Game Tech News

Yesterday, our own Joel Hruska wrote a post arguing for the merits of the Xbox One X. His premise is rock solid, and the hardware is very impressive, but this line in his article stood out to me: “When I say the Xbox One X is worth buying, that doesn’t mean it makes sense for literally every person right now.” I couldn’t agree more.
There’s a decent number of 4K-loving early adopters out there that will be entirely pleased with the Xbox One X at the $500 price point. I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum–it’s totally fine if the Xbox One X (Buy on Amazon for $499) makes you happy. However, if you’re unsure whether it’s worth it to buy (or upgrade to) the Xbox One X right now, there are a few conditions and competing products that are worth considering before you make your decision.

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A little over two years ago, AMD announced that it would restructure its high-end GPU development team. This new unit, dubbed the Radeon Technologies Group, would be led by senior vice president Raja Koduri. While RTG was never an independent spin-off or subsidiary, it enjoyed a fair degree of autonomy and concentrated AMD driver development, developer relations, GPU design, and GPU architectures all under the same unit. This was a departure from the previous arrangement, in which AMD has substantially unified its APU, CPU, and GPU teams. RTG, we were told, would be the vehicle AMD needed to deliver a best-in-class part that could compete with anything Nvidia had to offer. Now, Raja has announced he’s leaving AMD (he had been on sabbatical for the past 40 days).



Hexus obtained a copy of the memo Koduri sent to other members of the RTG group. In it, he thanks his co-workers for their hard work and dedication to a difficult two-year period and specifically mentions both Lisa Su and Mark Papermaster for the trust they extended to him in forming and backing RTG in the first place.

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Microtransactions have been hotly debated since they began debuting in mobile games almost ten years ago. While they’d been used sporadically in various games for years, the rise of mobile games and their extremely low-to-free pricing made them a functional necessity for developers working in Android or iOS. The AAA PC gaming industry quickly took notice of this, and began offering games with microtransaction options. There’s been a great deal of pushback from the community at various points (Dead Space 3 got hosed for it, as did Bethesda and its horse armor), but microtransactions are clearly here to say. Ubisoft just reported that it took in more money in microtransaction sales than it did in game sales for the first time ever.

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Earlier this week, Intel confirmed it would work with AMD to develop a new GPU for use in its NUC (Next Unit of Computing) systems. The news sent waves through the tech community, both because it had been previously rumored (and specifically denied), by Intel and because it’s the first such collaborative product effort between AMD and Intel in… well, basically ever. The two companies may work together in joint efforts to write standards or as members of other tech organizations, but they haven’t jointly announced collaborative products in decades.

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Most of the mechanical keyboards marketed as “gaming” boards don’t have many features that make them demonstrably better for gaming. That’s not the case with the Wooting One, an intriguing mechanical keyboard that was launched on Kickstarter earlier this year. It looks like a fairly standard keyboard, but the switches are an entirely new design that feature optical analog input–it’s not just on or off like other switches.

The Wooting One gives you more control over movement in games, similar to the analog stick on a controller, but with the added precision of a mouse. You might see a real advantage in certain titles. However, not all games play nicely with analog switches.

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Update: Multiple readers have written to suggest this could be a surge related to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds opening in China. If so, it would be an extraordinary event — I can’t recall a single time when one title so overwhelmingly tilted Steam results in a given direction. But as multiple readers have observed, PUBG is now pulling in 2x to as much as 5x more players than the current second-place game, depending on when you check the data.

If this hypothesis is accurate, Steam’s current data set cannot be reconciled with Steam’s previous data set. The figures reported for dramatically decreased market share for AMD, as well as the surge in Windows 7, are not inaccurate relative to the number of systems running Steam. But they cannot be compared with the previous survey results and do not represent a falloff of AMD sales, Windows 10 market share, VR headset sales, or a sea change in quad-core CPU shipments.

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Update: There are reports that EA “compensated” for slashing the price of heroes by slashing how many credits you can earn in the single-player campaign and in Arcade Mode. Which… I mean, really, EA? Really? Is there an attached limb you won’t blow off?

Original Story Below:
EA has been playing defense on Star Wars Battlefront II for nearly a week. While early coverage of the game was positive, highlighting deeper multiplayer and a genuine single-player story, things have changed in the run-up to launch. Players were extremely unhappy to discover that it could take 40 hours to unlock heroes, and EA’s initial response to this absolutely didn’t help.

While the company has slashed the cost of major heroes, follow-up stories have detailed how the loot crate system is fundamentally a play-to-win gambit, in which players who spend real-world money will have huge advantages over those who don’t. Now, Belgium is investigating the loot crate situation and EA’s attempts to do damage control via a Reddit AMA appear to have backfired.

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When Microsoft announced its refreshed Surface Book 2 last week, it was quite clear about how it wanted to position the product. “This is a desktop,” Panos Panay, Microsoft’s corporate VP of devices, declared. “For many, this is likely the most performant desktop they have ever seen.” Apparently Panay was working with a different definition of “performant” than the rest of us, however, because the Surface Book 2’s true stand-out feature this time around isn’t the hinge, upgraded GPU, or its generally high performance: It’s that Microsoft’s latest and greatest literally can’t game on AC power without draining the battery.

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I’ve demoed a lot of smartphone-based, augmented reality (AR) headsets, and while they’ve always seemed to have potential, nothing about them was very compelling. Lenovo and Disney are working to change that this holiday season with a well-thought-out game based on Star Wars, called Jedi Challenges. There are quite a few cute AR games now, but most of them rely just on your phone’s display, so they’re hardly immersive. Star Wars: Jedi Challenges ($199.99) (See it on BestBuy.com) goes quite a bit beyond that.

Leveraging Disney’s expertise in entertainment, and Lenovo’s inexpensive-but-clever Mirage AR headset, the game does a good job of making you believe you are interacting with holographic objects. The crowning touch, though, is the AR light saber. You control it by using a physical light saber handle, modeled after the ones in the movies. The cameras built-in to Lenovo’s Mirage AR headset track it and provide the deadly beam of energy Star Wars fans have come to know and love.

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For the past few years, AMD has worked on a new generation of external GPU technology that would use Thunderbolt 3 and offer a better experience. This push got a major boost when Apple announced back in June that the MacBook Pro line would support this functionality. eGPU support is still being built into macOS High Sierra, but it’s now in a sufficient state for testing.

9to5 Mac took a Mantiz Venus MZ-02 chassis for a spin to find out what kind of performance upgrade Mac users might expect from adopting a high-end GPU. The results are early — hardware isn’t properly identified, and the author may have made a mistake in his hardware configurations, given that he tested Rocket League with vertical sync enabled. While that’s a reasonable option when it comes to how you personally prefer to handle V-sync, it permanently caps performance of any solution at the maximum refresh rate of the monitor. If your GPU can push 500fps and you lock your frame rate to 60Hz, 60fps is all you’re going to get.

But, with that caveat in place, we can at least say the RX Vega 64 retains enough of its raw performance to smash through what the MacBook Pro 13-inch is capable of delivering. Unigine Heaven isn’t a great test these days — it’s old and synthetic — but it does show a MacBook Pro 13-inch barely breaking 10fps on its own compared with a smooth 65fps for the Vega 64.



Again, early driver support and imperfect hardware detection makes it clear that it’s still early days to be running out to bet on eGPU performance in Apple systems, but the long-term trend is positive. The chassis in question is expensive, at $400, but includes a power supply, can charge the MacBook Pro while gaming, and has SSD mounting brackets, USB 3.0 and gigabit Ethernet support, and a 550W power supply.

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