Game Tech News

Earlier today, Apple unveiled the new Apple TV at its big September event. With faster internals, a new operating system, and the availability of third-party apps, this is a big step forward for Apple in the living room. There’s a ton of potential for consumers and developers alike. But it’s never going to be the game console you really want.

Built with a custom Apple A8 system-on-a-chip, 802.11b/g/n/ac WiFi support, Bluetooth 4.0, 1080p video output, and Dolby Digital 7.1 audio output, this $149 device is significantly more versatile than the previous Apple TV model. And now that it finally supports native third-party applications via a dedicated app store, this set-top box is going to deliver a lot more than just streaming video.



The primary way in which you’ll be interacting with the new Apple TV is the “Siri Remote.” With a built-in touchpad and microphone, this tiny new controller is a lot more capable than the old D-pad style remote. Swipe through menus, ask Siri for recommendations, and start watching whatever tickles your fancy. Even though we’ve seen similar functionality in other devices, this seems like an incredibly slick solution that will resonate with the average consumer.

Personally, I’m excited to see what this does for the set-top box market. I use numerous devices to stream video (including the existing Apple TV), and a large influx of custom apps could make my television-watching experience even better. However, I know for sure that this will never offer the gaming experience I’m looking for.

First and foremost, the hardware in this 3.9-inch device simply doesn’t pack the same horsepower as a real gaming console. Considering that the $400 consoles on the market already have a hard time reaching 1080p60, imagine how poorly a major modern console game like The Witcher 3 or Metal Gear Solid V would run on this tiny little box. And since the premium $199 model only has 64GB of storage, there’s no hope for large-scale games on this platform. There’s nothing keeping game streaming solutions like PlayStation Now from coming to the Apple TV, but that’s a completely different conversation.

Second, it doesn’t ship with a real controller. Sure, you can use the Siri Remote or your iPhone to control casual games like Crossy Road, but traditional “core games” need thumb sticks and numerous buttons. Games like Fibbage or Tiny Wings work perfectly using a phone as a controller, but you’ll have a terrible experience with the likes of a first person shooter. Even though third-party Bluetooth controllers are an inevitability, only a tiny fraction of Apple TV owners will have those niche gamepads.
Third and finally, Apple just doesn’t care enough about gaming to take on the existing players. Sure, they’ll continue to pay lip service to game developers, but we’ll end up with more Candy Crush or Clash of Clans — not something the enthusiest crowd will care about. In the end, the Apple TV simply isn’t competing directly against the PS4 and Xbox One. It’s a console that can play some games — not a gaming console.

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Nvidia has announced a replacement program for its Shield Pro console, though the company claims only a tiny fraction of the shipped devices are actually affected. According to the company, this recall only affects Shield Pro users who bought the 500GB version of the console, not standard users with the 16GB flavor. According to Nvidia, devices that need to be replaced are those which exhibit the following characteristics (screenshot from Nvidia’s GeForce forum):



Nvidia hasn’t given any further information on what caused the issue, but has promised to replace the defective units for customers, or to work with them to secure RMAs through other retailers where it is able to do so. The company claims that less-than 1% of all units have been impacted, but also notes that the issue can “worsen over time.” If you’re seeing issues with graphical corruption or unusual pauses today, in other words, you’d best deal with the problem now before things get worse.
The timing on this particular recall is a bit awkward, given that NV prominently called out the Apple TV in a recent blog post. aggressively positioning Shield as the best all-in-one microconsole and dismissing the Apple TV as only good for people who play “Crossyroad” [sic]. (This appears to be a misspelled reference to the mobile game “Crossy Road,” which debuted for iOS late last year).




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Earlier this week, we reported on rumors that AMD’s Zen might have slipped into Q4 2016. Since then, we’ve heard the chip could actually launch in the Q1 2017 timeframe — and now, there’s further reason to think that something happened to AMD’s next-generation CPU timetable. Now, it’s been reported that Jim Keller, who returned to AMD to helm its new CPU after a stint with Apple, has left the company to “pursue other opportunities.”

Keller wasn’t just responsible for the Zen CPU architecture; he was also leading the team that designed AMD’s still-upcoming ARM-based K12 CPU, which isn’t expected to launch until 2017. AMD sought to downplay the impact of this announcement and told Hexus.net that “Jim’s departure is not expected to impact our public product or technology roadmaps, and we remain on track for “Zen” sampling in 2016 with first full year of revenue in 2017.” Mark Papermaster will now step in and head Keller’s team.

An uncertain impact

The knee-jerk way to read this announcement is that Jim Keller was fired because Zen is coming in 6-7 months late. That’s entirely possible, and it wouldn’t be the first time an AMD executive left to pursue “other opportunities” for reasons that only became clear months after they were gone. Dirk Meyer’s departure as CEO didn’t make much sense at the time, and it was widely reported that he was forced out over disagreements related to the tablet and mobile markets. Later, once Bulldozer had hit store shelves, it became clear that tablets and mobile products hadn’t been the only problem.



AMD’s Zen CPU

When you consider the differences between the AMD that Keller came back to in 2012 and the AMD he left in 2015, there’s no shortage of factors that might have caused a break-up. In 2012, AMD was clearly planning to enter the ARM market and launch its own custom ARM core (and Keller’s most recent expertise was in ARM SoCs, not x86 processors). In 2015, the K12 and Cortex-A57 CPUs that Sunnyvale once championed scarcely warrant a mention.



Skybridge went from mission-critical to dust in less than a year

As recently as 2014, AMD had a public roadmap for a common socket platform between x86 and ARM cores that would bridge the two, with an HSA-enabled version of the Jaguar architecture that might have helped plug the holes in AMD’s roadmap between now and Zen’s launch in 2017. By 2015, those plans had been canceled. The recent graphics reorganization and rumors of substantial private equity investments could be further indications that AMD’s new focus isn’t what Keller signed on to shepherd, and that he’s decided to pursue other opportunities without it being evidence of a substantial problem in AMD’s product pipeline.

One thing we’ve heard from multiple knowledgeable sources is that Zen is finalized. We don’t know if the architecture has taped out or not, but at least the vast majority of the work is already complete. I’m reminded of a quote attributed to Robert Palmer, the ex-CEO of Digital. “Designing microprocessors is like playing Russian roulette. You put a gun to your head, pull the trigger, and find out four years later if you blew your brains out.”
Keller’s departure will not be well-received. Here’s hoping it had more to do with differences over the company’s focus as opposed to Zen itself. AMD is out of time for putting its own house in order.


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Earlier this month, we covered Asus’ insane water-cooled laptop and the appearance of a new Nvidia GPU that looked for all the world like a GTX 980 desktop chip in a mobile form factor. Today, Nvidia is taking the lid off that particular project — and it’s even crazier than we thought it was. Putting a GTX 980 in a notebook chassis is a bit nuts, even if these systems are only portable in the same way that a five-gallon bucket is portable.

The handful of laptops now shipping with full-size GTX 980 graphics cards in them will allow those cards to be overclocked, opening up still more performance alongside the unlocked Intel Skylake-K chips that Chipzilla is now shipping in mobile as well. None of the specs are skimped on — the GPU’s core clock is 1126MHz base, identical to the standard desktop, while its GDDR5 memory bus is clocked at an effective 7Gbps. Max clock frequencies could supposedly hit an additional 200MHz, though that’s going to depend a great deal on the cooling solution of the system.



Other features coming to these new systems include variable fan controls, 17-inch 1080p panels, and 4-8 phase power supplies with higher peak currents. The end result should be some truly amazing notebooks from the likes of Asus, MSI, and Clevo. MSI even intends to introduce an SLI version of the laptop with an 18.4-inch screen.

Of notebooks and cooling

It’s worth pausing for a moment and considering the throttling situation in modern notebooks. If you’ve never owned a high-end boutique laptop or had occasion to test one, it’s easy to think that these are the systems you buy when you want maximum performance with minimal-to-zero throttling. You might think that — but in many cases, you’d be wrong. While I haven’t reviewed every high-end laptop ever built, it’s been my observation that systems that can handle their own heat output are few and far between. Systems that can handle their heat output without either turning into banshee-possessed wind tunnels or melting whatever surface you happen to set them on are even rarer.



Asus’ upcoming water-cooled system

The problem many boutique builders face is that high-end consumers want the fastest-sounding processor without any regard for what will happen if you try to run that particular chip in a chassis for more than 60-120 seconds. Sure, a high-end CPU core may burst to 3.7GHz initially, but once the chip overheats, you’ll be back in 2.5GHz territory. These kinds of issues are why Intel’s lowest-end Core M processors were measured outperforming the highest-end Core M chips earlier this year.

When I say that boutique systems typically throttle, I don’t mean that they throttle in Prime95 + FurMark when left sitting on a bed for an hour. I mean they tend to throttle within minutes to a greater or lesser degree. Not every laptop has this problem (I’ve been very pleased with the performance of Asus’ recent offerings), but many do, including those from major brands. It’s caused by a boutique manufacturer being willing to slam their foot down on the gas pedal, even when doing so will harm the customer’s experience.

That doesn’t mean that vendors like MSI, Asus, and Alienware can’t build great gaming laptops, even with this hardware — but I’d definitely read reviews, when they eventually appear, with a careful eye.

One final note: This GPU is apparently being called the GTX 980 for mobile as opposed to the GTX 980M, or any kind of Titan branding, as we originally theorized. If you go looking for it, make sure you pick the appropriate GPU. We reached out to Nvidia, who told us that this GTX 980 mobile card will also allow for higher operating temperatures then what we’ve seen with mobile GPUs in the past — presumably that means 90-95C as opposed to the 70C that most mobile GPUs seem to target.

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As VR headsets like the Oculus Rift move closer to production, we’ve started to see more software showcasing what the format can achieve. In some cases, that’s been courtesy of expensive tech demos from existing studios — but sometimes, it’s dedicated fans that produce their own impressive work. A recent tour of Star Trek’s Enterprise-D is making the rounds, courtesy of Unreal Engine 4 and, in the future, the Oculus Rift.

The goal of the project, according to the author, is to “Place you on board the ship. Walk the corridors. Explore the unseen rooms and communal areas. Hear the engines. See the screens. Fly the shuttlecraft. Exist as a member of the crew.” As the 12-minute YouTube demo makes clear, this is no idle boast — the tech demo takes you from landing in the main shuttlebay on a tour of multiple areas of the saucer section, including a theorized “Two-Forward” lounge and the bridge itself.

If you ever wondered how some of the sets on the ship connected together, or, more pragmatically, where the actual bathrooms were, this tour answers it. There are no loading screens or other immersion-breaking issues, and while the current version of the project isn’t running on Oculus hardware yet, the author intends to bring the project to VR hardware as soon as its available. As he notes, “Previous virtual tours have not gone far enough. They usually are 360 degree panoramic, without actual movement or immersion.”



Work in progrses

Source material for the project include Rick Sternbach’s official blueprints, Ed Whitfire’s unofficial blueprints (these are, some apparently argue, more in line with some of Andrew Probst’s original designs), as well as some minor creative license on the part of the author to model things in-game that may have been inconsistently modeled or approached on-screen. That last isn’t uncommon — Ex Astris Scientia has a huge section on inconsistencies in Star Trek models and designs errata.



These are the voyages…

The long-term future of the probject could be complicated, since it’s not a licensed production and the appropriate legal powers that be haven’t agreed to allow this kind of creation. At the same time, however, Paramount has shown precious little interest in actually creating new licensed Star Trek TV shows or games that would actually revisit this space. Once upon a time, ST:TNG was a trailblazing franchise in digital entertainment — the Next Generation Technical Manual CD-ROM was an early CD-ROM title, and Star Trek: Borg made heavy use of then-popular FMV sequences. With the exception of some awful movie tie-in products, the last decent Star Trek video games are a decade old or more.

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As DirectX 12 and Windows 10 roll out across the PC ecosystem, the number of titles that support Microsoft’s new API is steadily growing. Last month, we previewed Ashes of the Singularity and its DirectX 12 performance; today we’re examining Microsoft’s Fable Legends. This upcoming title is expected to debut on both Windows PCs and the Xbox One and is built with Unreal Engine 4.

Like Ashes, Fable Legends is still very much a work-in-progress. Unlike Ashes of the Singularity, which can currently be bought and played, Microsoft chose to distribute a standalone benchmark for its first DirectX 12 title. The test has little in the way of configurable options and performs a series of flybys through complex environments. Each flyby highlights a different aspect of the game, including its day/night cycle, foliage and building rendering, and one impressively ugly troll. If Ashes of the Singularity gave us a peek at how DX12 would handle several dozen units and intense particle effects, Fable Legends looks more like a conventional first-person RPG or FPS.



There are other facets to Fable Legends that make this a particularly interesting match-up, even if it’s still very early in the DX12 development cycle. Unlike Ashes of the Singularity, which is distributed through Oxide, this is a test distributed directly by Microsoft. It uses the Unreal 4 engine — and Nvidia and Epic, Unreal’s developer, have a long history of close collaboration. Last year, Nvidia announced GameWorks support for UE4, and the UE3 engine was an early supporter of PhysX on both Ageia PPUs and later, Nvidia GeForce cards.

Test setup

We tested the GTX 980 Ti and Radeon Fury X in Windows 10 using the latest version of the operating system. Our testbed was an Asus X99-Deluxe motherboard with a Core i7-5960X, 16GB of DDR4-2667 memory. We tested an AMD-provided beta driver for the Fury X and with Nvidia’s latest WHQL-approved driver, 355.98. NVidia hasn’t released a beta Windows 10 driver since last April, and the company didn’t contact us to offer a specific driver for the Fable Legends debut.



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There were a number of important announcements at the Oculus Connect 2 conference this week. First, Samsung’s Gear VR is expected to be on store shelves by the end of November, with support for a wider number of Android handsets. The first version of the device was only compatible with the Galaxy Note 4, which naturally limited its appeal. This new flavor will go on sale for $99 (half the cost of the original) and will be compatible with the Note 5, S6, S6 Edge, and S6 Edge Plus. The strange thing — and I’m not kidding, I find this more than passingly odd — is that the Gear VR final version apparently isn’t compatible with the Note 4.

Now, granted, you could argue that Samsung already rewarded last year’s group of customers with the hardware they paid for, but Samsung is claiming that the final Gear VR is 22% lighter and much more comfortable to wear for extended periods. You’d think that the customers the company would want to support the most would be those that shucked out $200 for last year’s model, but apparently that’s not the case. Oculus is also bringing a new arcade experience to Gear VR, billed as a novel way to play classic arcade games in a more immersive environment. Hopefully this doesn’t involve pumping virtual quarters into slots, much less the $2-$3 per play that most arcades charged when I last visited.



If you’ve been trying to wrap your head around what kind of hardware you need for an Oculus-ready experience, meanwhile, the company has heard you and wants to make the entire buying experience less painful. Oculus is going to develop a new “Oculus ready” brand for inclusion on systems that meet a certain standard of quality. Exactly what this will look like is unclear, but everything we’ve seen suggests that the hardware will need to be quite powerful to deliver cutting-edge performance in VR. In traditional games, players can often tolerate frame rates in the 30-50 range without nausea, but low frame rates or erratic frame timing are both the kiss of death for VR — unless you like your virtual reality with a slice of very real-world nausea.

Finally, there’s Oculus Touch. We haven’t previously talked much about Oculus Touch (above), beyond a brief description of the initial demo earlier this summer. This system is designed to give users tactile feedback in VR environments; Gizmodo has published an incredibly positive hands-on review of the technology earlier this year. This is where the bad news comes in — while Oculus Rift is still expected to ship in early 2016, the Oculus Touch won’t be part of the system. The Rift is set to debut in Q1 2016, with Touch delayed until Q2 2016. As for hard launch dates for software or game conversions, information is still a bit fuzzy. Expect the VR space to take some time to really get kicking — there’s a lot of heavy lifting still to be accomplished.


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Earlier today, we covered how the PlayStation TV can be hacked to play Vita titles. Today, Sony executive Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, more-or-less confirmed that Sony was planning to exit the dedicated handheld business once the Vita reaches the end of its lifespan. When asked about the possibility of a follow-up to Sony’s PSV, Yoshida noted that mobile gaming has created a tough climate for handhelds and called the possibility of a successor a “tough question.”

Yoshida put blame on the general rise of smartphone gaming, the advent of free-to-play titles, and the fact that handhelds have different hardware control schemes that simply don’t translate well to modern touch-based smartphones, Eurogamer reports. Of these points, the last is definitely true — games that try to ape the functionality of a joystick or buttons by providing virtual touch-based interfaces are often difficult to control and reserving screen space for a joystick chews up valuable real estate.
There’s no doubt the advent of smartphones created a challenging environment for handheld gaming, but I’m not convinced iPhones and Android are entirely to blame. When Sony announced in June 2013 that the PlayStation Vita would have a new feature, Remote Play, that allowed it to stream games from the PS4, sales of the Vita began to spike ahead of the PS4 launch. As this chart from VGChartz illustrates, PSV sales exploded from October to December, 2013. The Vita has sold 12.26 million units since it launched — and moved nearly 15% of them in those three months.



Chart courtesy of VGChartz. Click to enlarge

Clearly, the problem wasn’t with the Vita hardware, which always held up well in comparison with the Nintendo DS. Nor was it an issue of an intrinsically limited market. If it was, Nintendo’s 3DS would never have broken the 50-million mark. While that’s just a fraction of the Nintendo DS, the DS was produced for a decade, while the 3DS is just 4.5 years old. It may never reach the DS’ sales volume, but it should have no trouble racking up another 10-20 million units over the course of its life.

There are multiple reasons why Sony’s Vita sits at 12 million units shipped as compared to 53 million for Nintendo that have nothing to do with mobile gaming. Remote Play was billed as a late-launching Vita feature, but it’s has always had asterisks attached to it. While it works, the Vita doesn’t have an identical set of inputs as the PS4, which means certain functions are emulated using the rear touch panels. Lag is also a common problem, unless you’re sitting on top of the PS4.

the problem isn’t just Remote Play’s lackluster implementation. From the beginning, Sony has gouged users for memory cards ($100 for a 32GB Vita-compatible card, instead of $18 for a standard model), offered lackluster ports, and published just a handful of titles relative to Nintendo. Nintendo published 35 of the top 50 games for the 3DS, as measured by total sales. Sony published just 13 of the top 50 Vita titles. The bestselling title for the Vita, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, moved 1.47 million copies worldwide — which puts it at 26th place on the 3DS chart.

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When Sony launched its PlayStation TV in the US last year, the device debuted to mixed recommendations and a puzzling lack of compatibility. While it’s fundamentally based on the same hardware as the PlayStation Vita, the PSTV can’t play many games that the Vita runs quite handily.

In some cases, this makes sense — the Vita has a microphone, camera, and gyroscope, all of which the PS TV lacks. In many other cases, however, there’s been no intrinsic reason why the Vita could play a game that the TV couldn’t. Both systems are based on an ARM Cortex-A9 quad-core, both have 512MB of RAM and 128MB VRAM, and both use a PowerVR SGX543MP4+ graphics card. Now, a modder has found a way to unlock a number of games for the PlayStation TV, removing some of these roadblocks.

The hack, provided by Hackinformer poster Mr.Gas, shows how it’s possible to exploit a loophole in the Vita’s email client to load a modified whitelist into the client and open up an entirely new set of games. Full step-by-step instructions are available on HackInformer, but the list of games that can be played successfully is likely to skyrocket with this new method — at least, until Sony updates the firmware and breaks this method of compatibility.




What’s less clear is why users are having to resort to this kind of method for loading games in the first place. Anyone who buys a PlayStation TV has either purchased game cartridges (which are compatible with either the PS TV or Vita) or has downloaded games over PlayStation Now. There’s no “lost sale,” here, in other words, and by keeping games off the platform Sony is only harming those who prefer to play Vita titles on the big screen, or who want some of the additional set-top functionality that the Vita TV offers, like Netflix support.

It’s entirely possible that the whitelist approach was implemented to mollify Sony’s*mobile team, which doesn’t want to acknowledge that the PlayStation Vita is moribund. VGChartz shows that the 3DS regularly outsells the Vita by 4x or more per month — and while an install base of 12 million devices isn’t terrible, it’s nowhere near Nintendo’s 50 million 3DS sales.
VitaReviews has published an exhaustive list of every current title now known to run on the PS TV, but some caveats are attached. Games that require motion controls won’t work. Games that require touch may or may not be emulated. Some games still don’t work, even with this exploit installed. You can’t connect to the PSN network, and it’s not clear if rebooting the device also requires you to apply the patch again.

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By all accounts, the PlayStation 4 has been a huge success. It’s selling extremely well, it regularly out performs the Xbox One, and it’s become the de facto standard for third-party releases (much like the PS2 or Xbox 360 in their heydays). Even so, it’s far from perfect. I’ve used the PS4 nearly every day since it launched in 2013, and familiarity has most definitely bred contempt.

Today, I’ll be highlighting 10 of the most frustrating faults with the PS4, and offering up solutions to fix the issues. And even though there’s going to be a lot of complaining here, this isn’t an indictment of the platform all together. After all, I wouldn’t be using it if I didn’t enjoy it. With that in mind, let’s jump in.



Increase cloud storage for everyone

For most of the PS4’s existence, the cloud save situation has been rough. PlayStation Plus subscribers got a gig of cloud storage, and those who don’t pony up for a subscription got nothing. Starting with system software 3.0, PS+ users will get 10GB of storage, but everyone else still gets nothing.

Going forward, Sony needs to loosen up, and stop being so stingy with the cloud storage space. Truth be told, I think a Dropbox or iCloud model would work well here. Non-paying members should get a gig or two, and paying members should effectively have unlimited save space on Sony’s servers. At this point, cloud storage is so cheap, it’s actually a little embarrassing that Sony is still so tight-fisted.



Allow everyone to update in rest mode

Under the current scheme, only PlayStation Plus subscribers can download app updates while the PS4 is in rest mode. That means if you’re unwilling to drop an additional 50 bucks a year for PS+, you’re stuck twiddling your thumbs while your games and apps update. It’s an absurd limitation.

PlayStation Plus offers online multiplayer, free games every month, and some really fantastic discounts. It’s a good service, and plenty of people are willing to buy in for those benefits. However, the rest mode updates are a simple quality of life feature built in at the OS level — it doesn’t use any significant resources on Sony’s end. I’m not opposed to all paywalls for premium features, but this specific paywall feels wrong in every way.



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