Game Tech News

Ever since Game Mode surfaced as an upcoming Windows 10 feature, we’ve been curious to see what the new mode would offer as far as performance and capability. Microsoft has given guidance that the feature could give players an extra 2-5% frame rate in general, and while that’s not much, if you’re trying to make a marginal title playable you can use all the help you can get.

The technology’s current benefits are minimal, however, early testing by Jarred Walton of PC Gamer shows. All of the usual caveats apply: This version of Game Mode is still being worked on, it’s only available as part of Microsoft’s Early Access program, and the versions of Windows you get in the Fast Ring builds can be pretty wonky.

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Recently, Sony began rolling out the beta for the PS4 4.50 software update, and with it comes a bevy of useful user-facing changes. External hard drive support and custom wallpapers are getting a lot of public attention from the PlayStation team, but they didn’t say much about the biggest feature — a new “Boost mode” for the PS4 Pro.
Based on some leaked videos and screenshots from users running the latest beta, the PS4 Pro will enhance the performance of some older releases without the need for an official patch from the developers. Simply toggle on the boost mode, and the games will be able to take advantage of at lease some of the additional horsepower in the Pro.

As is, the PS4 Pro runs non-optimized PS4 titles almost exactly like they would run on a base PS4. The CPU is clocked down, and roughly half of the GPU goes unused. This theoretically means that all PS4 titles should operate without any additional quirks. So logically, allowing these non-optimized games to run without those protections in place in boost mode could potentially lead to some unexpected behavior.

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Last year, Facebook announced it would push Oculus Rift demo kits in 500 Best Buy stores around the nation. The move was widely seen as key to establishing virtual reality in the consumer market. One of the biggest problems with VR is that it’s impossible to convey in text, images, or video what it’s like to actually wear a headset.

On a 2D screen, the output from a VR headset just looks odd and weirdly doubled up (with one image for each eye).

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Earlier this week we discussed Sony’s Boost Mode for the PS4 Pro. The idea behind Boost Mode is that some of the PS4 Pro’s clock speed improvements can be harnessed to make older titles faster, even if those titles don’t receive updates to take full advantage of the improved hardware under the hood. Now, we have some idea what kind of benefits Boost Mode can deliver — and frankly, they’re pretty impressive.

Eurogamer has tested a number of titles and seen encouraging results, though the figures are a bit split. Boost Mode allows the PS4 Pro to use its higher core clocks — 30% higher on the CPU, 14% higher on the GPU — but which titles benefit is interesting. Some games, like BioShock Infinite, Killzone Shadow Fall, Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst, and Tomb Raider Definitive Edition see improvements in the 5% – 17% range, with several improving by 14% — exactly the size of the PS4 Pro’s clock speed boost over the PS4. Other games, like Assassin’s Creed Unity, Battlefield 4, Mighty No 9, and Project CARS see jumps of up to 38%.

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For most people, Resident Evil 7 has been a positive experience regardless of platform. On the PS4, it’s even better thanks to built-in PSVR support. Unfortunately, a small percentage of people running the game on the PS4 Pro are experiencing major graphical glitches. Even worse, neither Capcom nor Sony have been willing to step up to properly deal with this issue.

By most estimates, Resident Evil 7 is a well-liked game. It earned a “Good” score of 7.7 on our sister site IGN. And based on 86 reviews aggregated on Metacritic, the PS4 version is sitting nicely at an 86/100. It seems that the new direction worked out well for the long-running series, and that’s why this technical blemish is so infuriating. I’d really like to sit down and play RE7, but I keep running into a showstopping bug.

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After months in beta, Intel has announced official Vulkan support for Skylake and Kaby Lake GPUs. Intel’s 15.45.14.4590 driver is the first release to add full Vulkan API support (previous releases were all various flavors of beta). In keeping with Intel’s previous remarks on OS support, the latest driver will only support Windows 10 on Kaby Lake, but sixth-generation GPUs are supported in Windows 7, 8.1, and 10. That alone points to the artificiality of the restriction — as far as their graphics pipelines are concerned, Kaby Lake and Skylake use identical GPUs.

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Microsoft has announced it will take the lid off Scorpio at its E3 conference on June 11, four years after the Xbox One got taken apart by Sony during E3 2013. Scorpio, in many ways, is Microsoft’s first real chance to clean up the Xbox One baggage the company has been dragging around for nearly four years.

Microsoft’s early plans for the Xbox One were vastly different from what Sony offered with the PlayStation 4. Where Sony went simple and focused on the “It plays games,” message, Microsoft went broad. The Xbox One was a multimedia system where you could watch TV and game (despite lacking a DVR). It’s Kinect 2 camera was almost as expensive as the console itself, and Redmond was investing in creative partnerships to create custom Xbox One content, enhanced apps that took advantage of Kinect 2, and a live-action Halo TV series helmed by Steven Spielberg (Microsoft insists this is still happening, but the show is now 18 months behind schedule and Phil Spencer has taken to given single-word updates on it via Twitter).

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Back in 2014, Sony debuted a new, Netflix-like game streaming service dubbed PlayStation Now. The service was expensive, at $20 per month or $45 per three months, but it supported a wide range of hardware including televisions, Blu-ray players, the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation TV, the PlayStation Vita, all 2013 – 2015 Bravia TVs, and all Samsung television models. Strangely enough, PlayStation Now support for all of these devices will be turned off in August 2017,*except for the 2016 Bravia televisions, which go offline on April 1. Why the latest televisions go offline four months before everyone else hasn’t been explained. When our own Grant Brunner reviewed the service in August of 2014, he came away impressed.



More like PlayStation Then.

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After a weak showing early in the generation, Sony’s first-party exclusives for the PS4 have been very impressive as of late. Uncharted 4, The Last Guardian, and Gravity Rush 2 have all garnered significant praise in recent months, and the latest title out of Dutch studio Guerrilla Games is another standout exclusive for Sony’s platform. Horizon: Zero Dawn tells a fascinating sci-fi story in an open world that can thoroughly impress on both the base PS4 and the PS4 Pro.

More than anything else, Guerrilla Games is known for creating Killzone — the sci-fi FPS franchise that started its life way back on the PS2. The latest installment of that series had a handful of high points, but it was clear by 2013 that sequel fatigue had set in. Frankly, that’s a large part of why the public unveiling of Horizon at E3 2015 was met with so much excitement. Guerrilla was finally developing something brand new, and it looked incredible.

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For months, computer enthusiasts have chafed for fresh official information on Ryzen, as opposed to the stream of unverified leaks. Today, AMD is releasing detailed product information, pricing, and estimated IPC improvements over Excavator. Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen — things are about to get real interesting in the PC market.
For those of you just tuning in, Ryzen is AMD’s last, best chance to prove it can compete effectively against Intel’s Core i3/i5/i7 product lines. For years, AMD has been stuck trying to compete against Intel’s top-end chips with its Piledriver-based architecture. Ryzen is a new architecture, completely unrelated to AMD’s previous Bulldozer / Piledriver / Steamroller / Excavator product lines. It’s no exaggeration to say that AMD’s future in the PC market depends on this core. Based on what we saw at the Ryzen launch event on Tuesday, that future is in good hands.
For years, AMD has talked about a 40% IPC uplift for its chips compared with Excavator. Today, AMD revealed that it didn’t just meet that goal, it beat it by 12 percentage points. There’s no evidence whatsoever that this 52% uplift is a cherry-picked figure. If anything, it might be somewhat conservative.


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