Game Tech News

The PC market has largely moved to digital sales, thanks in part to aggressive down-sizing from chain stores like GameStop over the last decade, and partly because online PC gaming has been baked in for twenty years. There are, however, still people who like buying a game on physical media and prefer having a CD or disc with the game’s content rather than relying on a digital service. In recent years, we’ve seen a trend where game developers don’t bother putting the entire game on-disc, instead relying on the end user to download it from a secondary service. Now, Titanfall 2 is simply getting rid of physical media entirely. If you buy a physical boxed game, all you get is a code in a box. No disc, no nothing.

A leaked copy of the Titanfall 2 box art shows the game with a prominent “Download ONLY / No Disc Included” sticker, as you can see below:



There are several ways to look at this. On the one hand, boxed copies of games are a dying breed. Outside of collector or deluxe editions, which typically come with various value-adds of highly questionable value, few people collect boxed games anymore. The entire concept of the “Deluxe” or “Collector” edition is directly tied to both the sale of DLC and pre-order benefits (which is generally terrible for the industry and gamers), or just a money-grabbing mechanism designed to make a few bucks of profit off a games’ most die-hard fans.

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The original BioShock is considered a classic of modern PC gaming. Hailed as the spiritual successor to 1999’s System Shock 2, BioShock tells the story of Rapture, an underwater city and libertarian paradise gone badly wrong. Ruled by the increasingly unhinged and tyrannical Andrew Ryan, the city you descend to explore is a madhouse utopia gone wrong. Andrew Ryan’s Objectivist paradise, always on unsteady footing, was destroyed by the discovery of ADAM, a substance that could be used to grant incredible powers to those who use it, but which also fatally undermined their sanity and biology in the long-term. In BioShock, you play as Jack, a man who descends into Rapture after a plane crash and learns the truth about the social experiment — and himself.

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There’s a new set of rumors cropping up about AMD’s Vega. Last month, we covered an AMD press slide that stated the GPU would only arrive sometime in the first half of 2017. Now, reports indicate that the chip could drop in the first quarter — still quite late compared with Nvidia’s Pascal, which will have been in market for nearly a year at that point, but better than the late June timeframe typically hit by “H1” launch windows.

The upcoming Vega 10 chip will feature 24 TFLOPS of 16-bit precision performance, 16GB of HBM2, and 512GB/s of memory bandwidth, with 64 compute units in total, according to VideoCardz. If Vega keeps GCN’s 64 compute cores per compute unit, that puts a full-size Vega core at 4,096 cores in total. The 16GB of HBM2 is expected based on the specs we’ve seen for that standard, but the RAM bandwidth is significantly lower than what we’ve expected to date. HBM2 is designed to support up to 256GB/s of bandwidth per stack, and first-generation HBM2 solutions are expected to ship with 4GB stacks. That works out to up to 1TB/s of memory bandwidth for a full implementation — and the first-generation HBM implementations that AMD shipped were full implementations.



If these stats are accurate, it implies that AMD has kept bandwidth flat between Fiji and Vega rather than improving it further by pushing HBM2. Nvidia’s GP100, which is set to debut in 2017, offers 720GB/s of memory bandwidth. 512GB/s of bandwidth would compete well against Nvidia’s GTX 1080 and Titan X, however, and AMD may have scaled its bandwidth accordingly. TDP on the new high-end card is supposedly 225W, which would put it near Nvidia’s Titan X.

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Well, that didn’t take long. When Sony unveiled the new PS4 Pro, we spent some time talking about 4K, the difference between native and upscaled content, and what Sony can and can’t deliver as far as 4K is concerned with a GPU based on the RX 480. Now, we’ve got Microsoft weighing in on the capabilities of Project Scorpio.

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When No Man’s Sky launched in August, it was already clear that the game would primarily appeal to a niche audience. The title’s lead designer and head of developer Hello Games, Sean Murray, has been blasted for promising the game would include features that didn’t actually ship. Not long after launch, Murray and Hello Games went radio-silent as players began requesting refunds. Now, nearly a month later, the game has transformed into a ghost of its former self.

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Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR who sold the company to Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion, has been confirmed as the major financial backer behind a pro-Donald Trump group called Nimble America. Nimble America, in its own words, is a “social welfare 501(c)4 non-profit dedicated to shitposting in real life.”

The DailyBeast broke the story and confirmed with Luckey that he was the near-billionaire NimbleRichMan associated with Nimble America.


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If you’re a diehard PC gamer, you probably don’t have much of a history with the Forza franchise. This traditionally console-based series dipped its toe into the PC market with the free-to-play release of Forza Motorsport 6: Apex earlier this year, but Forza Horizon 3 marks the first simultaneous release on console and PC. And now that it’s been in the wild for a few days, we’re starting to see exactly how far Playground Games and Microsoft can push this engine on high-end PC hardware.

Even though Horizon 3 runs relatively smoothly at 30Hz on the Xbox One, the recommended specs for the Windows 10 version of the game are surprisingly high. The developers think you should be running at least a Core i7-3820 CPU, a GTX 970/R9 290X graphics card, 4GB of VRAM, and 12GB of RAM for a 1080p experience. Want to run the game at 2160p? Well, the “ideal specs” are listed as a Core i7-6700 CPU, a GTX 980Ti/R9 Fury X graphics card, 6GB of VRAM, 16GB of RAM, and an SSD.

After fighting with the Windows Store for a few days, the Digital Foundry team has finally given the game a once-over on a top-tier setup. With a Core i7-6700K and a Titan X Pascal, 2160p at a solid 60 frames per second was achievable as long as the anti-aliasing was configured to use FXAA instead of 4x MSAA.

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For the last few years, Apple has been an AMD-only shop. Graphics may not be a core area that Apple focuses on — OpenGL support in the latest version of macOS remains stuck in 4.1 territory). But it does include*discrete graphics cards in several of its MacBook Pro and iMac products, as well as in all of the Mac Pro SKUs. Now, there’s talk that Apple might switch back to Nvidia.

Bloomberg first noticed multiple job listings at Nvidia (some of which have since been edited) that talk about “help[ing] produce the next revolutionary Apple products” and claimed the role would require “working in partnership with Apple” and writing code that will “define and shape the future” of the Mac’s graphics software. There are also openings on the Mac driver team, and Nvidia doesn’t bother writing drivers and software for a platform it doesn’t intend to sell.

The report also notes that winning Apple’s business back would be a coup for Nvidia, which has lost some small amount of market share to AMD in recent quarters. Overall, Nvidia remains in control of the desktop add-in market, with roughly 75% market share. AMD’s own Polaris launch earlier this year was meant to reverse this trend, but Polaris is still priced well above its initial MSRP. GTX 1060 stock, in contrast, is both more widely available and more likely to be found at its target $200 to $250 price point. Both companies are still running hot, but Nvidia is doing a better job of managing the temperature.



Nvidia’s GP100 Pascal GPU.

As for the proverbial feather in Nvidia’s cap, Apple occupies a weird spot in the overall PC market. Its shipments are significant (Apple typically claims the fourth or fifth spot in total PC market share), but it’s dwarfed by its competitors. At the same time, however, people talk about the decisions Apple makes, whether that means building an extremely powerful system in a small wastepaper basket or removing useful ports from smartphones. When Apple shipped twin GPUs with the Mac Pro, it was seen as a sign the company would move towards improving its own graphics implementations and support emerging standards more aggressively. This hasn’t really happened; Apple has Metal, but it doesn’t support OpenCL 2.0 or any version of OpenGL past 4.1.

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After a disappointing showing with 2014’s Civilization: Beyond Earth, Firaxis Games is returning to the classic Civ formula. In Civilization VI, you’ll pick a society to control, build a nation from scratch, and ultimately work towards world domination in one way or the other.
If you’ve played Civ games before, you almost certainly know what you’re getting into here. It doesn’t seem like Firaxis is shaking things up too much this time around, but the move to a more exaggerated art style is rather divisive. Our sister site PCMag spent some time with an early build of the game, and didn’t care much for the new art direction. In contrast, I’ve actually quite liked what I’ve seen so far, but that mostly comes down to personal taste.

More worrisome are the criticisms about the user experience. In a game so heavily focused on reading stats and interacting with menus, any steps backwards in usability will undoubtedly enrage Civ fans from the word “go.” At this stage, it seems that some rather vital information (overall happiness) is not being surfaced properly, but the UI can also get cluttered with less important notifications. It’s disappointing, but those can definitely be improved in a post-release patch.

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Game developer Bethesda Softworks has announced the upcoming Skyrim Special Edition and Fallout 4 will both be receiving mod support on the PS4. Previously, this had been in some doubt — while Bethesda announced plans to bring FO4 mod support to both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, updates from earlier this summer suggested that Sony wasn’t keen on the idea and Bethesda might scrap it altogether. It’s not clear how the two companies came to agree on extending modding support for Sony’s new system, but Skyrim Special Edition will arrive with modding options on Sony’s console when it ships on October 28.

Bethesda also announced that Skyrim Enhanced Edition will run at native 4K on the PS4 Pro. That’s honestly not very surprising — Skyrim is a PS3-era title and we’ve already seen how developers like Naughty Dog were able to take a late-generation title that was heavily optimized for the PS3 (The Last of Us) and improve visual quality on the original PS4 while simultaneously boosting the frame rate. The PlayStation 4 Pro offers even more firepower than the original PS4, which likely puts 4K in range — especially since the graphics updates Bethesda has showcased appear to focus more on the game’s lighting engine than on upgraded textures or new levels of detail.



Skyrim SE appears to use most, if not all, of Bethesda’s original texture assets, but the new lighting engine is gorgeous.

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