Game Tech News

Now that Nvidia’s top-end GTX 1080 Ti is in-market, enthusiasts have begun testing, to see just how much performance they can wring out of the core. So far, the GPU has proven to top out around 1.9GHz in best-case scenarios, with a typical boost clock of around 1.6GHz. But how far can that be pushed?

That’s what the folks at Tom’s Hardware wanted to know, so they built a custom water cooling loop to see how far the GTX 1080 Ti can be pushed. Well, that, and because they weren’t particularly pleased with the GPU’s overall noise level under load. Custom water cooling loops aren’t something I’ve gotten to play with very often, but I have built one when I tested the CryoVenom R9 290 just over three years ago (we used the same rig for testing a pair of Asus Poseidon GTX 780s as well).

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Son' games in the near future. These games won’t be limited to the PS4 — they’ll also be available for streaming to compatible PCs.

Sony says*PS4 games as well as existing PS3 games will be available via one subscription and promises to share more details as the service moves closer to launch. The service will include cloud saved games, allowing you to begin a game on one device and pick it up on either a different PS4 or a PC — meaning you could conceivably play a game on a living room PS4, retire to your PC if the TV was needed for something else, then pick it up again on the big-screen later, without interruption or problems.

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Nintendo’s Switch has been flying off store shelves and is on track to hit the company’s target of two million devices shipped within March. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has also been extremely popular, selling almost as fast as the handheld itself.

According to game and research firm SuperData, information its received from various sources indicate the Switch has shifted 500,000 consoles in this country alone, with 360,000 shipping to Japan, 85,000 units in the UK, and 110,000 in France (a full country-by-country breakdown was not available). These figures only reflect the first week of sales, which puts Nintendo well on its way to hitting its two-million Switch target.

The initially strong response to the Switch seems to have been significantly driven by one game: Zelda: Breath of the Wild. According to SuperData, they estimate 89% of Switch owners have bought the title, with 1.34 million copies sold to-date. This doesn’t even include the Wii U version, though if analyses of that platform’s performance are accurate, it’s easily the worst way to experience the game.

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With this latest installment in the Mass Effect franchise, BioWare has moved the story 2.5 million light-years away from the controversial ending of the original trilogy. Thanks to*a lengthy development period, a new engine, a new crop of consoles, and a fresh narrative start, the expectations of fans are fairly high. We’re all dying to see if BioWare delivered the goods.

Here’s the story: After a 600-year journey, ships from the Milky Way are arriving in Andromeda in the year 2819. The Citadel races (Humans, Turians, Asari, and Salarians) have sent tens of thousands of individuals to colonize planets in a different galaxy, and these poor souls are largely unaware of the giant robotic space squids that their friends and family were inundated with back home. Sadly, things aren’t so rosy in Andromeda either.

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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is an amazing game by all accounts, with an incredibly high sell rate (as of last week, something like 93% of Switch owners bought BotW). Much has been written about the game, from how turning off Wi-Fi may improve performance to an in-depth comparison of how it plays against the Wii U version. But there’s one potential issue to be aware of, should you choose to hand the game to a different player to start from scratch.
If you try to start another BotW playthrough without first creating a new account, you’ll lose all of your saves, permanently. To be fair, Nintendo does warn you if you try to start a game, saying: “Overwrite previous save data?” But that’s simply not as clear as the company might think it is. “Overwrite previous save data,” could mean autosaves. It could mean that mission checkpoints and the list the game keeps of what you’ve accomplished in the game will be reset. It can also mean that every single save you’ve created, both manual and automatic, will be deleted — and apparently that’s exactly what it does mean, according to Kotaku’s Jason Schreier.



If you want to save your progress in BotW while still letting someone else play the game from scratch, you’ll have to create a new account every time you do it. What makes this somewhat confusing for players is that I’ve encountered various games that employed all of those definitions when asking if you want to start a new game. Not all at once, mind you, but in general. A vastly better message would be: “Starting a new game without first creating a new account will erase all of the saved games associated with this account.” It’s slightly longer, granted, but it also clearly communicates both what the user needs to do and what will happen if they don’t do it. Schreier himself notes that he initially misinterpreted the message, and he’s someone who plays games for a living.


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I’ve got a shelf full of computer history books, many of which I love and have reread several times. But I wanted to write one that focused on the first real computer I grew up with, the one that eventually led me to the tech industry and journalism: the Atari 800.

We’ve covered vintage computing many times before on ExtremeTech. I wrote a retro gaming feature back in 2010 (and a 2017 rewrite of that is in the works and will be ready real soon now). But I’ve always wanted to do a deep dive on Atari’s 8-bit computer, its peripherals, and most importantly, its games. It was an astounding machine. It was the first real gaming PC, one with graphics coprocessors and hardware sprite animation. It blew the contemporary competition out of the water, and was even superior in some respects to the Commodore 64 — also a great early computer, but one that lacked some of the Atari 8-bit’s innovations despite coming out three years later.

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Ever since the Nintendo Switch launched, there have been issues reported with its left Joy-Con controller. Teardowns and analysis confirmed the source of the problem. Unlike the right Joy-Con, which had its own separate antenna, the left Joy-Con’s antenna was part of the circuit board and partly shielded by the player’s hand.
Nintendo has fixed the problem with the left Joy-Con by implementing a small piece of conductive foam at the corner of the Joy-Con, as shown in the image below:




That small bit of conducting foam is apparently resolving the problems with connectivity for just about everyone, as reported by Cnet.

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For the last few years, there’s been an ongoing debate about the benefits and advantages (or lack thereof) surrounding DirectX 12. It hasn’t helped any that the argument has been bitterly partisan, with Nvidia GPUs often showing minimal benefits or even performance regressions, while AMD cards have often shown significant performance increases.

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Earlier this week, Mass Effect: Andromeda launched to a somewhat muted response. Beyond the interface issues and lackluster animations frequently cited by critics, the Xbox One and vanilla PS4 suffer from performance issues as well. Now, we have a better idea of how well the PC version holds up.

The Digital Foundry team gave the early stages a run-through on a high-end gaming PC, and found some substantial improvements. Not only can existing graphics cards handle the game running at 4K at 30fps, but the 1080p60 option is solid as well. Compared with the 1080p30 target on the base PS4 and the 900p30 target on the Xbox One, both configs are superb if you have the hardware to handle it.

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For years, GameStop has managed to maintain a significant lock on the physical games sale business, even as online sales of games and consoles became more popular online. The company’s current business model may have hit the hard wall of shifting consumer tastes according to its own fourth quarter results.

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