Game Tech News

There are a lot of ways that EA could deal with its Battlefront 2 program. The company could announce it was redesigning the progression system so that early players didn’t have a huge advantage over those who bought the game later. It could bring its microtransaction ideas back, but use them for cosmetic upgrades that don’t affect gameplay. But being EA, it decided to double down on the worst aspects of game design. And now it’s defending that decision, claiming that it only wanted to respect Star Wars canon. Here’s EA’s CFO, Blake Jorgensen, speaking at the 21st Credit Suisse technology conference:
“The one thing we’re very focused on and they’re extremely focused on is not violating the canon of Star Wars,” Jorgensen said, as reported by GamesIndustry.biz. “It’s an amazing brand that’s been built over many, many years. So if you did a bunch of cosmetic things, you might start to violate the canon. Darth Vader in white probably doesn’t make sense, versus in black. Not to mention you probably don’t want Darth Vader in pink. No offense to pink, but I don’t think that’s right in the canon.”

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Nintendo has been famously reluctant to allow its classic games to run on anyone else’s platform, but it’s making an exception in China. Nvidia is teaming up with Nintendo to launch the Shield Android TV box in China with an assortment of games from the Wii and Gamecube. Don’t hold your breath for these games to launch in other markets, though.

Nvidia has put together multiple partnerships to bring games like Borderlands and Doom 3 to the Shield, but the Chinese launch is all about Nintendo. The Shield is the only Android TV device with any kind of market share right now. It retails for around $200 in the US, and ships with a remote control and a game controller. Inside is a powerful Nvidia Tegra X1 chip that can decode 4K HDR video and run console-quality games. This is the same chip powering the Switch, so this partnership was probably a no-brainer.

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Digital gaming giant Valve has announced that some 18 months after adding the ability to buy games on Steam with Bitcoin, it will no longer accept BTC as a method of payment. The original decision to accept the cryptocurrency was never seen as a make-or-break affair for Bitcoin’s acceptance as legal tender, but Steam’s dominance of PC digital game distribution and the overlap between PC game enthusiasts and BTC users made it a high-profile win back in 2016. (To be clear, we’re not saying that there’s a high degree of overlap between gamers and cryptocurrency enthusiasts, so much as we’re arguing BTC is probably more popular with gamers than it is with, say, suburban Atlanta retirees.)

There are several reasons why Valve has stopped supporting BTC. First, the fees required to process transactions on the Bitcoin network have jumped, up to as high as $20, compared with just 20 cents when Valve began accepting the cryptocurrency. Second, the volatility surrounding Bitcoin has become a significant concern. The currency’s value has skyrocketed since the beginning of the year, but it’s also become much more volatile. Third — and this is an issue we’ve discussed when talking about Bitcoin’s several forks since August 1 — it can take a long time to process transactions on the network.

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Forza Motorsport 7If you have a high-end gaming PC or a brand new



CupheadCounter-intuitively, the most enjoyable part of Cuphead is how the developers were able to make it look nothing at all like a video game. Meticulously hand-drawn to emulate the aesthetic of early 20th century cartoons, this unforgiving shooter-platformer is an absolute joy to view. With dead-on approximations of a different medium in a distant era, even those of us who rarely play games are taken in by the execution of this standout indie title. While we don't need a flood of cartoon-themed shooters, the industry would definitely benefit if more games pushed the envelope of what 2D games could look like.

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AMD’s Navi has been of interest to AMD fans since it first popped up on roadmaps, with hints of a next-generation memory subsystem and a “scalability” option that might be similar to the modular GPU designs that Nvidia is supposedly considering for its own products. First, the hints. As Hot Hardware reports, some driver notes for a Linux driver update back in July that were recently discovered reported:
[WARNING]: Should use –pci when using create_asic_from_script()
new_chip.gfx10.mmSUPER_SECRET => 0x12345670
new_chip.gfx10.mmSUPER_SECRET.enable[0:0]
GFX10 is a Navi reference, and there are plenty of other hints to ongoing Navi work at AMD, from a job opening for a senior ASIC design and layout engineer (Shanghai, China) to various statements from AMD that it’s working on 7nm ramps already (the remarks date to May of this year). A Navi tape-out now or in the next few months would clear the way for a professional product introduction late next summer or fall, with consumer cards arriving a few months later.

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As 2017 coasts to an end, we ExtremeTech writers have spent a good chunk of our time this month looking back at what we enjoyed most. We all have our own specialties and tech predilections, but pretty much everybody here enjoys video games. Some of us focus on new releases to stay on the cutting edge, others are still working their way through their back logs, but we can all use this opportunity to commiserate about our time spent exploring virtual worlds.

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Live streaming has become a wildly popular pastime and revenue stream in the last few years. So popular, in fact, both Amazon and Microsoft acquired streaming empires while Google expanded into the market with YouTube. And while there are some high profile streamers who bring in some serious cash, this massive rise in streaming is built on the backs of average users who stream and watch just for fun.

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Microsoft revealed the future of gaming in in November of 2010 and it was called the Kinect. This motion-tracking camera accessory for the Xbox 360 was supposed to usher in an era of controlling games with your body, but that never happened. Its newest consoles need an adapter for the Kinect, but you won’t find that anymore. After being out of stock for several months, the Xbox One Kinect adapter has officially been discontinued by Microsoft. Even if you pick up the discontinued Kinect camera, good luck making it work with a new console.

According to Microsoft, it decided to discontinue the Xbox One’s Kinect adapter in order to spend time and resources developing more highly requested accessories for the console. This doesn’t exactly come as a surprise, though. Kinect didn’t have long-term appeal for gamers or developers. The Windows version of Kinect was discontinued in 2015, and Microsoft killed the Xbox 360 Kinect in 2016. The Xbox One version died just a few months ago, but it’s still in stock at most retailers.

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At CES 2018, Nvidia announced a new line of gaming monitors designed to round up and deliver every single high-end feature you can buy in a monitor or television today. The company’s new BFGD monitors — the acronym stands for Big Format Game Display, obviously, and not the kind of profanity-fueled phrase that might lead one to label such a display a “BFGD Screen” — are serious business, as the saying goes.

All of the partner displays from Acer, Asus, and HP are 65-inch panels that support up to 120Hz refresh rates and HDR with up to 1,000 nits of brightness. The devices also integrate an Nvidia Shield, which Nvidia says will deliver Netflix, Amazon Video, and YouTube at 4K, plus Nvidia GameStream, and Android games and apps.

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Samsung is throwing its hat into the GDDR6 ring and joining Micron in ramping the new memory technology for upcoming GPU products. It’s not a surprising move, but it does suggest that GDDR6 will be more widely adopted than its predecessor, GDDR5X.

Samsung is touting the new memory as being built on a 10nm* process at double the density of its previous RAM. 16Gbit chips means scaling up to 2GB of RAM per GDDR6 chip. This also clears the way for much higher amounts of RAM onboard GPUs over time, though I doubt we’ll see many 24GB GPUs in the near future. Even advanced 4K titles with HDR and other bells and whistles don’t push that kind of envelope (for now).

One potential advantage of the GDDR6 push is that we should finally see 2GB cards dropping off the map this generation. With Intel now fielding 4GB GPUs on its Radeon-integrated hardware, hopefully we’ll see a shift to larger RAM buffers across the board.
Samsung is claiming its GDDR6 can scale up to 72GB/s per channel (18Gbps per pin), which is more than twice as fast as the old GDDR5 standard and its 8Gbps performance. This ignores GDDR5X, of course, but since Samsung never built that type of RAM it can get away with skipping it as a point of comparison. Early GPUs are likely to opt for lower-clocked RAM, but a 72GB/s channel transfer rate is impressive, implying that a 256-bit GPU could hit 576GB/s of memory bandwidth. The next generation of midrange cards from AMD and Nvidia should be potent competitors for this reason alone.

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