nvidia to develop drivers that support the game effectively and ensure the rendering performance in this early test is representative of what DirectX 12 can deliver.

Nvidia really doesn’t think much of this game

Nvidia pulled no punches when it came to its opinion of Ashes of the Singularity. According to the official Nvidia Reviewer’s Guide, the benchmark is primarily useful for ascertaining if your own hardware will play the game. The company also states: “We do not believe it is a good indicator of overall DirectX 12 performance.” (emphasis original). Nvidia also told reviewers that MSAA performance was buggy in Ashes, and that MSAA should be disabled by reviewers when benchmarking the title.


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Two new bits of information have surfaced regarding Windows 10 and its various DRM and phone-home strategies. First, there’s news that looks great at first glance — Windows 10 no longer supports the much-hated SecuROM and SafeDisc. The downside of this news is that Windows 10 can no longer play those titles if the DRM hasn’t been patched out by the original developer.
This revelation comes from Microsoft’s Enthusiast Marketing Manager for Windows, Boris Schneider-John, who told German publication Rocket Beans the following:

“Everything that ran in Windows 7 should also run in Windows 10. There are just two silly exceptions: antivirus software and stuff that’s deeply embedded into the system. And then there are old games on CD-ROM that have DRM. This DRM stuff is also deeply embedded in your system, and that’s where Windows 10 says ‘sorry, we cannot allow that,’ because that would be a possible loophole for computer viruses.

That’s why there are a couple of games from 2003-2008 with SecuROM, etc. that simply don’t run without a no-CD patch or some such. We can just not support that if it’s a possible danger for our users. There are a couple of patches from developers already, and there is stuff like GOG where you’ll find versions of those games that work.”

Mixed blessings

On the one hand, good on Microsoft for patching potentially dangerous loopholes in system security. While these programs weren’t actually rootkits, they embedded themselves in a manner similar to rootkits, and existed at a very low level within the system itself. Security researchers, as a result, are anything but fans of the technology. Gamers uniformly loathed them, as illustrated by this Penny Arcade comic.



No more of this? Hurrah! But can we get backwards compatibility?

On the other hand, however, this means a number of games, some released quite recently, will no longer work without new patches or game cracks. While SafeDisc hasn’t been used for several years, a number of games shipped with SecuROM, including titles like Fallout 3, Dragon Age II (EA attempted to camouflage this by calling it Sony Release Control), Oblivion, BioShock, the released version of Final Fantasy for PC in 2012, and dozens more over the years.

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Over the last year, Nvidia has slowly and steadily introduced a new line of GPUs to replace its aging Kepler family. The latest entry in the GTX 900 series, the GTX 950, is based on the same GM 206 GPU as the GTX 960, but drops a few CUDA cores and some texture mapping units to hit its new targets. The GTX 950 contains two graphics processing clusters (GPCs), 768 cores, 48 texture units, and 32 ROPS. That’s cut back a fair ways from the GTX 960, at 1024 cores, 64 TMUs, and the same 32 ROPs, but it should offer significantly improved performance over both the GTX 750 Ti and the GTX 650 Ti.

Zotac’s GTX 950

The GTX 950 also doubles up on memory (2GB instead of 1GB) and offers 6.6GHz of 128-bit bandwidth. Both the 750 Ti and 650 Ti had just 5.4GHz of GDDR5 bandwidth, though the 750 Ti wowed us back then with its impressive memory bandwidth efficiency and overall performance, even if the card wasn’t an overall performance winner against AMD’s hardware. This time around, the GTX 950 has a better hand to deal, and AMD ends up rocked on its heels.

Because Nvidia decided to launch in the middle of IDF, most publications haven’t had time yet to look at the card itself. One exception is Guru3D, which has put together a fairly comprehensive evaluation of the GTX 950, 960, and AMD’s lower-end products. They also catalog the performance difference between OEM specialty cards, which typically retail for more money ($169 – $179, compared to a base price of $159) and the vanilla-flavored GTX 950.

Unfortunately, AMD is fighting relatively new Maxwell hardware with GCN-based GPUs that are much older. AMD’s $149 GPU, the R7 370, does include a 4GB RAM buffer, but its performance can’t quite match the GTX 950. The graph excerpt below shows performance in a common title we also test, BioShock Infinite.


This kind of discrepancy typifies the comparison, though the exact figures can vary from title to title. At best, the R7 370 is always a few frames behind the GTX 950, even if you only compare the default GTX 950 and not the Asus or Palit cards. While it’s true that the R7 370 is also slightly cheaper than Nvidia’s card, the $10 price difference probably isn’t enough to balance the scales.

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