Game Tech News

GOG (formerly Good Old Games) launched back in 2008 as a one-stop shop for older titles without any DRM restrictions. Over the past few years, the service has transformed into a would-be Steam competitor. The GOG Galaxy service went into beta last year as a combined store, social media hub, and software delivery service, but with the same focus on delivering games sans DRM. Steam dominates the world of PC digital distribution, but GOG just introduced a unique feature that could endear it to modders and players alike — the ability to forego patches and updates.

Steam, Origin, and uPlay all offer ways to prevent games from updating, either by disconnecting your entire account from the Internet (assuming a game doesn’t require its own validation) or by choosing, title-by-title, not to update the game when an update is available. None of these services, however, actually offer an option to roll back to an earlier version of the game. Backing up a game in Steam doesn’t bestow this capability, either — if you make a copy of your files and later attempt to restore them, you’ll be prompted to verify the installation online and the game won’t launch until it has finished updating the original backed up version.


The GoG client

“We know that patches can occasionally break a game or affect your mods,” Piotr Karwowski, GOG’s vice president of online tech, said in a statement. “With the newest update to GOG Galaxy, we’re giving our users more control over their games and patches, but also addressing many of the top requests from our community.”

Other improvements to the still-beta service include a streamlined navigation system, better performance, support for high-resolution displays, the ability to pause and resume installations, and the aforementioned “Rollback” feature. GOG doesn’t mention if taking this option consumes additional hard drive space, but it could — GOG may copy files locally to speed the recovery process. Alternately, the game service could track updated files and re-download only the initial versions to restore a title to full functionality.


The new, 1.1 client feature list

It’s not clear how this new capability would play with some of the updates we’ve seen from time to time on other services. About a year ago, Rockstar courted controversy when it updated the Steam version of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to remove 17 songs that had previously been licensed for the game. While the company likely did this due to an expired license agreement, consumers were angry that versions of the game they purchased months or years before had content unceremoniou sly stripped out. In theory, GOG’s new patch-dodging feature would block such maneuvers by Rockstar for gamers who chose to keep the song libraries that shipped with the title. Then again, some companies might not be willing to work with the service without being able to control customer access to such content.


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It’s no secret that the PS4 and Xbox One haven’t seen very many solid 60fps releases. While slower-paced games work fine at 30fps, competitive first person shooters like Call of Duty really benefit from a smooth 60fps experience. So, has Treyarch been able to achieve a solid 60fps for Black Ops III? For the most part, the answer is yes. Unfortunately, there are a few slight issues to consider before picking this game up at launch.

Earlier this month, the Black Ops III multiplayer beta went live on the PS4, and the results have been fairly solid. I spent about 45 minutes playing around with it, and the performance was fine. While I was handily murdered by genre devotees, I didn’t run into any notable technical issues.

Over at Digital Foundry, you can see exactly how the frame rate holds up under pressure. By and large, the game stays at 60fps, but it does drop here and there. When numerous large-scale events happen simultaneously, the frame rate will occasionally drop to 50fps. However, that’s a relatively rare occurrence, and the frame rate bounces back to 60fps very quickly.

Additionally, screen tearing is a little bit of a problem. When the engine can’t quite keep up, you’ll see some screen tearing at the top of the image. While it’s mildly disappointing that it doesn’t deliver a rock-solid locked 60fps experience from top to bottom, none of these issues should have a significant impact on how the game is played.

While the traditional competitive multiplayer seems fine, Digital Foundry seems more worried about the*four-player campaign co-op mode. The early footage we’ve seen of it ranges wildly from 30fps to 50fps, but Treyarch’s Mark Lamia claims that the existing footage is from a pre-alpha build, and it wasn’t given the full optimization treatment.



As it stands, it’s important to keep in mind that this is just a peek at a portion of the total product. The final game won’t be hitting shelves until November 6th, so there is still time to make performance improvements. And given the state of the gaming industry, a post-release performance patch isn’t out of the question.

As for the Xbox One and PC versions of the game, we still don’t know exactly what to expect. Since Sony signed a deal with Activision, we won’t be able to see the beta running on other platforms until tomorrow. While numerous recent PC releases have been something of a mess, Call of Duty has a long history on the PC. I don’t anticipate any serious issues, but only time will tell.
While the PS4 has had 1080p Call of Duty releases (almost) from the get-go, the Xbox One hasn’t been so lucky. Ghosts was stuck at 720p, and last year’s Advanced Warfare ran at the strange resolution of 1360×1080. While we can probably expect a similar frame rate on the Xbox One, the final resolution remains up in the air.


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Every time a major game launches, there’s a rush to compare performance and specs between PCs and consoles. In the case of Grand Theft Auto V, those comparisons came out solidly in the PC’s favor. While the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game are still gorgeous, the PC version offers higher detail levels, better foliage, and options like 16x anisotropic filtering (the two consoles only use 4x). Modders, however, are rarely satisfied with “best in class,” and a new mod project for GTA V shows just how gorgeous the game can be with a little more work.

The new Toddyhancer mod, by Martin Bergman, is still very much a work-in-progress. Bergman, amusingly, recommends that players “not go crazy,” noting that “Its just Reshade Shaders, ENB series, simple tweaks and some tonemapping with class!”As with all mods, fine-tuning details can take a significant amount of time. The video below illustrates some gorgeous detail levels and stylistic shots, but also may have lighting issues — it’s a bit dark overall. Other screen shots are a bit dark as well, though users have noted that many of them appear to have been taken at night.

Other screenshots of Bergman’s work on Toddymancer as well as other mods are available on his FB page, where he notes that a test will be released when he feels ready, and that the mod likely won’t be compatible with GTA V Online. Rockstar has taken a hard line with modding where online use is concerned, and the company isn’t afraid to drop the hammer. In some cases, users have lost access to all Rockstar games as a result of account suspensions, not just GTA V.







Bergman notes that the mod does come with a performance hit; his Asus ROG G751JY laptop takes a 10 FPS performance hit with it fully enabled. If your system is already stuttering in GTA V, mods like this may not improve your game much, even if you love the visuals.

Modding: The true strength of PC gaming

I’ve been a PC gamer since I was eight years old and text-based adventure games were a hot commodity. When I was a child, I lusted after a Nintendo that my parents refused to buy — in the 1980s, consoles were capable of a fluidity and speed that PC games never matched. Mario running and jumping smoothly on TV might not seem like much, but there were few equivalents on the PC side.

Over the decades, we’ve seen both platforms advanced by leaps and bounds. I still maintain that a keyboard and mouse are superior to any controller in existence, but that’s a peripheral issue rather than a core strength of either platform. Thanks to the magic of USB, you can use game controllers for PC titles if you have a mind to. What sets PC gaming apart isn’t graphics, or keyboards, or even game types — it’s modding.


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When AMD announced the Fury family of GPUs at E3 back in June, it promised that its new graphics hardware would ship in multiple high-end flavors. We’ve already covered the launch of the water-cooled, 7.5-inch Fury X and the larger, air-cooled Fury, but today’s announcement covers what was arguably the most interesting card of all — the six-inch Radeon R9 Nano. (The GPU was initially referred to as the AMD Radeon R9 Fury Nano, but AMD’s marketing folks realized that’s a bit of a mouthful).


It’s very small

AMD has set a high bar for the Nano, with some aggressive performance claims and a tight power envelope. Now that the company is formally revealing the card, let’s take a look at its specs and capabilities.

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When Ashes of the Singularity launched two weeks ago, it gave us our first view of DirectX 12’s performance in a real game. What was meant to be a straightforward performance preview was disrupted by a PR salvo from Nvidia attempting to discredit the game and its performance results. Oxide Games refuted Nvidia’s statements about the state of Ashes, but the events raised questions about the state of Nvidia’s DX12 drivers and whether its GPUs were as strong in DirectX 12 as they have been in DirectX 11. (Oxide itself attributed these differences to driver maturity, not any fundamental quality of either GPU family). Now, an unnamed Oxide employee has released some additional information on both the state of Ashes and the reason why AMD’s performance is so strong.



AMD’s R9 Fury X tied the GTX 980 Ti in DX12, though NV swept DX11 by a large margin.


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Hideo Kojima’s magnum opus, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, is out today on the PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360, and PC. In spite of all of the Konami drama over the last year, MGSV is no worse for wear. In fact, it’s received nigh-on universal praise for both its ambition and gameplay execution. But how do the graphics hold up?

First thing’s first: the resolution is different across the board. The last-gen consoles are rendering the game at roughly 992×720, the Xbox One is running at 1600×900, the PS4 at 1920×1080, and the PC version can deliver 4K if you have the gear to handle it. While it’s slightly disappointing that the Xbox One still can’t hit 1080p, this is a substantial boost from last year’s 720p release of Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes on Microsoft’s console.

Over at Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry, you can see a full breakdown of all of the console versions. Sadly, the PC version will have to wait a bit, but expectations are definitely high after a solid showing with Ground Zeroes. Thankfully, both of the current-gen consoles are capable of delivering a nearly perfect 60 frames per second. There are occasional dips on both platforms, but it’s pretty rare. I’ve spent about three hours with the PS4 version already, and it’s been silky smooth from top to bottom. Gameplay is absolutely unhampered here.

The PS4 offers better texture filtering than the Xbox One, but the difference is trivial. Pop-in is extremely mild on the newer consoles, and you probably won’t even notice it. However, one thing stands out as particularly puzzling. Subsurface scattering, an effect designed to make skin look slightly more realistic, seems to be missing completely from the Xbox One version. That effect was present on the Ground Zeroes release for the Xbox One, and it isn’t even particularly taxing on the hardware. Digital Foundry is so confused by this omission, the team posits that it might actually be a bug that can be patched down the road.

Unsurprisingly, the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game don’t hold up quite so well. The target frame rate is halved to 30 frames per second, but neither the PS3 or 360 can keep it pegged. The PS3 seems to be running at a slightly worse frame rate over all, but neither one is very good. There’s substantially more pop-in, and the textures are clearly blurrier on the old consoles.

However, it’s still impressive that the entire game is running on these ancient machines. The unstable frame rate will make lining up shots during frantic moments a bit harder, but it’s nice that those among us still clinging to the last-gen consoles still get to enjoy what seems to be the last “real” Metal Gear game.

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As the PS4’s second anniversary draws closer, Sony is working hard on the third major iteration on its BSD-based operating system. With improved cloud storage, better social features, and the addition of YouTube live streaming, this update won’t be revolutionary, but hopefully it’ll make the day-to-day operation of the PS4 significantly less of a hassle.

Last October, Sony released firmware 2.0 to the world. It brought Share Play, music playback, and themes to the popular game console. Back in March of this year, firmware 2.5 gave us higher quality Remote Play streams and the ability to suspend/resume gameplay at will. Firmware 3.0, dubbed “Kenshin,” is set to deliver a similar level of improvement this time around.



By far, the biggest impact here is how Sony will be handling cloud saves for PlayStation Plus subscribers. Instead of the measly 1GB of cloud storage space we’ve been stuck with, 10GB is the new standard. Considering that my save data for Dragon Age: Inquisition alone is 300MB, this is a godsend. As it stands, I hit the 1GB cap on the regular, and I’m forced to manually delete items if I want to upload a new save file. Even better, firmware 3.0 will offer better tools for monitoring how much cloud storage you’re using, and altering which titles will attempt to automatically upload new saves.

Now that Google is taking the gaming market seriously, Sony is adding in the ability to live stream to YouTube from your PS4. Of course, you’ll still be able to stream to Ustream and Twitch, so diehards of those services won’t be negatively impacted. While this is certainly a smart move, I’d also like to see Sony add support for smaller platforms like Hitbox.

Historically, Sony hasn’t had a particularly strong grip on the social aspects of online gaming. With Kenshin, the PlayStation team is attempting to address some of the more frustrating elements of communicating and playing online. “Favorite groups” will offer easy access to your favorite PSN friends, so you won’t have to scroll through your entire friends list to find them. If you’re in need of new online friends to play with, the new “communities” feature will help you connect with new people. And if you can’t be bothered to communicate with your voice, or even the written word, you’ll now be able to send stickers back and forth.

Firmware 3.0 has a few other nice touches, but they’re relatively minor. You’ll be able to send up to 10 seconds of gameplay footage directly to Twitter, and you can now badger your friends to start live streaming with the new “request to watch” feature. The “what’s new” and “live from Playstation” features are getting a fresh coat of paint, but there’s nothing here to get excited about — just some quality of life improvements here and there.

The closed beta began earlier this week, but Sony has remained silent regarding the public release date. However, it’s safe to assume that we’ll see this update hit later this year unless the beta testers find a catastrophic showstopper.

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Ever since DirectX 12 was announced, AMD and Nvidia have jockeyed for position regarding which of them would offer better support for the new API and its various features. One capability that AMD has talked up extensively is GCN’s support for asynchronous compute. Asynchronous compute allows all GPUs based on AMD’s GCN architecture to perform graphics and compute workloads simultaneously. Last week, an Oxide Games employee reported that contrary to general belief, Nvidia hardware couldn’t perform asynchronous computing and that the performance impact of attempting to do so was disastrous on the company’s hardware.

This announcement kicked off a flurry of research into what Nvidia hardware did and did not support, as well as anecdotal claims that people would (or already did) return their GTX 980 Ti’s based on Ashes of the Singularity performance. We’ve spent the last few days in conversation with various sources working on the problem, including Mahigan and CrazyElf at Overclock.net, as well as parsing through various data sets and performance reports. Nvidia has not responded to our request for clarification as of yet, but here’s the situation as we currently understand it.

Nvidia, AMD, and asynchronous compute

When AMD and Nvidia talk about supporting asynchronous compute, they aren’t talking about the same hardware capability. The Asynchronous Command Engines in AMD’s GPUs (between 2-8 depending on which card you own) are capable of executing new workloads at latencies as low as a single cycle. A high-end AMD card has eight ACEs and each ACE has eight queues. Maxwell, in contrast, has two pipelines, one of which is a high-priority graphics pipeline. The other has a a queue depth of 31 — but Nvidia can’t switch contexts anywhere near as quickly as AMD can.



According to a talk given at GDC 2015, there are restrictions on Nvidia’s preeemption capabilities. Additional text below the slide explains that “the GPU can only switch contexts at draw call boundaries” and “On future GPUs, we’re working to enable finer-grained preemption, but that’s still a long way off.” To explore the various capabilities of Maxwell and GCN, users at Beyond3D and Overclock.net have used an asynchronous compute tests that evaluated the capability on both AMD and Nvidia hardware. The benchmark has been revised multiple times over the week, so early results aren’t comparable to the data we’ve seen in later runs.

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Two major pieces of AMD news have crossed the wire today, and both could be good news for the struggling chip company. First, AMD is announcing a major reorganization of its graphics division. The entire graphics team will now be headed by Raja Koduri, including all aspects of GPU architecture, hardware design, driver deployments, and developer relations. Koduri left AMD for Apple in 2009, only to return to the company in 2013. Since then, he’s served as the Corporate Vice President of Visual Computing.

Now, Raja is being promoted to senior vice president and chief architect of AMD’s entire graphics business (dubbed the Radeon Technologies Group). In this new role, Koduri will oversee the development of future console hardware, AMD’s FirePro division, the GPU side of APUs, and all of AMD’s graphics designs on 14/16nm. Bringing all of these elements under one roof, along with developer relations and driver development, will allow AMD to unify its approach to various products that have previously been managed by different departments. This could pay significant dividends in areas like driver management and feature updates, which have previously been handled by other teams that reported to different managers. Koduri is well-respected in the industry and we’ve heard that the R9 Nano, which debuts in the very near future, was a project he championed at AMD.

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At E3 this past summer, AMD announced four new GPUs that would make up its next-generation product family: The Radeon Fury X, the Fury, the Fury Nano, and the as-yet-unreleased dual-GPU Fury. We’ve covered each launch in turn, but the R9 Nano (AMD opted to shorten the name) is arguably the pinnacle of the entire Fury family. While it’s not expected to match the Radeon Fury X’s performance, it’s even shorter than the Fury X’s 7.5 inches. At just six inches, the Nano is exactly the same size as a PCIe x16 slot. Any shorter, and AMD would’ve had to compromise on bus bandwidth.



The Radeon Nano

In person, the card is every bit as impressive as it looks in pictures. At six inches long, it’s actually shorter than the first 3D accelerator I ever bought, the Diamond Monster II. GPUs have gotten larger and smaller over the years, but I don’t ever recall AMD or Nvidia fielding a GPU this small at the high end of the product stack. This opens up all manner of interesting system possibilities for mini-ITX or small form factor enthusiasts, and that’s the audience that AMD wants to target with this card.



The Radeon Nano in a mini-ITX system.

One note: We don’t currently have data to share on how the Nano performs specifically in a mini-ITX configuration. The chassis that we ordered for the review shipped late and missed its plane. As a result, our Coolermaster Elite 110 is currently sitting in Newark, NJ. For now, we’ve decided to review the card against both the GTX 970 Mini and its full-size cousins and competitors from AMD and Nvidia in a full-size ATX chassis. AMD may have a different market in mind for this GPU, but there’s no reason it can’t be used in a full-size chassis — and users interested in purchasing one may want to know its performance characteristics in different thermal environments.

A tiny GPU with a steep hill to climb

The Nano is the smallest high-end GPU we’ve ever tested and the card’s cooler and heatsink are clearly high-class, but the price gap between the R9 Nano and its closest competitor is nothing to sneeze at. The GTX 970 Mini is a $355 GPU, going up against a $649 Nano. That’s a high bar to clear, and if you’re looking to the Nano to justify it strictly on performance grounds, you’re going to be disappointed. The Nano is more complicated than that, for reasons we’re going to be discussing.


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