Game Tech News

After years of waiting, the finalized retail version of the Oculus Rift is ready for pre-order. If you decide to buy now, you’ll get the headset, the sensor, a remote control, an Xbox One controller, a copy of Lucky’s Tale, and a copy of EVE: Valkyrie for a whopping $599. Unsurprisingly, that hefty asking price hasn’t gone over well with the enthusiast crowd. Comparisons with the overpriced 3DO and PS3 launches are popping up everywhere, but these strong negative reactions don’t necessarily spell doom for VR or the Oculus Rift. Truth be told, this kerfuffle might just make the VR market stronger.

The first group of orders will start shipping on March 28th in the initial 20 markets, but the ship date for new pre-orders has already slipped to June. Even if you’re willing to pony up $599 right now, you’re probably not going to be getting your Oculus Rift until some time in Q2. The limited supply is disappointing, but it’s not entirely surprising. This isn’t a massive consumer-focused launch — it’s more of a slow rollout to the eager early adopters with deep pockets.



Earlier this week, Oculus surprised us all by announcing that everyone who pre-ordered the Oculus dev kit by backing the Kickstarter in 2012 would be getting the finalized retail hardware at no additional cost. It’s a nice gesture, but most of that goodwill seems to have gone out the window.

The negative reactions across social media have been loud, but it seems this is a failure of Oculus’s messaging — not a true indictment of expensive first-gen technology. In May of 2015, Oculus said that you’d need to spend about $1,500 for an Oculus Rift and a gaming rig capable of driving it smoothly. This $599 price tag definitely fits within that estimate, yet even the enthusiast crowd seems shocked that the final hardware is so expensive. If Oculus had simply specified the $599 asking price a few months back, it would have given us the reality check we so desperately needed.

However, there is a silver lining: Oculus’s competitors will almost certainly try to exploit the sticker shock. The HTC Vive will be launching very soon, and it’s likely to be in the same ballpark, but other companies could use this opportunity to get a foothold in this brand new market.

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And if Oculus starts feeling severe pressure from the competition, it will help drive the price down as soon as it’s financially feasible.

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When AMD unveiled its new Polaris architecture, there was still some question as to where the new graphics processors would be built. Historically, AMD has built GPUs with TSMC and used GlobalFoundries for its CPUs and higher-end APUs, which use integrated graphics. GlobalFoundries has now officially confirmed that this is changing at 14nm.*In a statement, the company said it will fab cards based on Polaris for a number of applications and scenarios, “including thin and light gaming notebooks, small form factor desktops, and discrete graphics cards with lower power demands.”

This appears to confirm our previous hypothesis: AMD is tapping GF to fab its mobile designs and low-power desktop cards, but building higher-power architectures with TSMC. This also makes sense given what we know about the two foundries’ respective processes: GF’s technology is based on Samsung’s 14nm LPP (Low Power Process), and while it can perform some customization work to validate higher TDPs, AMD’s Zen CPUs are expected to top out around 95W TDP. GPUs, in contrast, can reach much higher values. It’s not uncommon for high-end graphics cards to hit 250W, and ultra-high-end cards can break 300W.


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For as long as games have had copy protection, there have been ways to break said copy protection. In the earliest days of gaming, games often required you to enter a random word or sentence from the manual, or look up a code sequence. For more than 30 years, game crackers and developers have fought a never-ending war with each other. At best, DRM has delayed a crack by a handful of days or a week. Most of the time, it hasn’t even managed that.

According to a prominent cracking group (as first reported by TorrentFreak), that may finally be changing. The Chinese cracking group 3DM has a great deal of expertise in breaking game DRM, including last year’s Dragon Age Inquisition. The group’s founder, Bird Sister (aka Phoenix) recently stated that the team has had no luck cracking the latest version of Denuvo, a fairly niche but apparently extremely effective DRM technology.



3DM may have one previous rounds, but Denuvo is holding its own this time.

In a response to the length of time it has taken to crack Just Cause 3, Bird Sister stated the following:

Recently, many people have asked about cracks for Just Cause 3, so here is a centralized answer to this question. The last stage is too difficult and Jun [cracking guy] nearly gave up, but last Wednesday I encouraged him to continue.
I still believe that this game can be compromised. But according to current trends in the development of encryption technology, in two years time I’m afraid there will be no free games to play in the world.

A world in which game cracks couldn’t exist would be a drastic departure from the past 30-40 years, and there would be some significant unintended consequences. While publishers would undoubtedly cheer the move, it would cause real problems for games that relied on online authentication servers that may no longer exist, or titles whose DRM checks caused significant performance issues. Both of these have occurred on shipping titles, and there’s no guarantee they’d stop happening if publishers perfected DRM.
Even if cracking isn’t abolished, it’s possible that it might take progressively longer for titles to be cracked post-launch. From a developer standpoint, this would be almost as good — most games generate the majority of their sales in the first few months, so a game that took six months to crack would likely earn most of the revenue it was going to earn. (Games with subscription costs or microtransaction models are an obvious exception to this.)


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AMD’s Radeon Nano was, in many ways, the crown jewel of the Radeon Fury family. While it didn’t offer quite as much performance as the Fury X or Radeon Fury, it blew the power efficiency of both cards out of the water. It was an incredible card for small form factor PCs, and packed considerably more firepower into the smallest high-end GPU we’ve ever seen.

The one downside? Price. At $649, the Radeon Nano was priced against the Fury X and the GTX 980 Ti, despite not quite matching the performance of either solution. That made the GPU something of a niche offering — fabulous if you needed its tiny size, but hard to recommend as a general card. Today, that changes — AMD has slashed the Radeon Nano’s price by $150, or 23%.



Absolute power consumption.

The price cuts bring the Radeon Nano down to $500, and at that price, it’s playing a different game. Unless AMD cuts the price on the Radeon Fury, the Nano and the Fury are now neck-and-neck — with the Nano using much less power, fitting into smaller form factors, and taking up a lot less of your case.




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When Nvidia’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage at CES last week he unveiled the company’s next-generation self-driving car platform, the Drive PX 2. According to Nvidia, its Drive PX 2 platform packs the same amount of compute power as six Titan X boards, in just two GPUs. During the show, Jen-Hsun displayed the new system — but what he showed from stage almost certainly wasn’t Pascal.



Image by Anandtech. The label is fuzzy to my eye.

As Anandtech readers noted, the hardware Jen-Hsun showed was nearly identical to the GTX 980 in an MXM configuration. The new Drive PX 2 is shown above, the GTX 980 MXM is shown below. The hardware isn’t just similar — the chips appear to be identical. Some readers have also claimed they can read the date code on the die as 1503A1 — which would mean the GPUs were produced in the third week of 2015.


Image by Anandtech. The GTX 980 MXM

If Nvidia actually used a GTX 980 MXM board for their mockup, it would explain why the Drive PX 2 looks as though it only uses GDDR5. While Nvidia could still be tapping that memory standard for its next-generation driving platform, this kind of specialized automotive system is going to be anything but cheap. We’ve said before that we expect GDDR5 and HBM to split the upcoming generation, but we expect that split in consumer hardware with relatively low amounts of GPU memory (2-4GB) and small memory busses. The Drive PX 2 platform sports four Denver CPU cores, eight Cortex-A57 CPUs, 8 TFLOPS worth of single-precision floating point, and a total power consumption of 250W. Nvidia has already said that they’ll be water-cooling the module in electric vehicles and offering a radiator block for conventional cars. Any way you slice it, this is no tiny embedded product serving as a digital entertainment front-end.
Then again, it is still possible that the compute-heavy workloads the Drive PX 2 will perform don’t require HBM. It seems unlikely, but it’s possible.

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Electronic Arts, and by extension the Origin game service, is not particularly well-liked by gamers thanks to its heavy use of microtransactions and DLC*packs. Perhaps it will earn some goodwill with a new service called Origin Access. PC gamers are able to subscribe to Access for a mere $4.99 per month and get early versions of unreleased games and unlimited access to The Vault, a Netflix-style selection of slightly older games.

EA calls the early access feature “First Play Trials,” and stresses that these will be full versions of the games, not demos. This feature will be limited to EA titles, but it has the potential to save you some real cash. When a game unlocks for First Play, you can dive in and see how it suits you. If you don’t like it, no problem — just don’t buy it when it comes out. If you do enjoy the game, you can play it as much as you want until it’s released, then buy the full version and have your First Play progress carry over.

There’s only one First Play Trial listed on the Origin site right now, a platforming game called Unravel. It will cost $19.99 when it launches on February 9th. Origin Access members will be able to start playing it on February 4th, though. As an added bonus, everything you buy on Origin comes with a 10% discount for Access subscribers.



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For more than a decade, the phrase “Intel integrated GPU” was synonymous with “terrible graphics solution.” The first Intel motherboard with integrated graphics, the i810, had terrible performance, even in 2D desktop work. The 2D graphics performance improved, but Intel’s 3D capabilities were more-or-less terrible until the launch of Sandy Bridge.

Since Sandy Bridge debuted, Intel has been much more aggressive about improving its 3D capabilities, generation-on-generation. AMD stole the GPU performance lead from Intel with its Llano APU back in 2011, but Intel has steadily chipped away at this advantage. AMD still holds an overall advantage against Intel’s desktop CPUs (as a write-up at Anandtech makes clear,) but Intel’s exact words were: “For the mainstream and casual gamer, we have improved our Iris and Iris Pro graphics tremendously. We have improved our graphics performance [by 30 times] from where it was five years ago. We believe that the performance of Intel’s integrated graphics today, what we offer in the products […], is equivalent to the performance of about 80% of discrete [GPU] installed base.”

Them’s fighting words. But is it true? As far as we can tell… no. At least, not according to Steam’s hardware survey. We ran down the list of AMD and Nvidia GPUs, counting only those cards we were certain could beat the Iris / Iris Pro in a head-to-head comparison. If Steam’s figures are accurate, AMD and Nvidia combined hold roughly 31% of the GPU market in terms of GPUs that are at least midrange discrete cards.



Part of what makes Intel’s statement tricky to evaluate, however, is that the first part of its statement depends on how you evaluate the meaning of “mainstream and casual gamer.” If that means Farmville, or equivalent Facebook-style games, then Intel is correct. I doubt there’s much difference between playing low-end titles on an Intel chip versus AMD or Nvidia these days.

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Microsoft announced it will be releasing an educational version of Minecraft, the popular online sandbox building game the company acquired in 2014. Minecraft: Education Edition will be released as a free trial this summer to existing Minecraft users, according to Mojang, the Microsoft subsidiary acquired for $2.5 billion in September 2014.

The new title builds on MinecraftEdu, “a version of Minecraft built for the classroom [which] has been used in over 40 countries,” Mojang said in a statement. Microsoft acquired MinecraftEdu this week, the statement said. Terms of that deal were not disclosed.

As with the public game, the updated classroom edition of Minecraft will continue to teach “essential life-skills like tree-punching and good Creeper-defense,” per Mojang, but will also feature purpose-built “lessons”*to help educators instruct students in areas ranging from basic problem-solving to history, art, and STEM disciplines.
Lessons include “Redstone Lodge,” a Minecraft: Education Edition mod, which “gives the full range of electrical engineering principles, logic gates, and even music composition within Minecraft” and the bomb-shelter building mod “Anderson Shelters,” which promises to teach both World War II history and physics.

Last year, Microsoft introduced Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition Beta as the first version of the game with Redmond’s stamp on it, as part of the rollout of the software giant’s latest PC operating system. But the rollout of a Minecraft version specifically tailored for the classroom has been cooking for even longer.


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We’ve already covered the Asus G751JY-DB72 laptop indirectly, when we reviewed mobile G-Sync and its impact on frame rates and visual quality earlier this fall. But after spending some time with this laptop, we wanted to do a*more thorough review. The G751JY-DB72 isn’t perfect, and its base model has been on the market for well over a year, but don’t let that fool you — this system offers a better price/performance ratio than many more expensive systems that shipped in the past six months.

Specs and availability

Asus manufacturers a number of laptops under the G751JY brand, so there are some specific attributes to be aware of if you’re interested in buying one. The particular model we’ve tested has gotten a bit tough to find at retail, and the price can vary significantly depending on whether or not you want the 2014 model (which shipped with 16GB of RAM but without G-Sync support) or the updated 2015 version, which had G-Sync.
The specifications on the model we tested were:

• Intel Core i7-4720HQ CPU (2.6GHz base, 3.6GHz Turbo)
• 24GB of DDR3L RAM
• 128GB SSD w/1TB HDD for additional storage
• Nvidia GTX 980M (4GB of RAM)
• 17.3-inch, 1920×1080 display (G-Sync enabled)

The handful of DB72’s showing up for sale are priced around $2,000 for the G-Sync model and a 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD, which is still quite expensive. One alternative, based on the same form factor and chassis, is the G751JY-WH71. It’s identical to the DB72, but uses a DVD-ROM instead of Blu-ray, has “just” 16GB of RAM and a smaller 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD. The price, meanwhile, drops to $1,569.


If you want a powerhouse mobile gaming system, that $1,569 price tag for a GTX 980M and a G-Sync panel is very hard to beat. Even Asus’ refreshed G752 Series doesn’t come close. The G752VL-DH71 is a $1,499 system but only offers a GTX 965M, while the $2,000 G752VT-DH74 tops out with a GTX 970M. Both are capable GPUs, but neither is as nice as the GTX 980M.

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Andrew Wilson, Electronic Arts’ CEO, took the stage at the BC Tech Summit on Tuesday, and heroically declared that his company isn’t trying to be a “corporate beast.” His comments echo remarks made late last year by Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgenson, who similarly argued that EA had no interest in “nickel and diming” gamers.
“If you understand the video game business, EA — the branding is this corporate beast that just wants to take money from them while people play our games,” said Wilson. “That’s not actually what we’re trying to do.”

Jorgenson’s comments weren’t exactly greeted by adulation from the publisher’s fans, and it’s doubtful Wilson will have better luck. EA has been repeatedly voted the worst company in America, and while I personally disagree with that assessment — I’d argue there are companies that engage in far worse behavior than anything a video game publisher has ever done — it’s obvious that there’s a great deal of lost trust and anger between EA and its customers.



EA lost to Comcast in 2014, which is progress, we guess.

At the conference, Wilson went on to explain how services like EA Access, which gives Xbox One gamers access to a back catalog of titles and early access to upcoming products, proved that the company had gamers’ best interests at heart. In and of itself, EA Access sounds like a decent concept, but Wilson’s description of its earnings potential isn’t all that encouraging.

“For the longest time in civilization, we would spend money as human beings, then we would spend time where we spent our money. That’s reversed now,” Wilson said. “You come in, and play a bunch of games, and ultimately you invest after that.”

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