Game Tech News

We covered how Remedy’s Quantum Break is the latest DirectX 12 title to run into problems on the PC. Despite a strong debut for its console, its PC version struggles, particularly on Nvidia hardware. Tweets from the game’s PR representative seem to suggest that at least some of the game’s problems aren’t really something that can be fixed.

When asked whether visual artifacts, ghosting, soft textures, screen-tearing, and texture pop-in could be remedied with a patch, Thomas Puha, PR head at Remedy, stated that “Ghosting is just a result of the temporal reconstruction. Just the way we render things.” Texture pop-in also got called out as an engine-specific issue by Puha, who wrote that it “unfortunately is a quirk of our graphics engine.” Also, there’s not going to be a way to turn film grain off, since that’s another locked-on attribute.



Zooey Deschanel is quirky. Texture pop-in in 2016 is janky.

Whether or not these are major issues for most people, however, is open to considerable debate. I don’t like texture pop-in all that much, but so long as it’s not constant and game-breakingly egregious, it doesn’t wreck games. The Mass Effect titles often suffered from a few seconds of texture pop-in when you entered an area, and it was never more than briefly distracting. The bigger questions are whether Remedy can patch up the performance issues and bypass the limitations that are holding the game back on UWP and DirectX 12.

Is the GTX 970 Ti’s low performance RAM related?

Multiple publications, including Eurogamer and PC Gamer, have noted that Quantum Break doesn’t perform well on the GTX 970 as compared with AMD hardware. Overclock3D ran some benchmarks on the game comparing the GTX 960 against the R9 380 as well as the GTX 980 Ti against the AMD Fury X. Oddly, where Eurogamer reported max frame rates topping out at 5/6 of refresh rate, OC3D managed around 91% of refresh rate — but never a flat 60 FPS, and always with some 1% and 0.1% frame times at or below 30 FPS. Why a $600 GPU can’t manage a uniform 60 FPS at 1080p is a mystery at this point.

The GTX 960 and AMD R9 380 are generally tied at 1080p at the “Lowest” and “Low” detail levels, but a huge gap opens up at 1080p “Medium,” where the R9 380’s average frame rate is 27.5% faster than the GTX 960.



Graph by Overclock3D. GTX 960 vs. R9 380. Performance drops off as RAM demand rises.


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Ever since 3dfx launched the original Voodoo, and in virtually every case, how a PC performs in games has been tied to its graphics card. But choosing a video card isn’t all that easy. The purpose of this guide isn’t to answer whether you should buy any specific product from AMD or Nvidia, but to create a framework that you can use to determine how much GPU performance you need, and how much you should spend to get it.
We’re going to assume that if you’re gamer enough to know you need a new graphics card, you’re gamer enough to at least have a small preference for a particular GPU manufacturer.

Determine your goals and budget

The first thing you need to determine before buying a card is what you want that card to do for you. Do you prefer turn-based games like Civilization, which tend to be less hard on the GPU, or do you play cutting-edge first-person shooters? Are you happy with an existing 1080p display with no plans to upgrade, or do you want a GPU that can push cutting-edge technologies like 4K and VR?



Turn-based games and MOBAs have relatively light GPU requirements; FPS and RPG titles tend to be more graphics heavy.


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Running out of disk space on your PS4 with those monthly PlayStation Plus releases? Maybe those long load times are slowly eating away at your sanity. That tiny, slow drive that comes standard with the PS4 leads to nothing but heartbreak, but you do have options at your disposal. It’s easy to swap out the default hard drive for something much better, but what about all the cool stuff already on your drive?



Begin the backup process

To get the ball rolling, you’ll need to plug in your external drive over USB. It needs to be formatted using FAT32 or exFAT, and if you want to back up a full drive, the external drive should have at least the same capacity as the internal drive.
Launch the Settings app from the PS4’s main menu. Select the System option, go down to Back Up and Restore, and then go into the Back Up PS4 sub-menu.

At this point, you may be notified that your trophies can’t be backed up. Of course, trophies sync over PSN, so that’s not a problem. If you’re sure that everything is already synced, just select “OK.” If you want to make sure that all of your trophies are properly synced, you should back out, launch the Trophies app, and make sure that everything is copacetic before continuing.



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Oculus has contacted us to state the following: “This is a hack, and we don’t condone it. Users should expect that hacked games won’t work indefinitely, as regular software updates to games, apps, and our platform are likely to break hacked software.”
Original story below.

Up until now, the nascent VR market has been something of a walled garden. Oculus Rift owners can play games on Steam VR, but the reverse isn’t true — HTC Vive owners can’t play games on the Oculus Rift. A new software utility on GitHub, dubbed Revive, aims to change that by offering a proof-of-concept compatibility layer between the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift.

Currently just two applications are supported — Lucky’s Tale and Oculus Dreamdeck — and it requires executable patches for the requisite titles. Revive’s readme states:

It [Revive] works by reimplementing functions from the Oculus Runtime and translating them to OpenVR calls. Unfortunately Oculus has implemented a Code Signing check on the Runtime DLLs, therefore the Revive DLLs cannot be used unless the application is patched.
The Revive DLLs already contain the necessary hooking code to work around the Code Signing check in any application. However you will still need to patch the application to actually load the Revive DLLs.

Controller support, according to Ars Technica, is a bit hit-or-miss. Some games worked with any XInput device, some required the Xbox One controller specifically, and at least one application refused to recognize controller input at all. There are also some distribution issues to consider, since the Oculus titles are currently free to any Oculus Home installer — probably in part because those games are meant to be reserved for Rift owners rather than Vive buyers.

Cross-platform compatibility: Consumers want it, Oculus doesn’t

Oculus CEO, Palmer Luckey, has stated “we can only extend our SDK to work with other headsets if the manufacturer allows us to do so.” Other vendors have indicated this isn’t the case — Valve told Digital Trends“Anything Oculus or other stores need to work with the Vive are documented in the freely available OpenVR APIs.” HTC has made similar statements promoting openness and argued that VR content shouldn’t be locked down. Developers working on games for the Vive were willing to say on-record that they weren’t being held to exclusivity clauses; no Oculus developers responded to DT’s requests for comment.



Lucky’s Tale, now playable on Vive.

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There’s a new Doom game due out soon, the first in 12 years and a potential must-have title for the Xbox One, PC, and PlayStation 4. Unfortunately, if feedback from the game’s now-complete open beta is any indication, the game isn’t going to win accolades for itself on multiplayer alone.

As of this writing, the game had 8,049 negative reviews and 4,992 positive ones on Steam, which works out to a shade under 40% positive reviews and 60% negative ones. The problem, according to those reviews (and as documented by multiple sites online) is that the game isn’t Doom in any meaningful sense.



The problems are legion. The rocket launcher is so weak, it’s beaten by the shotgun. The game uses loadouts and unlocks rather than dropping everyone into an open map with tons of guns to pick up and interesting ways to use them. It’s been heavily criticized as resembling Halo or CoD, which makes sense given that it’s built by different developers and has long been absent from the scene.
One aspect that nearly every PC player is complaining about are the controls, which don’t feel smooth compared with the original. It’s a game clearly designed for consoles, with PCs as an afterthought. This is, of course, entirely normal these days — PC players are rarely anything but an afterthought, and the state of so many PC titles these days is a testament to that fact. Nonetheless, it’s obviously angered many people that a franchise as iconic as Doom is treating PC gamers like a footnote.

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We’ve been hearing rumors for more than a month that Sony would launch an updated PS4.*The specs on the new unit, known unofficially as the PS4K or PS4.5 have now leaked, and they point to a significant performance jump for the updated platform.

According to Giant Bomb, the new platform is codenamed Neo, and will offer eight AMD Jaguar CPU cores clocked at 2.1GHz, 36 Compute Units based on Polaris and clocked at 911MHz, and the same 8GB of GDDR5, but with maximum bandwidth of 218GB/s.



All of these specs are a notable*improvement over the current PS4, but the GPU jump is easily the largest. The Neo’s CPU is 31% faster than the old PS4, the GPU should be more than twice as powerful, and the system packs 24% more memory bandwidth. This new platform would also incorporate the bandwidth-saving color compression that launched with GCN 1.2, as well as any other improvements introduced by Polaris.

The 4K question

As we expected, games will not be required to be 4K native, though Sony is leaving developers the option if they wish to target it. Critical to the Neo’s proposition is that it must maintain frame rates at least as high as those on the original PS4. In practice, the Neo should outperform the classic PS4 at every level, with better performance in existing titles. Tellingly, there will be no Neo-only games, no Neo-specific features in titles, and no unlocks or capabilities that are tied to owning the new platform.

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The Ratchet & Clank series has been a staple of Sony consoles for over a decade now. Ever since the first PS2 release back in 2002, Insomniac Games has regularly pumped out sequels featuring the lovable lombax and robot duo. This time around, the series is getting a reboot – a retelling of the original Ratchet & Clank story in both theatrical and game form. The movie will be hitting theaters later this month, but the PS4 game is available right now. Does this reimagining do justice to the beloved franchise, or is it just an exploitation of our warm memories? Let’s take a look.

By and large, the critical response to the new Ratchet & Clank game has been overwhelmingly positive. Our sister site IGN gave the game a 9/10, and the average score on Metacritic is 86/100. By combining the classic levels with a more modern take on game design, Insomniac has delivered a title that evokes nostalgia while keeping the moment-to-moment gameplay interesting. Even if you’ve played through the original release countless times, there’s still a lot of new content here to keep you engaged.

From a technical perspective, Ratchet & Clank is both impressive and slightly dissatisfying. Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry took a look at this release, and found that it’s running natively at 1920×1080. However, the game is capped at 30 frames per second. Compared with the 60fps target of the original release, this is a bit of a letdown. It might not seem like a big deal, but the halved frame rate is painfully apparent when shown next to the original game. If you’re a diehard fan, you’ll probably be pretty bummed out by the change.


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New surrounding the PlayStation 4’s upcoming update (codenamed Neo) continues to surface, and our understanding of what the new platform will offer is rapidly firming up. While these unofficial leaks should be treated as rumors until formally confirmed by Sony itself, the fact that multiple publications are willing to speak firmly on-record suggests that high-level sources are deliberately feeding information to the press (and yes, this is absolutely a thing that happens).
Eurogamer has a full breakdown of the latest details, but here are some of the major highlights:

All games will target 1080p as the minimum resolution: While there are no mainstream televisions that target 1440p as a native resolution, game developers will have the option to render internally at higher resolutions and down-sample the game to 1080p output. Done properly, this provides a visual quality boost that’s quite similar to smooth-screen antialiasing. Both Nvidia and AMD have provided technologies that can perform this task in-driver on PCs; it’s one way to play older titles at 4K levels of fidelity even if you’re stuck on an older monitor.

Game saves and online play are both cross-platform: All applications are supposed to be capable of saving games that can be played on either console, both consoles must be able to play together online, and the operating system will be identical across both platforms. Backup data will be accessible on either console, though you can only have one primary console and one PSN ID logged in at any given time.

No Neo-specific or PS4-specific titles: Older games can be patched for the Neo to offer forward compatibility, new titles must include such support from Day 1. All games will be available in unified binaries; the CPU binary is common to both platforms while the GPU binaries will come in up to three flavors: Neo-specific, PS4-specific, and a shared binary for both GPUs. This suggests that the CPU is a straight port of the earlier Jaguar APU, with a 500MHz clock speed bump.
Presumably developers are allowed some leeway regarding higher resolution assets and textures for the Neo, so long as these changes are not significant and do not alter the experience in ways that would disadvantage the PS4. Apart from the 1080p minimum mandatory resolution, Sony hasn’t given many rendering guidelines. Games must be at least as fast on the Neo as on the PS4 and can offer enhanced versions of PS4 features but not entirely new features. The example Eurogamer gives is that a game that supports two-player split-screen gaming on the PS4 can offer four-player split-screen on Neo. A PS4 game without split-screen at all, however, cannot offer split-screen as a Neo-only feature.

How much can Sony improve performance?

Without knowing more about Polaris, we can’t say for certain what the PlayStation 4’s upper performance boundary is, but we can take a rough guess at what the minimum performance improvement looks like. While the comparison is not exact, the GPU inside the PlayStation 4 closely resembles a trimmed version of AMD’s HD 7870 / R9 270. It so happens that AMD sold a Hawaii-class GPU with exactly 2x the R9 270’s core count — the R9 290. Eyeballing the performance improvement from the R9 270 to the R9 290 should give us a very rough idea of what to expect (Anandtech’s Bench tool is extremely useful for this).





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It’s been roughly two and a half years since the Xbox One replaced the Xbox 360, and Microsoft is finally ready to pull the plug on its venerable console. Sales of the older platform are thought to have been steadily declining for months, though Microsoft has declined to break out the exact sales figures. Even so, this is the end of an era.*The Xbox 360 (not the first Xbox) was Microsoft’s true breakout console, and the device that put the company on the map as a serious threat to Sony’s dominance during the PS2 and PS3 years.

At the start of the last console generation, Sony’s Ken Kutaragi made dismissive statements betraying just how impregnable the Japanese company thought it was. When asked about the price on the then-upcoming PS3, Kutaragi stated it was Sony’s goal to make “consumers to think to themselves ‘I will work more hours to buy one.’ We want people to feel that they want it, irrespective of anything else.” At E3 in 2006, Kutaragi claimed the Xbox 360 wasn’t even a blip on Sony’s radar, arguing “The next generation doesn’t start until we say it does.”



While both consoles ended in the same place, last-gen consumers clearly thought the next-generation started with the Xbox 360. Image by ReadWrite

The PS3 and Xbox 360 ended up in more-or-less the same place last generation in terms of total unit sales, but in the beginning Microsoft’s console ate Sony’s lunch. While the company’s gaming ambitions began with the original Xbox, the Xbox 360 strengthened and deepened its franchise pool with major hits from Halo, Mass Effect, and Gears of War. The console had an infamous hardware failure problem early in its life cycle (the so-called Red Ring of Death, or RROD), but it recovered from that debacle. The Xbox 360’s general focus and presentation were strong enough that the Xbox One’s initial launch plans and feature set were the subject of considerable ire from fans.

One common argument during the initial Xbox One launch was that Microsoft had forgotten the lessons Sony had learned from the PlayStation 3’s early struggles. In 2005, Microsoft had focused on delivering a top-notch, well-balanced gaming platform at an attractive price, while Sony’s decision to use an extremely powerful but difficult to program processor and expensive Blu-ray player had driven the PS3’s price much higher than its Xbox 360 competitor. In 2013, Microsoft was the company with the all-in-one box, mandatory bundled additional capabilities (Kinect), and higher price tag — and sales of the PS4 suffered as a result.

Heck, one of the reasons gamers are curious about Microsoft’s potential upgrade plans is because it gives the company a chance to finally fix the weaker performance that has dogged the Xbox One ever since it launched.
Xbox 360s still on-sale will be fully supported through their warranty periods and Microsoft has no near-term plans to shut down game servers or Xbox Live. For now, the peripherals, devices, and games attached to the Xbox 360 will function normally.


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It’s no secret that AMD and Nvidia are planning to launch new GPUs in the next few months, but there are still questions about configurations and technology. Initially, we expected these new cards to use the HBM2 memory standard, but the persistent rumor has been that AMD’s upcoming Polaris would be GDDR5 based. That now appears to be true for Nvidia as well.



The “GTX 1080” moniker is for discussion purposes only; Nvidia has not revealed their future branding

Leaked photos of the GP104 die show the chip with a standard memory interface — either GDDR5 or GDDR5X (it’s difficult to tell). PC Perspective is reporting that there’s an ongoing rumor the GTX 1080 will use GDDR5X, which could be possible, but would honestly seem to be a bit early — when we spoke to Micron about the memory, the company implied that the production ramp would be later in the year. With JEDEC qualification and good initial production yields, however, it’s possible that Nvidia could deploy GDDR5X on high-end GPUs, and it wouldn’t be the first time that a GPU manufacturer used a limited memory run. AMD was the only company to make significant use of GDDR4 or HBM, after all.

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