Game Tech News

Blizzard’s StarCraft and the follow-up expansion Brood Wars are considered two of the greatest real-time strategy (RTS) games ever created. First released in 1998, the original game had three related campaigns between races (Terran, Protoss, and Zerg) that played dramatically differently from one another. This was a significant departure from earlier games like Warcraft: Orcs and Humans or Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, which had little practical differentiation between the races.

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Razer’s Razer Blade Pro has been the company’s go-to high-end machine for gamers wanting a desktop replacement, and the company has tweaked its high-end configuration for 2017. The jumps aren’t huge, but the new system will offer a Kaby Lake Core i7-7820HQ (2.9GHz base, 3.9GHz Turbo) as opposed to the older i7-6820HQ (2.7GHz base, 3.6GHz Turbo). It also ships with DDR4-2667 instead of DDR4-2133.

The other major claim to fame for this laptop is its support for THX. To achieve that, the Razer Blade Pro had to meet certain standards for color resolution, color accuracy, and video playback (on the video side). The audio jack on the Razer Blade Pro also had to be certified for THX, which means conforming to that standard’s guidelines for crosstalk, distortion, frequency response, and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).

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Last Friday, Nintendo pushed a patch for the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild that’s said to significantly improve performance when playing in both handheld and docked mode. The only actual patch notes are:
“Adjustments have been made to make for a more pleasant gaming experience.”

That’s a very short note for the improved experience you get. Kotaku took the game for a test-drive and reported significantly improved frame rates in Korok Forest, which normally had substantial dips. Jason Schreier tested the Switch in docked mode (important, since that mode reportedly had issues at the upscaled 900p resolution).

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Not enough resolution is one of the most common complaints about the current crop of VR headsets. They’re all more or less roughly 1080p (or 2K), split between the two lenses. So I was really interested when Aukey came out with the Cortex 4K VR headset at $399.99 — substantially below the Rift or Vive. However, while specs are one thing, real world performance is another. I’ve been taking an Aukey Cortex 4K through its paces. So far, my test results have been mixed.

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Nintendo’s new hybrid handheld / living-room console is inevitably going to suffer more damage than its strictly living-room relatives; you don’t see too many people lugging a PlayStation 4 around with a built-in display, after all. A new report suggests that the Switch has problems over and above some intrinsic fragility, with multiple users reporting that their Switches are warping, particularly those that have been used in docks for most of their life cycle.

The reports started from a Reddit user, _NSR, according to TechnoBuffalo and as shown below:




In and of itself, that looks like bad luck, or a defective system rather than a systemic flaw — but reports from other users have started coming in as well. It looks as though there are a number of Switches showing signs of warping, including one owned by TechnoBuffalo author Joey Davidson.

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Last week, the Total War: Warhammer team released a new patch, codenamed Bretonnia. While they didn’t specifically discuss any kind of new features in the patch notes, testing shows that the update significantly improved performance on AMD’s new Ryzen microprocessors.

PCGames.fr tested the new 1.6.0 patch, and found a consistent 10 percent improvement on all three Ryzen 7 processors, as shown below:



Intel microprocessors were reportedly unaffected by the patch. The size of the improvement suggests further proof for AMD’s claim that Ryzen’s lower-than-expected performance in some titles was caused by a lack of game code optimizations.

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When Nvidia launched the GTX 1080 Ti at the end of February, it short-circuited its own highest-end product, the 6-month old Nvidia Titan X, thanks to higher clocks and a much lower price tag ($700, compared with $1,200). Now, Nvidia is rectifying that issue with a full-fat GP102 part — the Titan Xp.


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Microsoft finally announced some of the specifics of its upcoming Project Scorpio refresh, and the implications for the Xbox One product line are enormous. This isn’t just a refresh or a doubling-up of existing resources, like Sony used with the PS4 Pro. This is something altogether different, and Microsoft doesn’t seem to be just gunning for the PS4 — it’s taking on the PC market as well.

Project Scorpio tech specs

Project Scorpio will feature 40 ‘customized’ Radeon compute units (2,560 cores, presumably) clocked at 1172MHz. The clock speed boost alone is 1.37x higher than the Xbox One, while the GPU’s core count has increased by 3.33x.



The new Project Scorpio SoC, built on TSMC’s 16nm FinFET proces. Image by Digital Foundry

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Now that we’ve discussed the basic technical specs of Project Scorpio, Microsoft’s follow-up to the original Xbox One, it’s time to cover some of the ancillary information, like 4K support, 1080p goodies, and VR functionality. Microsoft and Sony are pursuing different strategies with their new refreshed hardware, so it’s worth exploring what each platform offers (at least, as of this writing).

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AMD launched an entire refresh cycle of its midrange graphics cards today. While our review focuses on the RX 580, AMD is also shipping new SKUs for the RX 460 and 470, as well as a new part, the RX 550. Let’s step through what’s changed for these chips, and what the updates mean for gamers in these market segments.

RX 560 and RX 570

The RX 560 and RX 570 are both iterative improvements of the RX 460 and RX 470 GPUs AMD launched nearly a year ago. Both Anandtech and Hot Hardware included the RX 570 in their reviews, and it broadly shows the same pattern as the RX 580 — which is to say, performance is improved by ~12*percent, the GPUs are quieter (thanks to improved cooling solutions relative to AMD’s reference designs on the RX 470 / RX 480), and they throttle much less. The flip side is that these GPUs do burn more power. Anandtech’s review implies that the RX 570’s power curve is a bit better than the RX 580s, meaning the gap between the stock RX 470 and a custom, overclocked RX 570 is about 10 percent smaller than the equivalent gap between a stock RX 480 and an overclocked RX 580. Since the RX 570 is also clocked lower than the RX 580, this fits our theory that Polaris is slamming into the top of its frequency curve. We don’t know how much headroom is left in these chips, but we’re fairly certain tapping it will burn larger and larger amounts of power relative to measured performance improvement.

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