Game Tech News

Yesterday, AMD’s Vega 56 GPU went on sale — and immediately vanished from the market. Availability was exceptionally brief, possibly only a matter of minutes, and the cards are now sold out at every retailer we’ve checked (Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg). Obviously new stock may trickle out to manufacturers, but snagging a card is going to require lightning-fast reflexes and a good memory for one’s own credit card number. Once again, the likely culprit is cryptocurrency mining; AMD GPUs have been exceedingly difficult to find in-market and NV cards, while easier to locate, aren’t exactly selling for their MSRPs. The cheapest GTX 1070 available at Newegg is $429, with many models pushing into $489+ territory.

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During Gamescom last week, Microsoft showed a significant number of games running on the new Xbox One X (See it on Amazon) hardware. New titles like Forza Motorsport 7 are looking superb on this half-step console, and older releases like Rise of the Tomb Raider are being jazzed up as well. So if what we’ve seen recently is representative of what we’ll get this November 7, will Microsoft’s new console be able to deliver on all of our hopes and dreams?

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Last year, Nintendo launched its great monument to bait-and-switch, the NES Classic Edition. The cutting-edge 30-year-old console packed a reasonable number of classic NES games into a diminutive form factor; then Nintendo slapped an attractive $60 price on the whole shebang. And then, in the face of completely predictable high demand, Nintendo decided to build six of them a week. After a few months, the company decided it had enough money and killed the NES Classic, despite selling more of them in a few months than it had sold Wii U’s in the entire calendar year.

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While the PS4 Pro can’t live up to a high-end PC, it’s an excellent way to give your 4K TV a real workout without spending much. Sure, it retails for 400 bucks, but it’s easy to find refurbs and open-box deals ranging from $350 to $370. Even better, some of the best Pro-enabled games are already quite affordable.

It’s a given that new full-priced games will take advantage of the additional graphical power in the Pro, but there’s a surprisingly wide selection of titles that received excellent post-release Pro patches as well. From relatively small indies to beloved Sony exclusives to third-party best sellers, there’s a lot of high-res enjoyment to be had for $20 or less.

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Nintendo’s third-party developer relations have never been as strong as Sony’s or Microsoft. Some consoles, like the Wii, had a great deal of third-party games, even if the console missed out on many of the most popular franchises that debuted on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. The Wii U’s third-party support was much worse, thanks to low lifetime platform sales.

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When Nvidia or AMD launch a new GPU, there’s a typical rollout pattern. The first cards out the door are reference designs, based on a package Nvidia and AMD provide. Later, companies like MSI, Gigabyte, EVGA, Asus, and PowerColor debut their own custom designs. These custom boards are generally clocked higher, have better, quieter coolers, or may be built on a custom smaller PCB. This time around, however, AMD’s board partners are reportedly having major trouble sourcing GPUs.

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When Atari announced its upcoming “Ataribox” earlier this year, it was a fairly transparent attempt to cash-in on the retro gaming craze that Nintendo kicked off with the NES Classic last fall. There were, however, some concerns about how Atari would make money in the first place, or whether anyone would actually want the platform. Unlike Nintendo, which has always maintained a tight grip on its franchises and properties, rarely making them available for platforms it doesn’t control, Atari has released any number of collections and bundles for various platforms. The initial console reveal was just a video of a faux-wood box, with no information on the platform’s hardware or capabilities.

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In 1989, the first Sierra game I ever played, Space Quest III, shipped on six 5.25-inch double-density, double-sided floppy disks. A hard drive was optional, though copying the game files to the HDD substantially improved performance. The total game install was between 3.5 and 4MB–but that was significant, when a computer from the same time period only had between 10 or 20MB of HDD space.

Fast forward nearly 30 years, and games of today commonly eat dozens of gigabytes per install, dwarfing the sizes that were common as recently as five years ago, at the end of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era. To some extent, this is to be expected. As consoles and PCs have become more powerful, they’ve added support for higher resolutions and more detailed graphics. These higher-quality detail levels require higher-quality assets, which means the game installation grows as a result. Increasing the size of a game world or adding additional content also increases total installation size. If a (sadly hypothetical) Skyrim II uses art assets that are four times larger on average than Skyrim’s, and is twice the geographical size, the final game is going to be far larger than its predecessor.

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PC gaming has a plethora of benefits: customizability, high frame rates, an enormous variety, and most notably, low prices. Thankfully, if you’re not looking for brand new releases, it won’t cost you much to stock up on excellent games from every genre under the sun.

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Today, Intel is unveiling its new Coffee Lake line of desktop CPU cores and its first mainstream desktop response to AMD’s Ryzen architecture since that platform launched in March. That’s not to say we haven’t seen some significant shifts in Intel’s desktop parts–in fact, even before today’s launch, we’ve seen more price drops and feature improvements from Intel in 2017 than at any point since at least 2011.

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