Game Tech News

AMD has been quite tight-lipped about Vega, its upcoming consumer GPU meant to compete at the high end of the market, as opposed to the midrange RX 400/500 families. Thanks to some leaks, however, we now know a bit more than we did before about what Vega can do and how it does it.

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The first edition of Dungeons & Dragons came out in 1974, but the venerable tabletop game is still rolling along. Now in its 5th*Edition, the various incarnations of the game have relied more on dice and statistics than some other competing RPGs that place a greater emphasis on DM/GM (Dungeon Master/Game Master) discretion and roleplaying and less on random outcomes. Now, Wizards of the Coast is prepping a major release of three digital tools meant to improve game speed and streamline the experience.

If you’ve ever actually played D&D or seen the Summoner video set to audio from the Dead Alewives, you’re aware that the game (particularly its earlier incarnations) could be downright lugubrious.

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There’s a new “unofficial” project to bring back classic WoW gaming — just not in quite the same form as the game’s original launch code. The new, unofficial (read: Blizzard un-approved) Felmyst server will target The Burning Crusade expansion as its setting rather than the original, vanilla, World of Warcraft.

As someone who played a great deal of WoW during both vanilla and TBC, I’d say that this is the stronger technical choice. The Burning Crusade rebalanced the game around a new level cap and arrived once a major set of class overhauls had expanded the roles that hybrid classes — Paladins, Druids, and Shaman — could viably play in end-game raids. In vanilla (depending, to some extent, on which patch you were talking about), all three of these classes were reasonably viable in 5-man dungeon content as healers, damage-dealers (DPSers), or tanks, but were assigned/required to heal in most raids. Poor itemization meant that Retribution (DPS) or Protection (Tanking) Paladins had little chance of competing against Warriors, which were either DPSers or tanks, but had no healing option. Druids and Shaman had similar problems to a greater or smaller degree.

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After last year’s NES Classic Edition being such a smash it, it wasn’t surprising to see the company follow up with this year’s Super*NES Classic Edition (although as previously stated, I don’t recommend trying to get your hands on one). But that’s not all the company apparently has up its sleeve.

According to Business Insider, Nintendo has filed for a European trademark on a stylistic representation of an N64 controller. While that might not seem like much, the design elements of the image (shown below) match those that we’ve seen on the NES Classic Edition box. In other words, it’s not crazy to think Nintendo might be prepping a new variant of the N64, or at least taking preliminary steps to do so.


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In business, it’s usually ideal to sell as many things as possible to consumers, but Nintendo has a different approach. The NES Classic Edition released last year was a hot must-have gift for the holiday season, but Nintendo just didn’t make very many of them. Then, Nintendo discontinued the device while people were still clamoring to get their hands on it. It’s all very bizarre, and it’s possible we’re headed for a very similar outcome with the upcoming SNES Classic.

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In the wake of Oculus’ decision to cut the price of the Oculus Rift with controllers to $400, there’s been some worry that this move indicates a major new platform update is imminent. It’s not a crazy idea — plenty of companies, from car dealerships to CPU and sometimes even GPU manufacturers will cut prices to clear inventory and make room for upcoming models. In Oculus’ case, however, that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening.

Now, Facebook executives threw cold water on the idea of an upcoming new product generation from multiple angles. In an interview with CNET, Facebook’s Jason Rubin, head of content and marketing for Oculus VR as well as being the creator of both Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter series, stated: “Someone who buys a Rift today has years of enjoyment in front of them.”

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AMD released the latest version of its Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition (whew) last night, with a significant performance and feature boost for Team Red GPU owners. It’s part of a significant transformation in how AMD handles its drivers that kicked off in earnest back in November 2015, with the launch of Radeon Software Crimson Edition.

From 2012 to 2015, AMD adhered to a limited driver release schedule with periodic updates and more driver betas provided as opposed to more frequent (monthly) updates. The company’s more recent policy has been to release much faster updates, with 17 drivers published so far this year, mostly as optional updates to improve performance in specific titles.

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It’s been a little less than five months since AMD launched its first Ryzen 7 products, and the company is finally ready to introduce its Ryzen 3 family of CPUs. While Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 may have captured more headlines, Ryzen 3’s lower price points are targeted at the mass market of gamers that want a decent CPU with solid performance, but who don’t want to spend an arm and a leg on it.

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AMD has been trickling information about Threadripper piece-by-piece over the last few months, ensuring that the topic stays fresh and keeps people interested. This weekend, the company finally released some significant details about Threadripper and its plans for the platform long-term.

We’ve created a slideshow with some of the most important data on performance and overall product positioning against Intel. Click to enlarge each slide in a new window.

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At SIGGRAPH this week, both AMD and Nvidia are announcing various hardware and software technologies. SIGGRAPH is an annual show that focuses on computer graphics and advances in rendering techniques. At the show this year, Nvidia showcased the ways AI could be used to improve gaming or to create extremely realistic images, without the enormous computational horsepower that would be required to brute force certain visual standards.
This last bit is of more than incidental concern.

The problem is simple: If you compare a top-shelf character animation from 2017 versus the best hardware of 2005, you’ll obviously notice the difference. At the same time, however, you’re unlikely to be fooled into thinking that even the most amazing CG is actually a movie. Slowing silicon advances make it less and less likely that we’ll ever be able to simply computationally force the issue. Perhaps more to the point, even if we could, brute-forcing a solution is rarely the best way to solve it.

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