Game Tech News

As VR headsets like the Oculus Rift tip-toe towards launch day, we’re starting to hear more about the types of VR content you’ll actually be able to buy. Last week, CCP Games and Oculus jointly announced that the new headset would ship with a copy of Eve: Valkyrie. Now, Crytek has announced its own VR title: The Climb.

As the name implies, the point of The Climb is to climb mountains. Players will navigate a series of hand-and-footholds, either by using motion controllers or a gamepad. You aim at new ledges by looking at them — you can jump if you can’t reach a new area just by aiming. Despite the simple premise, Polygon’s review of the early code came back quite positive.
One thing Crytek’s developers are highlighting, even at this early stage, is that playing on VR is fundamentally different from playing on a PC.

“It’s been a bit of transformative experience having those restrictions placed on us,” he says. “VR also places a lot of restrictions on performance. CryEngine games are known for pushing the boundaries but not necessarily running great across all hardware. Here, we have to pull that in to guarantee a frame rate on a particular hardware set. It’s running at a perfect 90Hz on the target machines we’re working with.”



They really nailed the hand. I’ll let myself out.

According to Crytek, the game is running at a steady 90 FPS at a resolution of 2160×1200. While the pixel count of 2160×1200 is only slightly higher than 1920×1080, the higher frame rate and the absolute necessity of steady delivery make this a tougher challenge. As detailed on the Oculus Rift blog, video cards need to be able to push at least 233 million pixels per second for smooth Oculus gaming, as compared to 123 million pixels to play at 60Hz in 1920×1080. Of course, smooth frame rates are about more than raw frame rate, but the different figures still illustrates the gap. At the “default eye-target scale,” Oculus thinks you’ll need to be able to push at least 400 million pixels per second.
The Climb demo that’s shown below seems conceptually quite similar to the Back to Dinosaur Island 2 demo that I saw at AMD’s E3 event this past summer. In both cases, you’re a nameless climber using motion controllers or a gamepad to haul yourself up a sheer rock face. The primary difference is that Crytek has removed the extraneous bits of content to focus solely on building a top-notch climbing simulator.


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Microsoft has continued to roll out its new Xbox 360 emulation layer for the Xbox One, with support for another 16 games dropping today as an early Christmas present. The new titles contains some significant hits and a few duds, but it’s a solid expansion of the existing library.*We’ve added average Metacritic scores for each title. The list is as follows:
Braid (93)
Deus Ex: Human Revolution (89)
Doritos Crash Course (74)
Fable III (80)
Halo: Reach (91)
Hydro Thunder (75)
Iron Brigade (82)
Kane & Lynch 2 (63)
Motocross Madness (73)
MS.PAC-MAN (unrated)
Peggle (89)
Portal: Still Alive (90)
Spelunky (87)
Splosion Man (84)
Ticket to Ride (70)
Zuma’s Revenge! (76)

Remember: You still need to own any game you want to play through emulation, either by downloading it from the Xbox One’s digital marketplace, or by buying a physical copy. The Xbox One can read Xbox 360 discs, so there’s no problem with taking either approach.



Microsoft is still offering an Xbox One / Fallout 4 bundle with a free copy of Fallout 3 tossed in.

Reports on game performance have varied from title to title, but the emulation layer is capable of delivering impressive results. Digital Foundry tested Fallout 3 on the Xbox One and reported that “there’s actually a fairly compelling argument that Fallout 3 could be one of those rare titles that produces an improved experience on Xbox One. We noted a number of instances of the Xbox 360 version stuttering as we traversed the wasteland and roamed the town of Megaton, while in like-for-like situations, the Xbox One game seemed unaffected.”

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Two new announcements from the Team Green front as we head into the holidays. Nvidia’s 361.43 driver has just dropped, with two significant updates inside it, though only one will be of immediate benefit to customers. First, Nvidia has fixed the driver bug that caused abnormally high power consumption at high refresh rates when using Maxwell cards. This should prevent the issue we documented earlier this year where power consumption spiked at higher refresh rates.
Note: This issue was initially reported as affecting G-Sync monitors and we saw no sign of a problem with a 144KHz non-G-Sync display. Other readers, however, reported that they had problems and Nvidia’s bug report doesn’t mention G-Sync specifically. Regardless, this driver (Windows 10 / Windows 7/8/8.1) should solve the problem.

The other improvement looks farther down the road to OpenGL and VR support. Nvidia has introduced a custom OpenGL extension, “GL_NVX_linked_gpu_multicast,” that can accelerate HMD rendering and boost performance by up to 1.7x. The company states that Autodesk VRED Professional 2016 SR1-SP4 has already integrated the capability and explains the new extension as follows:

“With the driver in the new multicast mode, all OpenGL operations that are not related to the extension are broadcast to all GPUs in the SLI group. Allocations are mirrored, data uploads are broadcast, and rendering commands are executed on all GPUs. This means that without the use of the special functionality in the new multicast extension, all GPUs are executing the same work on the same data.”


SLI is important to VR because it allows the system to dedicate one GPU to each eye, rather than rendering right-left-right-left in quick succession. What this new Nvidia extension does is allow the system to upload the same scene to two different graphics cards simultaneously without incurring additional overhead.

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The Oculus Rift’s price is still unknown, but the company appears determined to keep its Q1 2016 release window. The VR developer announced that it has finalized its Oculus Rift SDK (Software Development Kit ) in version 1.0, and will be shipping the software to a handful of chosen developers. Not just anybody gets the new hardware — the launch will be limited to those devs who are “putting the final touches on launch titles.”

You can bet, therefore, that the fine folks behind Eve: Valkyrie will get one. Adrift was confirmed as a launch title a few months back, but there doesn’t seem to be a recent compilation of proposed launch games. A post from October 1 on TheRiftArcade lists Job Simulator, Nimbus Nights (RTS), Moon Strike (RTS), Surgeon Simulator (trailer for the original below), Dead and Buried (FPS), Final Approach, I Expect You To Die, (Puzzle game), Pulsar Arena (rhythm shooter), and Bullet Train (FPS).

We might see another title or two pop up on the list, and we don’t have independent confirmation that all these games are still scheduled for Q1 2016, but from what we’ve seen thus far, it’ll be Eve: Valkyrie that headlines the launch. Of course, there are plenty of titles planning to integrate Oculus support, including some games that have already shipped — we’ll have to wait and see how these efforts go, and whether or not they’re well-optimized. Squeezing VR support into already shipping titles could be tricky, since some of the motions and actions known to cause nausea in VR players may already be baked into a title.

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As the year comes to a close, our focus shifts to 2016. What games will we be playing this time next year? Will virtual reality and game streaming see astronomical success, or are we in for another year of major missteps? In a way, the last few years feel like they’ve been building to this moment.

The consoles have a solid install base new, long-awaited VR helmets are making their way into the hands of consumers, and we’re finally seeing new games instead of just sequels. The potential is exciting, but nerve-racking all the same. So let’s jump in, and examine exactly what the new year has in store for us.



Virtual reality

Back in 2012, a crazy little crowdfunded upstart called Oculus kicked off the modern VR gold rush. Nearly four years later, three big-name VR headsets are scheduled for release in the first half of 2016: the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and the PlayStation VR. For better or worse, next year will be the turning point for this generation.

Consumer-grade VR has been tried before, but the technology just wasn’t ready yet. After a series of flops, it took decades to convince companies to invest heavily in it again. Nobody is in a position right now to say if this current crop of hardware will be successful, but most folks in the game industry are hopeful that this will be the biggest step forward for the medium since the introduction of polygonal graphics.

We’re still not sure how much these headsets are going to cost, or even how many games they’ll support at launch. If consumer-focused VR stumbles out of the gate, this generation of hardware might fade even faster than the PlayStation Move and Kinect. Virtual reality seems like an inevitability, but it might take decades to recover if all we get next year is a series of failures.



Nintendo NX

Nintendo is in an odd place right now. The Wii U was a severe disappointment, the lumbering Japanese giant is just now dipping its toe into the app store, and the whole company is still reeling from the untimely death of Satoru Iwata earlier this year. With so much up in the air, it seems that 2016 will define where Nintendo sits in the modern landscape.

Over the last few weeks, numerous patents have surfaced showing a crazy new touchscreen controller and a scalable modular console. Nobody outside of Nintendo knows for sure exactly what the NX will look like, or how it will function, but the longest-running popular theory points towards a merger between handhelds and traditional consoles.

At this point, it’s unlikely that Nintendo is ever going to try to compete head-to-head with the likes of Sony, Microsoft, and Valve.
Quirky controllers and family friendly franchises make Nintendo what it is. And since the Wii and DS lines saw such success in the last decade, I find it hard to imagine a world in which Nintendo abandons the infamous blue ocean strategy.



Steam Machines

Unless there’s some sort of catastrophic financial event next year, Valve and its hardware partners will continue to work on further consolizing the PC market. Surely there will be some attempts at selling high-end machines running SteamOS, but it’s inevitable that the price will trend downwards. And as stick PCs start to gain traction, it seems likely that Valve will push for small, cheap machines that can play hundreds of smaller releases. And considering how well streaming tech has progressed, we might even see something along the lines of PlayStation Now.

As for AAA releases, it’s hard to imagine a future where SteamOS (and Linux in general) receives significant support. Sure, a few notable games like Street Fighter V are coming to SteamOS, but that’s not standard operating procedure. Based on the history of the industry, it’s safe to assume that AAA support for Linux and OS X will be half-hearted at best. But if you’re looking for a cheap way to play loads of indie titles, the future is looking bright for Steam Machines.



Gameplay streaming

Over the last two years, gameplay streaming has become surprisingly solid. With Remote Play on the PS4, local gameplay streaming on the Xbox One, and Steam Link for PC games, it’s never been easier to play your games wherever you are. In 2016, expect this trend to continue.

Just a few weeks ago, Sony confirmed that a Remote Play client is being developed for both Windows and OS X. And since it’s already up and running on select Sony smartphones, it’s not hard to imagine iOS and Android clients as well. If Sony crosses the line into those markets next year, it’s reasonable to expect Microsoft to do the same.

Obviously, nobody wants to try to play a console game with just a touchscreen, but pairing a Bluetooth controller to an iPad sounds pretty compelling. I occasionally use my Vita for PS4 Remote Play, but instead I usually end up using the PSTV in my bedroom simply because I can use a real controller. If I could use my iPad instead, I’d jump at the opportunity.



Game releases

Of course, none of this tech matters at all if we don’t have games to take advantage of it. 2015 was jam-packed with some outstanding releases, but 2016 is looking even better right now. Technological powerhouses like Uncharted 4, Gears of War 4, and Final Fantasy XV will undoubtedly wow us with production value, but there are a few other games lined up for next year that are much more intriguing than those well-worn franchises.

No Man’s Sky is taking procedural generation to the next level, and populating a galaxy with countless worlds that nobody has
ever seen before. Details are still worryingly slim on what the moment-to-moment gameplay will consist of, but hopes are incredibly high. And since it seems that the small team at Hello Games is getting some sort of financial backing from Sony, they might just be able to deliver on some of the hype.

As I mentioned above, 2016 is the year of VR. So, what titles can we expect to play on our fancy new headsets? Eve Valkyrie seems like a home run — the cockpit-centric gameplay plays to the strengths of the hardware. Rez Infinite made a great showing at PSX, but it loses some of its appeal without that expensive full-body vibrating suit. And if you’re into absurdity, No Goblin’s 100ft Robot Golf will be right up your alley.

The Witness, Horizon: Zero Dawn, ReCore, Tacoma, Quantum Break, Firewatch, and Hellblade. What do those games have in common? They’re all brand-new franchises. After sifting through dozens of sequels this year, I couldn’t be happier to see a completely new crop of games. There will assuredly be some disappointments in the bunch, but with so many new games on the schedule, there’s bound to be something that tickles your fancy in the new year.

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It’s been over 18 months since we first visited the topic of DirectX 12 and what features and benefits it would bring to modern gaming. Much has happened since. Windows 10‘s launch and the debut of Ashes of the Singularity brought the first hints of DirectX 12 gaming performance, as did Fable Legends, which debuted some weeks later. We’ve also covered the work being done on Vulkan, the open-source, Linux-friendly DX12 competitor (now not expected to debut until 2016), how that software might impact the future of Valve and the company’s push for its own SteamOS, and the debut of DirectX 12 on the Xbox One as well.

From debates over the importance of asynchronous computing to confusion over exactly which feature sets are and aren’t supporting on current hardware, DirectX 12 was one of the most important stories we covered in 2015. This story*will start you off on a discussion of its capabilities and advantages compared with DirectX 11, and if you want more nuance, feel free to consult the links above.

Enter DX12

Microsoft and Nvidia first took the lid of DirectX 12 at GDC 2014. The new API promised to deliver the same low-overhead benefits of AMD’s custom Mantle UI, along with vastly improved performance and superior hardware utilization compared with DirectX 11. Even better, DirectX 12 (and D3D 12) are backwards compatible with virtually every single GPU from the GTX 400 to the present day. At present, only Nvidia’s Kepler and Maxwell cards are DX12 compatible, but the company has promised that Fermi compatibility is coming in a future update.

Microsoft has published a blog post and accompanying API samples that illustrate how much more powerful the software is, while acknowledging some of the flaws in the DirectX 11 API. One of the central problems with DX11 is that it’s virtually impossible to multi-thread the 3D rendering path. Game rendering ends up running almost entirely on a single CPU thread, bogging down the rest of the system. DirectX 11 also makes certain assumptions about the underlying hardware that have proven to map poorly to GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia.

Here’s a threading comparison between DX11 (top) and DX12 (bottom):


See how, in DX11, the entire workload is hanging on a single thread with extremely low utilization on the other threads? That’s a problem — with the kernel-mode driver running on the same thread as the game and the D3D layer, there’s just not much for the other threads to do. The second graph shows how, by splitting the workload more evenly, the game can hit much lower latencies. Better latencies translates directly into higher frame rates.



3DMark – DX11



3DMark – DX12

This pair of screenshots from 3DMark 2012 further illustrate the difference. Total CPU time is dramatically reduced in DX12 by efficiently reallocating data across all cores.

OS and GPU support

DirectX 12 is currently supported on all Nvidia GPUs based on Kepler and Maxwell. That’s the vast majority of the 6xx series and all of the 7xx and 8xx graphics cards. Fermi support is coming soon, which will extend support all the way back to the 400 and 500-series as well.

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After years of impatiently waiting, the latest generation of virtual reality headsets are nearly here. Facebook alone has dumped over two billion dollars into the VR market, and countless developers are dedicating thousands of man-hours to make brand new titles for these shiny new platforms. This isn’t just a fun novelty anymore — it’s big business.

The stakes are huge, so everyone involved is scrambling to ensure that we don’t see a repeat of the 90s-era VR flops. Solid hardware and impressive games are vital, but those already seem to be in place for the launch window. To ensure widespread success, what these VR companies need are evangelists: People that can pound the pavement, and make sure the public is getting exposed to the highlights of modern virtual reality.


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Ever looked at your PC and thought: “Man, I wish this thing looked like a Star Destroyer, with integrated fiber optic lighting, a water-cooled GPU, and 3D printed detailing?” Enterprising custom PC builder Sander van der Velden, aka Asphiax, evidently did — and his new Venator-class Star Destroyer (dubbed the Yazi) is truly something to see.

The Yazi will be shown at CES this year, and while I haven’t been able to locate actual dimensions, it’s clear from photographs that this is no small mod. The frame and body are made from aluminum, while the greebles (the fine detail patterns added to the exterior to make the shape more visually interesting) are 3D printed. The ship contains more than 50 meters of fiber optic cabling, and the sides and bridges are wired to give the appearance of a functional spacecraft.



Here’s the hull, with greebles partially applied. The final version of the ship also includes the bow section, but it’s a purely cosmetic addition.



The hull, with greebles applied to both the dorsal plate as well as the sides.



Close-up of a greeble. In the original Star Wars movies, greebles were created by grabbing a variety of aircraft, tank, and spaceship models and borrowing parts from each of them. Nowadays, 3D rendering software can automatically generate and place greebles on 3D models without forcing the author to painstakingly create them piece by piece. 3D printing blends the two approaches and offers extraordinary levels of real-world detail with less painstaking, piece-by-piece assembly.



A vertical photo, looking down into the chassis. The GPU and motherboard can both be seen (the system requires a custom cooling loop, but Asphiax couldn’t mount it before shipping the hardware).



The cooling loop diagram. There’s a huge fan bank mounted at the front of the ship. There aren’t any good shots of the fans while mounted, but we can show you the radiator and fan assembly.



And finally, for reference purposes, a 3D render of a Venator-class Star Destroyer. This particular class was built before the iconic Imperial Star Destroyers of the first Star Wars trilogy and features an enormous hanger bay and twin bridge towers — one for directing the hundreds of starfighters the VSD could launch, and one for standard ship operations. Later Star Destroyers carried far fewer fighters, and the second bridge was eliminated from these designs.

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Before the Xbox One launched in 2013, there was some talk of an inexpensive alternative device shipping alongside the main console. Besides a minor Xbox 360 refresh, nothing of the sort ever came out, but a similar rumor has surfaced yet again recently. And after thoroughly mulling over this set-top-Xbox concept, I’m convinced that it’s a terrible idea.
While a typical hardware redesign seems inevitable for the bulky Xbox One, that’s not what we’re talking about here. This rumor is focused on a limited Apple TV-style “slim Xbox One.” According to Petri IT Knowledgebase, the most recent rumor of a set-top Xbox consists of a streamlined box that only runs Windows 10 apps, couched in wishy-washy language like “it’s not clear if these plans have been scrapped.” Even as the rumor is brought up, it’s thrown under the bus.
Microsoft has almost certainly prototyped something along these lines at some point, but it just doesn’t seem like a viable consumer product under current market conditions. Maybe an Apple TV competitor running Windows would have been compelling in 2010, but it’s a wet noodle in 2016.



Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Apple TV are completely mainstream at this point, and all of those boxes run third-party apps of some sort. Offering a hundred-dollar box that can run a subset of Windows Store apps seems overwhelmingly mediocre.
Of course, there are some ways that Microsoft could change up the formula to find a more successful product. I spoke to ExtremeTech’s own hardware expert Joel Hruska, and he said that 14nm die-shrunk Xbox 360 guts could fit into a box roughly the size of the Wii U, even if the Apple TV’s form factor is still out of reach.

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Over the past month, we’ve detailed the technology initiatives and projects that AMD’s Radeon Technology Group (RTG) revealed at its Sonoma, California retreat in early December. From improved monitors to its GPU Open initiative, AMD wants to introduce new visual standards and capabilities across the market. Now, we’re finally going to talk about the third prong of AMD’s 2016 strategy. Say hello to Polaris — AMD’s official fourth-generation GCN architecture (Tahiti, Hawaii, and Tonga/Fiji were are being defined as generations 1-3).

The new name refers to AMD’s desire to power “every pixel on every device efficiently.” The company notes that “stars are the most efficient photon generators of our universe,” and claims that this is the inspiration behind the new GPU. The major features of fourth-gen GCN are laid out in the chart below.



There are a number of subsidiary technologies included in the Polaris brand-name, alongside the GPU architecture itself. Hopefully this will help avoid confusion over which products belong to which family. When it launched GCN, AMD attempted to avoid various model numbers, instead referring to families of products (Tahiti, Hawaii, Tonga, etc). The problem with this approach is that it didn’t translate well to AMD’s model numbers. The press and public coined its own nomenclature of GCN 1.0, GCN 1.1, and GCN 1.2 to describe AMD’s feature sets, partly because the company’s previous approach wasn’t very clear.

Polaris: Built on 14nm FinFET

We’ve expected this announcement for quite some time, but RTG confirmed it in December — the next-generation Polaris will be built on 14nm FinFET. This offers a number of concrete advances over 28nm planar silicon, including less variation in transistor performance, improved speeds, and better leakage characteristics.



As for how much of an advantage 14nm offers overall, however, AMD’s own graph indicates there’s a definite sweet spot to the new technology. In the graph below, we see that Fmax (maximum frequency) offers dramatically better power consumption at the same clock speed or somewhat improved frequency headroom at the same power consumption.



The frequency gains from 14nm FinFET taper off as the clock rises, which implies that the process is more focused on power efficiency than raw frequency gain. Certainly AMD’s own disclosures at this early date are emphasizing performance-per-watt rather than raw performance.

That doesn’t mean Polaris won’t be substantially faster than Tonga / Fiji — it just means that those gains may be delivered more by architectural enhancements than by clock rate improvements.

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