Game Tech News

Steam is an incredible platform. Frequent sales, the workshop, refunds, cloud saves, and dozens of other smaller features come together to form a service that any company would be proud of. Unfortunately, there’s a downside: DRM. When you buy games on Steam, you’re locking yourself into that platform, and you have to abide by Valve’s restrictions. Thankfully, the folks at GOG.com have put together a clever solution that allows developers to offer DRM-free versions of their games for free to existing Steam users.

Dubbed “GOG Connect,” this new service scans your Steam library using the official Steam API, finds any applicable games, and allows you to import them into your GOG account. Your Steam copy remains, but you’ll now have access to the GOG version at no additional cost. As a consumer, there’s simply no downside to going through this process. Even if you continue to play the Steam version, you’ll still have a DRM-free version in your pocket if you ever change your mind.
Unsurprisingly, the service has been extraordinarily popular. That’s great news for GOG.com, but it also means that the account connection process is currently running at a snail’s pace. The service is so overwhelmed, in fact, users have been warned that it may take days before everything starts working properly.



Because an agreement has to be reached with the developers and/or publishers of each game on GOG Connect, not every title that’s available on both platforms will be supported. Still, 22 games are available for import right out of the gate. Beloved indie games like Braid, The Witness, VVVVVV, and FTL: Advanced Edition are a big part of this launch, but some older high-profile games like Saints Row 2, Unreal Tournament Game of the Year Edition, and The Witcher: Enhanced Edition are included as well.

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For decades, companies like AMD and Nvidia have created two sets of products for the desktop and laptop markets. While the relative performance of laptop GPUs compared to desktop cards has varied, both companies have generally recognized the need to build lower-power cards to fit into laptop chassis. Nvidia is reportedly breaking this trend with its GTX 1080 and 1070, which may come to laptops in essentially unchanged form.

This rumor is courtesy of PC Gamer, which cites insider contacts at Computex 2016 for spilling the beans on Nvidia’s plans. PCG reports that Nvidia will bring the full-fat versions of both the 1080 and 1070 to mobile systems, with clock speed tweaks to ensure the GPUs don’t draw more power than the laptop can handle. Nvidia launched a full version of the GTX 980 for laptop configurations last September, but kept the rest of the GTX 9xxM family intact. Now the company is supposedly dumping the “M” label with no plans to revive it.


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Bethesda has been pumping out Fallout 4 DLC this year at a steady clip, and the latest release is the biggest yet. The $25 Far Harbor DLC takes the player to a new location off the coast of Maine, and adds a thick layer of radioactive fog. Not only does this awful mist slowly chip away at your health bar, but it causes the frame rate on the PS4 to drop in a big way. Thankfully, Bethesda has already released a new version of the DLC that significantly improves performance.
When Far Harbor launched last month, it received a positive, if subdued, critical reaction. The PC and Xbox One version received a metascore of 79/100 while the PS4 version averaged a slightly lower 75/100. On our sister site IGN, the PC version of the DLC scored an 8.3/10. In comparison, the base game ranged from 84/100 to 88/100 on Metacritic while IGN gave it a 9.5/10 on all platforms.

If you absolutely loved Fallout 4, this add-on is undoubtedly what you’ve been waiting for since launch. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the works of Bethesda Game Studios, but I played through the entirety of this DLC in the last few weeks. Most of the strengths and weaknesses of the core game remain, but I did find myself smiling while solving a cheeky murder mystery inside a newly discovered vault.

Sadly, that small joy didn’t last long. After spending a couple hours in the fog, the atrocious frame rate on the PS4 turned my smile into a frown accompanied by a deeply furrowed brow. My expectations were already low thanks to the choppiness of last year’s release, but the fog seems to have caused the frame rate to fall off a cliff. My gameplay experience was sub-par to say the least.

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When HTC and Oculus launched their VR headsets, both companies ran into fulfillment problems that caused significant delays. Oculus, however, seemed to be more significantly impacted than HTC, and suffered a larger number of delays. As of today, HTC claims to be shipping out all orders within 72 hours, while simultaneously expanding its retail availability and demo locations.

According to HTC’s press release, the Vive is now on sale in 24 countries and can be purchased from select Microsoft stores, GameStop, and MicroCenter locations. Pre-orders placed through these retailers will begin shipping this week as well. The company also notes that it’s expanding its demo locations up to 100 stores across North America. Microsoft Store demos will expand to 51 showrooms, up from the current 29, GameStop will have 40 demo locations (up from 10), and MicroCenter will have 10 total, up from 5.



The HTC Vive

“Since beginning pre-orders at the end of February and shipping in early April, we’ve seen incredible interest in Vive,” said Dan O’Brien, VP of VR at HTC. “Working with our retail partners has only enhanced that momentum because more people are able to try the only truly immersive virtual reality offering on the market today.”

What about Oculus?

Oculus has made headlines recently for its decision to introduce DRM to the Oculus Store and break third-party compatibility after Palmer Luckey promised he had no interest in doing so. Palmer has a long history of making statements and then breaking or retracting them, as catalogued here. The debate over copyright and interoperability in VR, while important, has somewhat obscured the fact that Oculus does seem to be making progress in fulfilling its orders.


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At long last, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst has finally hit store shelves. After years of internal tribulations, this prequel/reboot to DICE’s 2008 stylish first-person parkour game is available for the world to play. Unfortunately, this open world interpretation is receiving a somewhat tepid response. It’s by no means an outright failure, but it seems to be disappointing for many fans of the original game.

On Metacritic, Catalyst currently has a score of 72/100 on the PS4. Both the Xbox One (73) and PC (75) version rate slightly higher, but there are less reviews to draw from. On our sister site IGN, the game received an “Okay” rating of 6.8/10 on all platforms. The fast-paced traversal continues to impress, but most of what’s built around that core gameplay idea didn’t sit well with IGN’s reviewer. The bland open world, a disappointing story, occasionally awkward combat, and muddier console versions make for a lackluster overall experience.

With all of that said, it’s worth remembering that the first game wasn’t perfect. It ranged between a 79 and an 81/100 on Metacritic, and the different platforms scores spanned a 7.3 and an 8.5/10 on IGN. The gun combat was widely panned, and there were people clamoring for bigger environments at the time. And since it targeted only 30fps last generation, it was clear from the start that there was a lot of room for improvement.

It’s been about eight years since the first game was released. When people compare Catalyst to its progenitor, it’s in the context of eight years that have been chockablock with open world games. What we wanted back then isn’t necessarily what we expect out of a game now. So while it’s safe to say that Catalyst is an improvement over the original in numerous ways, the steps forward simply aren’t big enough for some of us.

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Ever since it launched Windows 10, Microsoft has been working to integrate Xbox One and PC gaming. Multiple games are now available as cross-buy titles, meaning you buy the game once, you can play it on either an Xbox One or a PC. Xbox Owners can stream games locally from their console to a PC elsewhere in the house for portable gameplay. Xbox controllers are fully supported on PC hardware, and Microsoft has already talked about building future games that are cross-play, meaning Xbox One owners and PC gamers can play on the same network.

Now, Microsoft is considering plans that would blur the gap between Xbox One and PC gaming even more, by allowing PC gamers to stream Xbox titles, even if they didn’t actually own an Xbox, The Verge reports. There’s also talk of allowing PCs to stream titles to the Xbox One, which would be an interesting way to shift back and forth between living room and desktop gaming.



There are substantial potential benefits to this kind of flexibility. Microsoft could take a page from SteamOS’ Big Picture mode and offer users the option to boot straight into the Xbox One’s UI, even when the PC in question is running Windows 10. Allowing PCs to run or stream Xbox One titles as a default option would open up back catalogs of console exclusives, possibly including hits from the Xbox 360. In-home streaming between the Xbox One and a high-end PC would give living room gamers the option to run games at their highest resolutions and detail levels without moving a tower into the living room.

These options would greatly increase the flexibility of the Xbox One and create an ecosystem flexibility that Sony would be hard-pressed to match. There are still certain issues with cross-play between Xbox and PC gamers related to fundamental differences in controllers vs. mouse+keyboard gamers, but there are plenty of titles where this simply wouldn’t be an issue. For that matter, there’s also no reason Microsoft couldn’t beef up mouse+keyboard support on the Xbox One, for gamers that want to stream titles to a big screen but still play them from PC peripherals.

What Microsoft has to get right

With all that said, there are some issues Microsoft needs to address if it wants PC gamers to embrace Xbox titles or integration. To date, the Windows Store has done a generally awful job of meeting the needs of PC gamers. Multi-GPU support has been absent, titles have run terribly, modding doesn’t work, API support is limited to DX12, and games bought via the Windows Store don’t work on other platforms. A game you buy on Steam can be played on any operating system it supports. AAA Windows Store games, in contrast, are Windows 10-only. Microsoft has addressed some of these issues already and it promised to fix a few more when the Anniversary Update drops next month. Some of the others, like the DX12 API limitation and the Windows 10 requirement probably won’t get fixed.



No more Gears of War-style launch disasters, ok?

If Microsoft wants PC gamers to take a shine to Xbox One games, it needs to offer PC gamers some of the features and capabilities they’re accustomed to having. People don’t buy into PC games because they somehow missed the giant Xbox One or PS4 signs at the local Best Buy, but because they value certain specific qualities that PCs offer. Some people prefer a mouse and keyboard over controllers, some want the option to run at higher frame rates and control detail levels, some want the ability to mod the game, easily install (and benefit) from an SSD, or use multiple GPUs — and those are just off the top of my head.


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When Blizzard shut down the Nostalrius third-party World of Warcraft server, it triggered a wave of protest from thousands of players who had signed on to play the classic version of WoW, before any expansions had arrived to change the experience. In the wake of the fan outcry, Blizzard promised to meet with the Nostalrius developers and discuss the situation. According to the lead developer of Nostalrius, Viper, their meeting with Blizzard about the prospect of building classic servers for the game was productive and treated seriously by Blizzard itself. The list of people attending the meeting included:

• Mike Morhaime – CEO
• J. Allen Brack – Executive Producer for WoW
• Tom Chilton – Game Director for WoW
• Ion Hazzikostas – Assistant Game Director for WoW
• Marco Koegler – Technical Director for WoW
• Saralyn Smith – Global Director of Community Development
• Kester Robison – Manager of WoW Community Development
• Vanessa Vanasin – PR Manager for WoW
• Randy Jordan – Blizzard Community Manager

The discussion itself ran to more than five hours and touched on a variety of topics, including the history of WoW emulation, whether or not a volunteer team could continue to handle Nostalrius (or a Classic project of similar scope), and a technical report on the achievements and bugs of the Nostalrius project in particular. Here are the major highlights from that meeting.

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The writing has been on the wall for this decision ever since Nvidia announced the GTX 1080, but the company has finally made it official: Three and four-way SLI rigs won’t be supported with GTX 1080 and 1070 GPUs, save for “a select few applications.”

This news comes courtesy of PC Perspective, who spoke with Nvidia about the issue. While Nvidia isn’t requiring enthusiasts to acquire an “Enthusiast Key” to enable more than two-way SLI, it’s also dropping support from everything but, we imagine, the handful of popular applications typically used to break world performance records.

Three-and-four-way multi-GPU mostly doesn’t work

While the absolute die-hard, well-funded enthusiasts may be disappointed by this move, the fact is, it makes a great deal of sense. Multi-GPU configurations have never scaled well past two video cards, despite improved support for such configurations from Microsoft and a great deal of driver work from both AMD and Nvidia over the years. PC Perspective and PC Gamer both wrote articles on SLI scaling with the GTX 980 and 980 Ti respectively, and the story is the same with both GPUs — not only do frame times go to hell, but frame rates often increase marginally, if they increase at all.



Graph by PC Gamer

The problems with multi-GPU development and driver development in general were explored very well in a post to GameDev.net. The author of the post, Promit, writes:

The first lesson is: Nearly every game ships broken. We’re talking major AAA titles from vendors who are everyday names in the industry. In some cases, we’re talking about blatant violations of API rules — one D3D9 game never even called BeginFrame / EndFrame. Some are mistakes or oversights — one shipped bad shaders that heavily impacted performance on NV drivers. These things were day to day occurrences that went into a bug tracker. Then somebody would go in, find out what the game screwed up, and patch the driver to deal with it. There are lots of optional patches already in the driver that are simply toggled on or off as per-game settings, and then hacks that are more specific to games — up to and including total replacement of the shipping shaders with custom versions by the driver team. Ever wondered why nearly every major game release is accompanied by a matching driver release from AMD and/or NVIDIA? There you go…
Multi GPU (SLI/CrossfireX) is [expletive deleted] complicated. You cannot begin to conceive of the number of failure cases that are involved until you see them in person. I suspect that more than half of the total software effort within the IHVs is dedicated strictly to making multi-GPU setups work with existing games. (And I don’t even know what the hardware side looks like.) If you’ve ever tried to independently build an app that uses multi GPU — especially if, god help you, you tried to do it in OpenGL — you may have discovered this insane rabbit hole. There is ONE fast path, and it’s the narrowest path of all.

When you start adding additional complexity in the form of three or four GPUs, you start slamming into multiple system bottlenecks, some of which may or may not be alleviated by DX12. On the plus side, DX12 gives you more CPU threads to work with, which could help with dispatching work. On the minus side, however, the new multi-GPU modes require explicit developer support (which means the developer is the one doing the heavy lifting), while the legacy modes may or may not provide the same scaling capabilities. That’s before we get into technical issues, like PCI Express bandwidth limitations or the increased overhead required to spin workloads out to more than two GPUs, only to put it all back together again.

Who wrote Mantle, Vulkan, and DirectX 12?


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For months, the rumor mill has churned with predictions that Sony would launch a new, higher-end PlayStation 4 system with improved graphics, potentially larger storage, and possibly support for UltraHD (aka 4K) Blu-ray discs. Now the company has confirmed these rumors, but says it won’t show the console at E3 this year.

Andrew House, president and group CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, has confirmed that the PS4K / PS4 Neo / PS 4.5 will be more expensive than the current version of the PlayStation 4, which retails for $350. This actually makes a fair bit of sense — if Sony is hitting reset on the platform’s capabilities, we’d expect the console to come in around $400 at the least.

Sony, however, isn’t planning to phase out the PS4. “It [the PS4 Neo] is intended to sit alongside and complement the standard PS4,” House told the Financial Times. “We will be selling both [versions] through the life cycle.”
This quote suggests that the price gap between the two variants could be larger than just $50. A $350 / $400 split makes sense if Sony wants to push end-users to the newer version as quickly as possible, while $350 / $450 or $350 / $500 might allow higher overall margins while still paying for the new architecture and GPU. The new console is said to target users with 4K content who want access to higher resolutions, but the platform won’t be shown at E3 this year. According to House, that’s because “We want to ensure we have a full range of the best experiences on the new system that we can showcase in their entirety.”

House also stated that all games would be supported on both platforms and that supporting the newer PS4 would create a small amount of additional work, but nothing too difficult. Sony will require that all games continue to support the standard PS4, but expects that the vast majority will support the newer variant as well.


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If there is a dark cloud over the rapid emergence of VR games and entertainment content, it is the walled-garden approach being taken by some of the leaders in the space — particularly Oculus. When you buy an app or a game from the Oculus Store, it will only run with an Oculus-powered headset, even though you typically pay just as much for it as a version that will play on any PC with any monitor (and often any headset). Gamer-focused Razer has taken the issue head on, pushing an Open Source VR platform — OSVR — and providing open hardware to power it. Today Razer demoed its HDK2 headset, that features similar specs to the Oculus Rift headset for $200 less.

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