Game Tech News

Christmas is a great time for finding deals on various bits of equipment, and Newegg is offering an AMD Fury X at rock-bottom pricing. There’s an XFX version of the GPU for $319 at Newegg right now, and while we don’t normally recommend cards based on rebates, you can pull the total price down to $299 if you’re willing to submit one.

That’s a pretty insane deal by any measure. When we compared the Radeon Fury against the GTX 1060 earlier this year, we noted that the Fury was a compelling challenger compared to the GTX 1060. The Fury X is roughly 10% faster than the Fury, which means this is about as good a deal as you can get on a $300 GPU.

There are a few caveats to keep in mind. First, the Fury X is limited to a 4GB memory buffer, while other cards in this category now regularly offer more. Whether or not that’s an issue will depend on what kind of games you play and how often you upgrade. Our 4GB memory testing last year demonstrated that 2015-era GPUs tend to run out of steam before the memory limit becomes a problem, and that’s still true of the other $300 GPUs competing in this territory.



Tech specs on the Fury X

There are a few things to be aware of if you’re eying a Fury X. First, it’s an older GPU and draws a fair bit of power as a result, so make sure to check power supply requirements and make certain your own hardware is within spec. The 4GB memory limitation is also a bit of a barrier at this point — it should be fine for current and future titles, provided you’re playing at 1080p or 1440p, but 4K isn’t a great resolution for the Fury X, even though the card can technically drive it.

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Nintendo’s Mini NES Classic Edition is one of the hottest tech items this Christmas and it’s been nearly impossible to find as a result. Now, thanks to a new report, we have an idea just how many consoles Nintendo has sold: Nearly 200,000 Classic NES systems thus far in America alone. The Wii U is estimated to have sold just 220,000 units in the last six months, which means a 30-year-old game console is blowing out Nintendo’s most recent living room platform. Nintendo is fond of arguing that specs alone don’t make great games, but the company probably didn’t plan to make that point in quite such dramatic fashion.

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Razer has been making a name for itself in the PC market the past few years, after starting life as an accessory manufacturer with products named after various types of snakes. The company has been behind some far-out proposals for next-generation hardware, worked with Intel and AMD to bring external dock support to market, and has pushed hard to position the Razer Blade (thin-and-light ultrabook) and Razer Blade Pro as high-end systems for enthusiasts who are often spoiled for choice. Reviews of the updated 2016 Razer Book Pro have dropped, so how does the hardware look?

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Upgrading an older system to deliver higher performance in games can be a chore if you’re not used to the process, but Nvidia wants to make the experience a little easier. The company has unveiled what its calling a PC Gaming Revival Kit, and while the hardware is currently only being stocked in Spanish-speaking countries, we suspect this kind of bundle could come stateside relatively easily if Nvidia sees strong uptake.
Kit contents include:

• An MSI GeForce GTX 1060 3GB
• Corsair Force Series LE 240GB SSD
• Corsair CX450M Power supply
• *T-Shirt
• A Gears of War 4 code

According to VideoCardz, which first spotted the kit, the retail price of these components would come to roughly the same price as the bundle, so it’s not currently much of a savings. Then again, comprehensive kits of this sort rarely are. The point is to put together a list of solid components that the consumer can purchase and rely on, not to necessarily offer a significant cost advantage. These sorts of hardware products used to be more common, particularly when CD-ROMs and multimedia capabilities started to debut in consumer hardware. Those of you who were computing back then likely recall the CD-ROM + speakers + SoundBlaster kits that companies like Creative often sold.



Kit contents.

As a gaming revival kit, this is pretty solid. SSDs are excellent for improving the performance of older machines, the GTX 1060 3GB is a good GPU for a midrange system (though the 3GB RAM limit is a bit smaller than we’d like), a 450W PSU should drive the rig easily, and you walk away with a game code you can use to test your new hardware. The only sticking point is RAM — systems from several years ago might need a bump in that regard.
Part of what makes this kit work, of course, is how little CPU performance has improved over the last 4-6 years. If you’re still running a 2008 – 2010 Nehalem Core i7, you can pick up significant performance gains from upgrading. Even Sandy Bridge systems, by this point, can look forward to some moderate improvements — but that’s really the threshold as far as significant gains, and even then the results are more likely to be “modestly faster” as opposed to “Holy crap, would you look at that?” If you’d told me in 2006 that plenty of people would still be using CPUs that were pushing a decade, I wouldn’t have believed you. Things could slow down, of course, but that slow?

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Just over 17 years ago, Turbine Software launched the third major MMO to hit the market, Asheron’s Call. Now, that journey and the briefer resurrection of its sequel, Asheron’s Call 2, are both coming to an end, with servers scheduled to go offline on January 31. The announcement was made as part of a general shakeup at Turbine, which also developed Dungeons and Dragons Online as well as Lord of the Rings Online. These last two titles have been shifted to a new game studio, Standing Stone Games, and will continue with “business as usual” with no significant changes or disruptions planned at this time. There’s a full FAQ available if you currently play one or both games and want to check on what’s happening as a result of the transition.

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We got our hands on the PS4 Pro back in November, and we gave it a thorough workout on a 1080p TV and the PSVR. But now that we’ve had a few weeks to test it out running on a 4K TV with HDR, we have a better idea of just how much visual bang for your buck you’ll get with Sony’s latest console.

For testing purposes, we hooked up the PS4 Pro to a mid-range 2016 4K UHD TV with HDR10 support. While it certainly doesn’t have the same kind of visual punch as a $4,000 OLED screen, it’s a massive step-up in quality over a standard full HD set. And since this model lists for a fraction of the cost of a top-of-the-line OLED set, it’s a lot closer to what an average person would be using in their home.

With that in mind, let’s check out a few games and video services on the PS4 Pro, and see how they hold up on a 4K TV. And while we’re at it, we’ll look ahead to a handful of upcoming titles that will make your wallet quiver in fear.

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We’ve seen a rapid reappraisal of Nintendo’s Switch hardware in recent weeks. For months, scuttlebutt pointed to a Pascal-derived product, only for multiple sources to specify that no, Maxwell and the 20nm Tegra X1 was the basis for Nintendo’s next-generation device, rather than a 14/16nm Pascal SoC. Information on the screen has pointed to a consistent 720p, but a recent report claims that Nintendo will opt for something considerably higher-resolution.

Takashi Mochizuki, the Wall Street Journal’s Tokyo-based technology reporter, has published a series of tweets from Ace Research Institute analyst Ace Yasuda, who claims that Nintendo will use DisplayPort over USB-C to provide a 5Gbps connection for external video, and that the display will be a 1080p screen with a 1440p resolution target when the handheld is docked. His series of tweets is below:



The USB-C over DisplayPort tweet implies that the Nintendo Switch is using USB-C’s Alternate Mode for DisplayPort support with a USB 3.0 / USB 3.1 Gen 1 controller. The idea that the controller might feature a 1080p or 1440p screen is interesting — it’s possible that the displays on the developer units were initially 720p, but that Nintendo managed to source higher-resolution displays with resolution targets it found more appealing.

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So far, confirmed news on Nintendo’s Switch is difficult to come by. We know the chip is based on Nvidia technology, we know it’s a hybrid console, and we know it’ll feature detachable controllers. Now, we have a bit more information from the FCC, and while we can’t put this in the 100% confirmed category, it’s a strong indication. Filings with that organization show that the Switch hardware Nintendo submitted for testing and verification — hardware that’s supposedly equivalent to the final shipping product — doesn’t contain a user-removable battery.

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Windows 10’s upcoming Redstone 2 update (aka, “Creator’s Update,”) is expected to introduce a variety of features that at least six people will care about, including a new 3D version of MS Paint, a “My People” feature that integrates with other aspects of Windows like Skype, a new UI for Windows Defender, and various improvements to the company’s Edge browser.

One feature Microsoft hasn’t talked about at all, however, is the idea of a dedicated game mode for Windows 10. Twitter user h0x0d caught sight of hints of a new mode in preview build 14997 and tweeted about it:



But this only raises more questions. What would gamemode.dll be for in the first place? Plenty of sources have hypothesized that this is a tweak that would allow a system to dedicate more CPU and GPU resources to gaming rather than paying quite so much attention to what’s going on with background apps. But what does this realistically mean in Windows 10, when even the Xbox One touts the ability to multi-task and can snap certain applications right along game content?

The idea that Windows could dedicate more resources to gaming sounds interesting, and I’m nowhere near enough of a software engineer to say there’s no improvements to be made — but my general understanding is that the principle difference between consoles and PCs in terms of gaming was at the API level. Prior to DirectX 12, game developers had much less direct control over various aspects of 3D rendering, and the DirectX 11 API itself didn’t map particularly well to anyone’s GPU hardware.

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The Nvidia Shield Android TV box tries to emulate mainstream game consoles with game-streaming capabilities and an included controller. At CES, Nvidia announced it was pulling another common game console trick — the Shield is shrinking. The new Nvidia Shield is considerably smaller than the last one, and it has a new, more refined controller.

The Shield is where Nvidia is putting all its Android focus lately. It hasn’t released a new variant of the Shield Tablet in more than a year now, and the long-rumored update was quietly cancelled a few months ago. The original Shield handheld gaming device was also a one-off that has never been updated. That leaves the Android TV box version of Shield. It was already the best Android TV device around, and that’ll probably be true of the new one as well; it’s extremely similar.

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