Kickstarter is making waves in the gaming scene; every week there’s a new indie developer looking for funding via Kickstarter. The great thing about Kickstarter is that it’s a springboard for a plethora of different projects, and every now and then we get some really interesting goals cropping up. For example, there is a Kickstarter campaign for an online web series entitled Tropes vs Women in Video Games.

Anita Sarkeesian is no stranger to analysing pop culture’s preoccupation with presenting women in stereotyped roles. Her original web series, Tropes vs Women, covers mediums like films and books. Her new series will focus exclusively on video games and the how the industry portrays female characters, whether they’re leading ladies or tacked-on eye-candy.

Her Kickstarter has almost reached its goal, which is great news considering the subject matter. While analysing female representation in video games isn’t anything new, judging by her previous work Sarkeesian approaches the subject in a very accessible manner. She’s not trying to make you stop playing certain types of games, she’s merely getting you to think about the type of media you’re consuming. You can read more about the project here, or check out her website for her previous work.

Alienware’s X51 is the only small form-factor PC that could look at home with your regular entertainment systems and could even replace the need for a console for some people. The X51 is based off desktop parts and requires very little maintenance. Its fully upgradeable and also negates the need to buy Valve’s console box when it launches. Read on to see why you’d want one. 

By default the X51 ships in two flavours; the low-end version houses a Intel Core i3-2120 LGA1155 processor, 4GB of DDR3-1333 RAM (upgradeable to 8GB), a 1TB Western Digital hard drive, a dual-layer DVD drive and a full-sized Nvidia GT545 desktop card. When ordering the X51 from Dell’s Alienware site you can also choose any component up to a Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770 processor, any solid state drive of your choice, a Blu-Ray reader as well as Nvidia’s GTX555. You might have your jaw on the floor and tongue wagging by now, but the best thing is how Dell got all this kit into such a small chassis.

The X51′s chassis is tiny, comparable to the Xbox 360 Slim more than Sony’s trying-to-be-anorexic PS3. The chassis was designed from the ground-up to be modular and its slim design is thanks to – you guessed it – an external power brick. The more expensive X51 with the Core i7 option comes with a 330w 80Plus rated power supply which means one of two things; 1) if your power supply blows, your hardware is still safe from frying out and buying a new one is all it takes, even if its expensive and, 2) the power circuitry is specially designed for the TDP of the entire system including the CPU and graphics card. That’s why, on the 250watt power supply, the most you’d ever do is a Core i5-2400 as an add-in. In their review of the console-like PC with the larger power supply, The Verge managed to use a GTX560Ti inside the chassis with room to spare. The GPU slots in sideways inside the chassis and uses a riser board (those of you more than twenty years old will probably remember those) that plugs into a modified PCI-Express 16x expansion slot, all in an effort to keep space usage to a minimum. I wish more things were designed with as much thought and attention to detail as the X51. When powered on, the plexiglass cut-outs glow with a range of colours that you can configure in Alienware’s customisation program in Windows – red, green or blue.

Its probably the best usage of space I've ever seen.

At the back you’ll see a host of ports for use of the X51 as a desktop PC or a entertainment console/media centre. USB3.0 ports are found on the front and back of the chassis, there’s a slot-loading DVD drive at the front as well as HDMI and Digital Audio-out ports at the back. Its designed to usurp your consoles with better gaming performance and ability and this is certainly true in The Verge’s tests. Most games play with high settings at 720p resolutions, with some allowing for the use of AA and AF. That’s on the GTX555, which I need to remind you is a last-generation part. With the minimum TDP of 150w that Alienware recommends for the 330w power supply, you could squeeze in a GTX660 when it launches and have 1080p visuals and not-so-anemic settings. Hell, stick in a HD7770 or the GTX660 and you could theoretically put up three 46″ Tvs running at 3840 x 720 for the best gaming experience this side of the equator. The potential is nearly limitless with this machine.

Stacked with the consoles, the X51 looks right at home.

Sadly, this is not an option for most of us. While the X51 would end up being the perfect LAN partner with a 22″ monitor, an Xbox controller or wireless keyboard and mouse and some comfy earphones, the basic version starts at $699 direct from Dell. For the best balanced configuration, you could order the Core i3-2120 with 8GB of RAM, the GTX555 and the 330w power supply if you phone Dell and ask them nicely. That at least leaves you open to upgrades to a quad-core Core i7 processor, a GTX or Radeon-whatever and an SSD stuck somewhere inside where you can fit it. You’d be putting up at least R9000 for the convenience of the small chassis, but at least you aren’t shooting yourself in the foot with the low-end option either.

For those of you who use high-end workstations, ask your IT department to consider getting you an X51 if you’re due for an upgrade. Choosing the 8GB option with the Core i7-3770, a 240GB SSD, Blu-Ray reader and perhaps a mid-range Quadro card would mean you’ve got a lot less desk space to be occupied and a quieter and better-looking machine. But what if you can’t afford to buy the X51, what other choice do you have for getting a low-cost, slim gaming desktop to have fun with? You could go with an ITX chassis and motherboard, which I’ve outlined for you below (convenient, isn’t it? Drool no more, you can have something similar too!)

LIAN LI PC-Q07 (Black) @ R585

INTEL DH67CF CLEAR FORK @ R1050

Intel Core i3-2120 3.3Ghz @ R1183

Geil Value Plus DDR3-1333 4GB x2 @ R478

Club 3D HD7750 1GB DDR5 Single-slot @ R1145 or Gigabyte GTX550Ti 1GB DDR5 @ R1377

Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB @ R804

LITE-ON iHAS524 DVD-RW @ R174

Antec EA-380D Earthwatts Green @ R452

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit @ R1077

Total: R6892

Its closer to the X51′s default asking price, yes, but what you lose in slim width and convenience you make up in flexibility. You’ve got the same range of upgrade options, a comparable chassis that allows you to use a third-party CPU cooler if you wanted. The Lian Li does have one caveat though and that’s the use of a single PCI slot for your graphics cards. You’d only be able to use single-slot solutions which isn’t too bad, as the coolers are still allowed to be dual-slot sizes. However, you’ll get all that heat back into your chassis. A better option for those who worry about heat would be the Cooler Master’s Elite 360, which is a slimmer desktop chassis and allows the use of cheaper mATX boards and dual-slot graphics cards. You can even turn the case sideways and put your monitor on it, saving space in cramped environments.

If you’re a purist, however, there’s only one option for you – the Alienware X51! And that’s why its today’s Fantasy Friday hardware item.

Source: Alienware.com, The Verge, Eurogamer

Discuss this in the forums: Linky

Publisher THQ isn’t having the best run of luck at the moment. They’ve recently revealed that they’re looking to offload that stylishly gory hack and slash game Devil’s Third, which is a total bummer. Hopefully somebody snaffles that up because it was looking like a boatload of fun.

Luckily, Darksiders II is still looking rather healthy. Except for Death I guess, because he’s, well, dead really. Still! The game’s a ton of fun; I played it during a recent trip to Amsterdam, and you can read all about that in the current issue of NAG magazine. Alternatively you can read the interview I did with the game’s director, Marvin Donald, right over here.

To remind us that (in spite of the recent delay) Death lives, THQ and Vigil have unleashed the second part of their “Death Strikes” cinematic trailer. The action in the trailer is reminiscent of the section of the game I’ve played. Fans of Shadow of the Colossus should pay attention. Hit the jump for part 2; if you missed the first part you can find it here.

Rhode Island based developer and publisher 38 Studios (the team behind Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning) looks to be in a dire financial situation. The company was founded in 2006 by baseball pitcher Curt Schilling. The Rhode Island government approved a loan of $75 million for 38 Studios as part of an Economic Development program – earlier this week, 38 Studios defaulted on the repayment to the tune of $1.25 million.

This default on payment has prompted the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation to investigate what’s happening with the studio and publisher. Since then, 38 Studios issued a cheque to the Economic Development Corporation, which was then returned to 38 Studios once the EDC learnt that there were insufficient funds in the developer’s account; the cheque would have bounced.

In the worst case scenario, 38 Studios will be declared insolvent and be forced to close. This will leave Rhode Island taxpayers with the responsibility of paying back 38 Studios’ $75 million loan over the next eight years. It’ll also mean that all of 38 Studios’ intellectual property will belong to the Rhode Island public; the IP will likely be sold off to a different developer or publisher in order to recover some of the loan amount.

Adding to the woes of the languishing developer is the fact that they were unable to pay their staff. A source has also told website Joystiq that all temps and contractors at 38 Studios have been fired.

It’s not looking good for 38 Studios at all. What this means for their upcoming MMORPG based on the Amalur universe is pretty obvious. Unsurprisingly, they will not be appearing at E3 this year.

Source: Joystiq

Naughty Dog is making a game that doesn’t star Nathan Drake! But we knew that already. We also knew that The Last of Us has been keeping a low profile as we head towards the build-up to E3. Luckily, there’s a new clip from the game to remind us just how awesome things are looking.

On top of a new clip, we also get a new Ellie, the young, female heroine who we won’t actually control during the game. When we first met Ellie many people commented on how similar she looked and sounded to actress Ellen Page. The character is, in fact, being played by actress Ashley Johnson.

In an interview with website IGN, the game’s creative director Neil Druckmann claimed that the changes to Ellie were done so as to “better reflect [actress] Ashley’s personality, and also resemble a slightly younger teen more fitting to the story”. Hit the jump to see the clip; it’s some nail-biting stuff!

Source: IGN

OpenCL looks to give customers heterogeneous computing abilities no matter the platform, allowing applications to take advantage of GPU acceleration together with your CPU to make short work of things like video encoding, photo editing and animation, to name a few workloads and AMD’s Bulldozer cores currently suck at. With Trinity, AMD has pushed forward their agenda to open the OpenCL standard to all applications that could use it and Anandtech showed the world how it could help Intel users, too.

OpenCL doesn’t care which platform its on. Its an alternative to the proprietary QuickSync technology used by Intel which is only supported in paid-for applications like Cyberlink’s MediaEspresso converter. Intel’s Quicksync is really, really good at accelerating the transcoding process while preserving framerate, image quality and picture-perfect colour. by comparison many didn’t favour Nvidia’s approach using CUDA cores, as the final video was more leaning towards performance and a faster, smoother frame rate than image quality. AMD’s Stream achieves the kind of quality seen with Quicksync, but doesn’t have nearly enough chops to do it at the same frantic pace.

 In the test Anandtech ran with MediaEspresso, OpenCL shows that Trinity’s transcoding time nearly halved and now draws up squarely to Intel’s best chips with Quicksync disabled. Not shown here is AMD’s Llano under the same OpenCL benchmark, but I assure you it reaches a similar level of performance, nearly halving the time taken to complete the video. Trinity will never rival the 12-second record set by QuickSync but it doesn’t have to – its almost $300 cheaper than Intel’s flagship.

For those of you who really weren’t paying attention in class and staring at your classmate with the pretty eyes/nice smile/big boobs, OpenCL is actually royalty-free software, free to implement wherever you choose. Who designed it? Apple Inc. No, I’m not joking. All those rumours that Apple was looking to put AMD chips in its laptops in future? Looks a lot more likely now than it ever was, doesn’t it?

Moving onto other applications, a really popular option for those who don’t want to pay the ridiculous fees for MediaEspresso can grab Handbrake, the open-source GPL-distributed video transcoding software. Handbrake is multi-threaded and has been a popular option for many media enthusiasts, but suffers from a lack of GPU acceleration. Nvidia’s CUDA, Intel’s QuickSync and AMD’s ATi Stream are all licensed technology and a free program like Handbrake wouldn’t be able to recoup the kinds of losses it would otherwise incur. It’d just be another media converter that costs roughly $25 to do the same thing as everything else. Handbrake’s dev team is working on an OpenCL-capable build and Anandtech had an early version in their hands for testing. Both Intel and AMD receive a boost from the standard, but wait ’till you see the scores!

Two things should be noted here. First, Intel’s Sandy Bridge platform doesn’t support OpenCL on their HD3000 GPU. Thats surprising considering that it still does better, finishing second behind Ivy Bridge. Both get around a 5fps boost, suggesting that there was a slight amount of power left. It should also be noted that this is with QuickSync disabled, since there’s no discernable benefit. Trinity’s scores double, bringing it right up to the Intel Core i7-3720QM. For a low-end solution, that’s pretty impressive. Even more surprising is Llano’s improvement, more than doubling its original score.

Its a win for AMD either way, and consumers who focus on content creation but need something on a low budget, they’d be happy enough with a capable Llano or Trinity notebook/Ultrabook. Intel users have nothing to fear for now, but this may change in future.

Source: Anandtech

Discuss this in the forums: Linky

If you bought a GTX670 Superclock with the batch product number 02G-P3-2672-KR, you might want to stress out your card for a while and see if anything happens. It might be something, it might be nothing at all discernable to your eye. You might not even know you had a problem and you could go for years without knowing it was there until one day it smacks you in the face with a spade. Maybe you’re losing a few frames and your settings are at stock or the fan is too loud. At this point, if you’re desperate, you really could make up anything you want until you hit on the right fault. 

If you do or don’t find anything but still have that card from the batch, you need to e-mail EVGA’s Jacob Freeman (no relation to Gordon) and he’ll set about replacing your card to the GTX670 FTW. Which, I hardly need tell you, is a bargain of note since FTW cards are binned chips rated for higher performance.

Source: HardOCP

Discuss this in the forums: Linky

Wanna see me? Buy a telescope!

An anonymous electrical and systems engineer who calls himself “Dan”, nicknamed by the Internet as “Scotty”, has uploaded plans and details of how we could build a full-scale version of the starship USS Enterprise that takes us to the Red Planet in ninety days. And all with technology currently available to us.

Scotty’s designs and plans for the ship are detailed on his website, BuildTheEnterprise, and show that the ship could be built in space for $1 trillion and could take up to twenty years to complete. His site shows many concepts and proof-of-concepts that would work on a spaceship of this scale. The ship’s gravity generator would provide 1G of force and would measure 960 metres from front to the rear Ion engines.

The ship would be too big to build anywhere on the planet.

Scotty writes that the ship would have to run off a nuclear reactor as solar power wouldn’t afford the same kind of recharge rate and batteries would add to the expense and weight of the materials needed for the ship. The reactor would have to be incredibly efficient given its smaller size to ones used in nuclear power plants and would have a maximum of 1.5 Gigawatts of heat energy. His plans also include provisioning for a 100MW laser to be used as a weapon. While in use, the engines would have to be powered down as there wouldn’t be enough current to fuel the weapon. Lasers of a similar calibre are already in use on naval battleships commanded by the United States, to the much lower tune of 15MW, which can target and sink a boat up to a mile away. 100MW would easily carve mount Rushmore on the moon’s surface and wipe the smile off Thanos’ face (spoiler for some and shame on you for not watching The Avengers yet if it is). Hold on to your hats, lightsabers might come next.

But back to the ship – Scotty’s even taken the radiating heat from the laser weapon into account with an aluminium coating for the surrounding area of the ship, preventing the outer body from being melted. The engines will be based on current Ion thruster designs in use in small satellites, and are designed to be very efficient. The ship could carry up to 1000 crew members and tons of cargo and would act as a docking station for other, smaller ships.

If the project were to launch now, it would take nine years of research, eleven years of construction in zero-gravity space outside of the field of space junk and the backing, military and monetary support of the richest and most technologically-capable countries in the world.

What are you waiting for, guys?! Let’s go to space. Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!!!

Source: Tom’s Hardware, BuildTheEnterprise

Discuss this in the forums: Linky

Who hunches for hours in front of a PC monitor, cramping their elbows and cultivating haemorrhoids? Not me, that’s not who. Although the keyboard and mouse are pictured here on a coffee table, they are moved onto my lap and a conveniently placed cushion once the real click-looting commences. This arrangement also puts me in range of my Xbox, so I can sign into Xbox LIVE and use the party voice chat because Diablo III doesn’t have it. Improvisation, people.

The Finnish Anti-Piracy Centre (FAPC) wanted to claim €6000 from the woman (approximately R64,000) for some piracy that took place over a twelve-minute period. What was actually shared has never been mentioned outside the courts, but recently the case came to a head and the judge rules that the woman was not guilty. But what this means for other cases all around the planet is a bit unclear. 

See, the defendant’s claim was that it was impossible to discern who actually shared/downloaded the files in question. She had an open Wi-Fi network that could have been accessed at any time. The defendant also lives next door to a school and free internet isn’t something you get every day as a kid, so perhaps someone took advantage of that. During the 12-minute observed period, there was also a school concert on the hall next door, and parents with less-than-honest consciences could have linked to it and downloaded a couple of things off MegaUpload before it was taken down this year (Rapidshare very quickly got a court to deem its activities legal this year, surprise surprise!).

The court went on to forget the whole scenario, taking into account that it was a ridiculous amount of money at stake and looked at whether the matter of having an open Wi-Fi network was an offense on its own right. Luckily this wasn’t Germany, where you can be fined for having an unprotected network with internet connectivity. Had the judge found that it was an offense, the FAPC would have legal grounds to sue and shut down Wi-Fi networks of others which weren’t protected or encrypted. That would have opened up network owners to multiple cases involving piracy and theft if the FAPC could prove that the files were illegally downloaded on the owner’s network.

Its likewise debatable that the FAPC would also ask the government to rule that protecting a network with WEP encryption was just as bad as allowing it to be open. WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol) has been shown to be a weak protection scheme and one that could be cracked in less than five minutes. But the really interesting twist comes at the end, you see. If the courts had rules in the FAPC’s favour, they would then have legal grounds to sue Google for their Wi-Fi snooping.

The street drive cars get lost and pass a map, of all things.

If you remember, Google’s Streetview endeavor used cars fitted with cameras, GPS recorders and Wi-Fi receivers to create a map of the world and use Wi-Fi networks and cell-towers to create a complete and accurate layout of the landscape. Cell phones commonly use GPS locators in addition to cell towers and nearby Wi-Fi networks to get a more accurate lock. If there isn’t a GPS signal, they use the wireless networks to triangulate their position and estimate where the user is on the map. While Google collected all this data, it also identified unprotected Wi-Fi networks and packet-sniffed the unprotected information over the air. Google being Google, they knew about it and kept quiet, collecting terabytes of information in each region they visited.

When civilians found out about this, they alerted their respective governments to the information theft. Germany critisised Google about the data they collected and made it law that an owning an unprotected Wi-Fi network was a criminal offense. The FCC launched its own investigation into Google’s network snooping on American soil and found that while it wasn’t illegal, a measly fine was still applicable. Even the Spaniards didn’t like it and most of the European countries launched their own investigations into the incident to see whether it was worth the worry.

But in the end, nothing’s going to come of it. Hacking into wireless networks is a daily, nay, minutely occurance and aside from large companies who are able to track the hacks taking the people responsible to court, there’s not a lot the average Joe can do. I’ve never heard of someone in SA being taken to court for illegal filesharing on their network, but anything’s possible now.

So do what you can to protect yours. Use WPA2 encryption with a 16-character complex password. Hide your SSID. Reduce your transmitting power especially if your wireless signal only needs to cover a small area. Block other IP addresses from accessing your internet or network. For businesses that have mission-critical material being passed around, isolate your users in your router’s software and employ passwords to protect sharing files.

Its your duty to protect yourself and your data connection, lest someone else abuse it for their own gain and you end up in court for the same thing as the Finnish woman. And you may not find a court that sees things the same way.

Those of you who don’t know about the kind of methods the RIAA uses to twist people into paying the fines they ask for in court can read up on Joel Tenebaum’s columns for the Guardian that he wrote between 2009 and 2010. He was sued for $4.5 million for sharing 30 old Nirvana songs as a student six years ago. He is still fighting the case today, with the absurd sum of $675,000 owing to the RIAA from their original lawsuit.

Source: Tom’s Guide, ZD Net, Time Magazine

Discuss this in the forums: Linky

In fact, the majority of the people I’ve encountered discussing the game are people that I didn’t even know played games, mostly because they don’t anymore. But they did 12 years ago, and IT’S DIABLO BRO.

Anyways, so I’m supposed to write about something today, and at this point it would feel unnatural and forced to write about anything other than Diablo III. So I’m going to share my thoughts so far.

I played the beta extensively a few months ago, and did a few write-ups on the various playable classes. If anything, the beta, like most betas, served only to quell my enthusiasm for the game. The gameplay was not polished, the interface not quite as slick as it should have been, and the scope of the entire experience was just too limited to really hold my interest. I’m pleased to say that most of these issues have been resolved, and Diablo III seems to be an almost perfect action RPG.

The gameplay is fluid, polished, and compelling – and really, that’s what it’s all about. I actually can’t remember the last time I had this much fun playing a game, and I might even begrudgingly admit that I’m having more fun with Diablo III than I did with Diablo II, so far. In a weird way, Diablo III is remarkably minimalist, and I love that about it.  Having spent a shameful number of hours over the last few months exploring the world of Skyrim and battling to save Mass Effect 3’s inhabitants from the mighty Reaper invasion, I find myself now expecting slow, drawn-out gameplay and long, tedious conversation paths to dominate my game time. This is not the case with Diablo III, and it’s gloriously satisfying.

After a brief but straightforward introductory cinematic, you are thrown in the world, and within minutes you are hacking and slashing your way through zombie hordes. The narrative is worked into the gameplay seamlessly, and although you are given a healthy dose of story and background content to digest, it is served in a manner which does not distract from the gameplay. This slick integration of compelling dialogue which doesn’t detract from the fun is part of the genius that is Diablo III.

The pacing is also fantastic. Within the first hour of gameplay you can expect to start creeping up on level  10. In contrast, it can take well over 10 hours to get to the same point in Skyrim. This means that your character, at least early on, develops at a rate which is remarkably satisfying. You are never disengaged, and I think this is what will set Diablo III apart from other contemporary AAA RPGs.

I’m running out of words here, so I’ll jump to my chief complaint so far, and it’s an obvious one. I’ll give you a hint; I bitched about it on this website yesterday.  Diablo III’s obvious problem right now, is that it’s ostensibly a single-player game that requires you to be online at all times, and Blizzard’s servers have simply not been up to the task since launch. Hours of being unable to connect to the game at all are interspersed with laggy gameplay and frequent disconnects. This has led to an inordinate amount of Internet rage, which in all seriousness, I think has been blown out of proportion. I’m willing to assume that Blizzard will sort out these issues within the next few days, and we will be left to enjoy this long-awaited game, which from where I’m sitting, is promising to be something truly glorious.

Have you picked up Diablo III? How has your experience been so far?

For tips on how to potentially improve your Diablo III clicking ‘n’ looting by throwing out the minimalist new-school, here’s a handy link.

As you all know, Activision and Electronic Arts aren’t exactly on speaking terms. Activision and former Infinity Ward main men Jason West and Vince Zampella aren’t on speaking terms either. West and Zampella were responsible for making the Modern Warfare series a household name. They were fired by Activision due to alleged insubordination. They then went to work for EA and that’s when things got even messier.

Activision accused EA of poaching West and Zampella – this was due to go to court but has since been resolved. Activision and EA are settling out of court, with the only official wording on the matter saying “Activision and EA have agreed to put this matter behind them”.

As for Activision versus West and Zampella, that bout of litigation continues. West and Zampella are seeking unpaid bonuses and royalties amounting to millions of dollars. Activision is saying that West and Zampella breached their contract and as such are not entitled to anything. Documents have since surfaced that implicate Activision in instigating an illegal hacking attempt into West and Zampella’s PCs so as to “dig up dirt”.

According to the LA Times newspaper, Activision asked a man called Thomas Fenady to hack into West and Zampella’s email accounts, voicemails and files so as to uncover any evidence that would give the publisher grounds for terminating West and Zampella’s contracts. The move even had a code name called “Project Icebreaker” and was allegedly an instruction that “came from the highest levels of the company”.

Fenady refused to do it, and has since testified, which has resulted in these documents being added to the Activision versus West/Zampella case; that case is scheduled to proceed on 29 May. Activision has refused to comment on “Project Icebreaker”.

Meanwhile, the recent out of court settlement between EA and Activision has given West and Zampella’s lawyer (Bobby Schwartz) a boost in confidence:

“We are delighted. This makes our case against Activision even clearer. Activision dragged EA into the case hoping to distract from Activision’s wretched conduct towards West and Zampella. In dismissing EA today, Activision admits that it was never going to convince anyone that EA conspired with West and Zampella to breach their contracts or did anything else improper. And now Activision will have to answer for its misconduct towards West and Zampella.”

Sources: Eurogamer; LA Times; Kotaku

Diablo games with secret levels are nothing new. What is new is Diablo III, and it’s got a secret level of its own called Whimsyshire. The level itself is meant to be a nod to the fan furore that erupted when Diablo III was first announced. Way back in 2008 (wow, we’ve been waiting a while for this game) Diablo fans moaned that Diablo III looked too colourful.

Blizzard has a sense of humour. As such, it doesn’t get more colourful and cutesy than Whimsyshire. The land features “Cuddle Bears”, rainbow unicorns and dancing flowers. It’s a wonderful land – a beautiful land full of cheer and whimsical laughter. But then, some evil demon hunter suddenly appeared and slaughtered the wonderful creatures of Whimsyshire, all the time repeating the mantra “moar loot!” as he/she carved his/her way through the cuddly friends.

If you want to get to Whimsyshire then you better be collecting a few odds and ends that are scattered about the various acts of the game. There’s a full shopping list after the jump, but be warned that there are some very, very minor spoilers as far as names of characters and locations go. There’s also a video, if you want to witness firsthand the genocide of the creatures of Whimsyshire.

The details of what’s needed are courtesy of Battle.net forum user Zerofire who, along with three of his friends, first discovered Whimsyshire.

The items needed:

Black Mushroom spawns in cathedral level 1 ACT1

Shinbone is located randomly in the fireplace in leorics manor ACT1.

Liquid Rainbow is located from the Mysterious Cave in the Mysterious chest in the Oasis in ACT2. You will know its the right place when you save the old man and he opens it up. the spawn point is always the same for the event.

Wirts Bell is sold from one of the merchants in the city on ACT2

Gibbering Gemstone drops from Chiltara in the caverns of frost ACT3(The area where you destroy the ballistae) if you get Ice caverns exit out and start a new game. The mob itself is random.

The plans drops randomly from Izual on ACT4.

Opening the portal I will leave that up to you.

Source: Battle.net forums
Via: Kotaku

Left to Right: Llano, Trinity and Phenom, three distant cousins

Yes, despite that some people say AMD’s FX-8120 is a octo-core chip, its really four Bulldozer modules with two single-core chips per module, squashed together and forced to share cache, floating point units and bandwidth. Likewise for the quad-core chip, which has two modules and really can’t contend with even Intel’s Sandy Bridge-based Pentiums. For laptops and desktops, AMD promised that Trinity would improve performance by 15% overall and prove a worthy upgrade from the Llano chips of old. Lets see how they’ve delivered.

While AMD’s low-power Brazos and Llano chips may have used the integrated “Sumo” graphics core as leverage in the past, Intel’s Ivy Bridge quickly caught up with their improved integrated graphics core. As Sandy Bridge filtered down into the low-end laptops, AMD’s market and mind share took another dip. Only Brazos-based netbooks and cheap Ultrabook alternatives gained any traction and a reputation for being capable media consumption devices. Gaming was an option on Llano chips, but as you’ll see later, Intel’s HD4000 chip actually does really well for itself in comparision.

Trinity's lineup only consists of dual and quad Piledriver cores, with two processors for each core.

Devastator brings some design wins for AMD.

The graphics core improves with Trinity and launches with “Devastator”, an improved version of the previous chip inside Llano. One of the biggest problems with Llano is that its graphics core was, essentially, too big for its boots. Devastator is based on AMD’s VLIW4 architecture that was used in the HD6000 series and is a more streamlined version of VLIW5 which Llano used. VLIW4 chucks out an ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) that was sitting idle in Llano/s SIMD units. Most applications only take advantage for up to four ALUs so AMD cut out the unused one and used the extra space to fit in more texture units and thread processors (similar to Nvidia’s plan to increase the amount of CUDA cores in a chip, while cutting out the fluff).

In addition, Devastator brings a number of improvements that we saw with the release of the HD7000 series. Devastator supports up to four display outputs using DisplayPort (Sumo was limited to two). You have to daisy-chain on the fourth monitor, but that’s pretty impressive for a notebook processor. In addition,  each output supports its own audio path so that as you cycle a playing video in VLC between monitors with their own speakers, each one plays sound in turn as the video player is moved between each one. Its a really impressive piece of tech and will be useful to people who hook up their laptop to an HDTV and expect things to work without fiddling. Display grouping is also supported and you can group displays in relation to their position in front of you.

Trinity improves the original Bulldozer design but remains on the 32nm process. That has implications for die size and power consumption, but AMD is confident that they’ve got things under control with this new generation of processors. They’re also banking on apps and more software to make use of OpenCL, which allows acceleration using just about any graphics core regardless of make or model. The biggest flaw Bulldozer and Llano have is that floating-point performance is still mainly performed on the processor and OpenCL was nowhere near the kind of polish or potential it has today.

For those of you who are still confused, OpenCL is a framework for other software that allows code to be executed on the CPU and GPU simultaneously, cutting down on completion time and the resources required to accelerate the process. Adobe’s Photoshop  and CS5 suite famously support GPU-accelerated editing options when using certain Nvidia graphics cards. OpenCL aims to remove limits like those and open heterogeneous computing to anyone who needs it.

The next thing to note is that Piledriver improves everywhere that Bulldozer cut corners to get to market as quickly as possible. There are lots of small improvements made from the way code is handled, improved branch prediction and even faster and more optimised L2 cache memory. Its still a bunch of Bulldozer modules clustered together, but they’re made a lot more efficient and robust. Given all the improvements, Piledriver reduced power consumption by as much as 20% which is great given that its designed for laptops and low-power Ultrabook designs. In addition, the floating-point weakness of Llano has been addressed, but not by much – AMD still chooses to put its eggs in its basket with OpenCL.

The last notable improvement has to be AMD’s changes to the way Trinity uses Turbo Boost. When the chip identifies a GPU-intensive workload, it underclocks the processor and raises the clock speed on the GPU. Likewise for a CPU-intensive load, the GPU is underclocked and the CPU’s speed is raised to as much as 3.2Ghz as we see below in the case of Cinebench. Its an interesting idea, and allows Trinity to stay within the 35w power envelope. What does this mean for battery life? You won’t have to worry about how long it will last you, regardless of the workload you’re doing.

This approach will be interesting for overclockers on the desktop if it’s implemented there as well. You might have to turn it off completely to keep settings stable, or you could overclock to find the chip’s operating limits and then keep boost on while raising default clock speeds, allowing the chip to speed up to the maximum stable speed for certain workloads. If we could raise the default power envelope and use our desktops at a nominal 2Ghz but increase that to 3.6Ghz on all cores when there’s a multi-threaded CPU-intensive workload, that would automatically be a far better option in terms of power consumption than Intel’s Turbo boost because it only goes up to a certain point before hitting the maximum power envelope.

In general, performance has improved in all areas and we see this in the benchmarks below. Anandtech’s tests showed Trinity gaining a small lead in PCMark 7′s benchmark, achieving roughly half the computational power of Intel’s Ivy Bridge-based Core i7-3720QM. That scenario plays out in the rest of the benchmarks too, showing better performance than Llano and almost catching up to Sandy Bridge dual-core chips in the Productivity benchmark. Moving to the Creativity test, its shown the the optimisations to Piledriver do their best to improve performance when creating content. However the Computational test shows that Trinity, even though it improves hugely over Llano in the Computation test, still falls very far from the baseline set by Intel’s Core i3-2367M.

Its an improvement nonetheless and for mobile users the battery savings implications are huge. Moving onto battery life tests, Anandtech found a notable boost in performance, gaining nearly an hour extra in the idle test with the screen at medium brightness settings, achieving nearly nine hours off the wall. Its interesting to see how performance actually drops with Ivy Bridge – even with a bigger battery, Intel’s Core i7-3720QM achieves roughly half the battery life of the Core i7-2637QM. Moving onto browsing, Trinity takes a huge leap forward with its efficiency and only loses under two hours of  battery life from idle. The Ivy bridge i7, however, barely loses half an hour, suggesting that the processor underclocks itself severely to let the GPU take all the rendering load of the web browser. In the video playback test things take a dive to just under four hour’s running time, but it does draw up favourably with Ivy bridge.

For gaming, however, here’s where we see the real improvements to Trinity. In Batman: Arkham Asylum we see the Devastator GPU drawing up alongside Llano’s Sumo chip, delivering playable performance at medium details. Intel’s HD4000 chip in the Ivy Bridge processors also provides playable performance and once overclocked, may even break the 60fps barrier. Battlefield 3 is a disappointment but it is a texture-heavy game, with Trinity beating out Ivy Bridge despite the more expensive solution having a lot more power available to throw at the game. Nvidia’s GT630M is the only solution providing a playable frame rate here and shows that EA’s latest cash cow is GPU-limited. Civilisation V shows Trinity shooting to the top thanks to its improved Compute and tesselation abilities, easily besting the GT640M. However, settings had to be turned to low here, demonstrating the power Civilisation V has of bringing stronger systems to their knees.

Moving onto DiRT3, Ivy Bridge and Trinity square off again with 40fps at medium details. DiRT3′s EGO game engine is used in Codemaster’s other racing games like F1 2010/2011 and in Racedriver: Grid. Skyrim again shows the 1-2 finish, but with both chips barely showing performance differences. I doubt many gamers will notice the 5.8fps difference in-game. Nvidia’s GT640M is looking to be the gamer’s choice here, almost always ending up with 60fps in most games. Portal 2 is processor-limited, and surprisingly shows Trinity in a huge lead over Ivy Bridge. This is again seen in Total War: Shogun 2, with Trinity showing nearly double the performance of the HD4000 inside the Ivy Bridge processor.

So what should we take away here? Firstly, Trinity almost always usurps the combination of Intel’s Core i7-2820QM in games along with the HD3000 and is now the baseline for acceptable gaming at medium details and native 15.6″ resolution. Ivy Bridge may end up performing marginally better, but that chip combination costs nearly $300 more to implement for manufacturers. Should you find a nice Ultrabook with the Trinity A10-4600M, that’s your best choice by a clear mile if you spend a lot of time gaming or at LANs. In fact, compared to Ivy Bridge, AMD’s price/performance ratio shoots through the roof.

Its only in very specific scenarios where you’d be better off with an Intel chip, especially if your workload is almost exclusively related to content creation – but consider that if OpenCL attains the kind of lofty support AMD hopes, there’ll be no reason to buy an Intel quad-core processor in a notebook over Trinity unless your application makes use of Intel’s Quicksync, which really can’t be matched in the notebook segment. For all other workloads, Trinity performs very well and the Turbo boost feature is implemented nicely.

So while AMD can celebrate a win over Intel here, what does it mean for consumers? Ultrabooks are approaching the $800 price point and the same notebook with Trinity could save you $200. However, given Intel’s history of forcing out its only competitor by asking suppliers to stick with its chips even when they’re not as good,  for Ultrabook builds I’m guessing there’s little chance you’ll see an AMD-based one in your local Game, Makro or even Incredible Connection. HP’s Sleekbook range is the first that I’ve seen with a focus on Trinity and it remains to be seen how other manufacturers approach AMD’s platform.

But certainly, we’ll see some interesting designs. Given the 35watt TDP, who could say no to a Trinity-powered Ultrabook alternative with an 11.6″ screen to rival the Macbook Air at half the price? How about options from Alienware to have this in their M11x? Or a 15.6″ R5000 Makro bargain with Windows 7 Home Basic and the A6-4455M processor? There’s a good chance AMD’s next Bulldozer refresh will bump up performance by another 15%, so things are looking up for the underdog once again. Shove an SSD into the chassis and you’ll be good to go. Things are even more promising for desktop users, as Piledriver for socket FM1/AM3+ is still coming later this year.

I only hope AMD can capitalise on the small lead they now have to improve their standing with customers and suppliers. After all, its the consumer they’re servicing and what better way to serve that consumer than to give them options?

Source: Tom’s Hardware, Anandtech, Hardware Canucks

Discus this in the forums: Linky

Diablo III is out and people are either loving it or hating it. Personally, I haven’t made up my mind, but one thing that strikes all of us at NAG as odd, is how much of the game’s good stuff is disabled by default. Diablo III is presented in its most simple form to those who don’t take the time to dig through the game’s options, and taken at face value it’s easy to feel disappointed in the simplicity of it all. Take a few moments to do so (or just read this handy guide), and you’ll discover that it’s a lot closer to what a veteran of the series would expect.

Enable elective mode

What it means: Instead of being forced to assign skills based on their category, elective mode allows you to assign any skill to any quickslot or mouse button. It’s a lot closer to what you’re used to from previous games.

Where to find it: Options* -> Gameplay -> Interface

Disable quick join

What it means: Your friends can no longer instantly join your game in progress. They’ll first have to request an invite to your party which can choose to ignore or accept.

Where to find it: Options -> Social -> Friends and chat

Enable zoom on inventory

What it means: Get a better view of your character while you’re swapping out equipment and armour. You can also press the “Z” key to zoom in and out on-the-fly.

Where to find it: Options -> Gameplay -> Interface

Enable advanced tooltips

What it means: Skill tooltips are actually useful now. They’ll show you exactly how much damage a skill does as well as specifics about any extra effects.

Where to find it: Options -> Gameplay -> Interface

Tweak HUD options

What it means: For the number-crunchers; get a better picture of damage dealt, healing performed and enemy life bars. You can also set these on-the-fly with hotkeys.

Where to find it: Options -> Gameplay -> HUD

Quickly access salvaging or crafting

What it means: Go directly to an artisan’s services without the extra dialogue click.

Where to find it: Each artisan will have their wares laid out on the ground around them, just click on the service you require.

Set social status

What it means: When set to “busy”, friends cannot join your game in progress or even request an invite. They can still whisper you directly.

Where to find it: Social menu (hotkey “O” or click on the icon)

Use slash commands

What it means: Communicate quickly with co-op players by issuing commands like “go”, “wait”, and “take this” with an accompanying character animation.

Where to find it: The chat menu (hotkey “Return”). Type “/?” for a list of commands. Those with gaming keyboards would do well to assign macros to a few of these options. Update: Reader @Chippitsaur has informed us that many of these commands are already bound to the num pad. Thanks Chippit!

Equip your CE wings (if you have them)

What it means: Stand out from the crowd with your collector’s edition wings.

Where to find it: When you first spawn there is an item in your inventory called Angelic Wings. Right click on it to activate/de-active the wings. You don’t need to have them in your inventory to maintain the wings, but you will have to re-activate it each time you log in.

*These options are only available to you once you’ve logged in, and can’t be accessed from the title screen menu.

I suppose I shouldn’t be disappointed, or even surprised. As a result of bazillions of would-be dungeon trawlers all desperately clawing to get started on Diablo III, Blizzard’s Battle.net servers have been falling over all morning. If you have tried to play Diablo III this morning, you might be familiar with the screen below the break.

Blizzard released this official statement on the Battle.net forums:

“Due to high concurrency the login servers are currently at full capacity.”

The good news is that Blizzard earlier today took Battle.net offline and launched additional servers to accommodate the unexpected masses of gamers desperate to at least crack level 10 on their first day.

Since then things have been better, but server issues continue to be reported across the European Battle.net network, which is where literally dozens of unemployed South Africans are trying to play right now.

Eurogamer made this adorable GIF, which pretty much explains the problem perfectly using guinea pigs.

Just last year, in August, Apple was alerted to a botnet building up among their customer’s computers, at its height claiming over five hundred thousand desktops under its control in under two months. By the third, another hundred thousand desktops and laptops were under hacker’s control and there wasn’t any word immediately from the Cupertino company about how they were going to fix it. Oracle’s Java was the source of the vulnerability and it was patched by the company four months later in February – but Apple never pushed out the update immediately, choosing o rather wait and teat it out before pushing to their servers last week. 

Its this head-in-the-sand approach that makes me wonder how some companies still make their money. Apple hides in a corner and cries foul while vulnerabilities are exposed and slowly patched. Samsung releases mobile phones and only updates them once Google’s Android moves to the next version in the family. At least Google and Microsoft pay hackers for revealing exploits to the company to help beef up security. Android is still the most malware-riddled mobile OS today but at least something’s being done about it.

For any software company, when a major vulnerability is found the first thing they should do is alert their customers to the fault and how to avoid it. Microsoft issued an alert to all users who were infected by the “Popureb” trojan within weeks telling them to reformat their systems and deep-clean their hard drives (it was later found out that it was the more extreme approach) if they were significantly affected by the virus. Its not the company’s fault if someone found a clever hack into the operating system, its just their job to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Likewise, Apple needs to be more proactive and start plugging holes that have been in their build of OS X for a long time. It makes no sense that the latest version of Mac OS X ships by default with the firewall turned off and its that kind of mentality, that they’re smaller and still Unix-based, that makes their approach to security all the more dangerous for users. Imagine if that botnet had reached  servers running OS X? The incredibly long time it took for Apple to even address the issue would have been enough, for some people, to launch a lawsuit against the company.

Eugene Kaspersky quipped a few weeks ago that Apple has always been “ten years behind Microsoft” in terms of security measures implemented and the secure-by-default standard that servers are released to. Granted, no operating system is ever truly safe (goes for Linux as well) but its simple steps that help users avoid being infected that will go a long way to preventing another Conficker disaster (which is still a threat, by the way and still no-one knows exactly what it does).

After the Info Security 2012 conference where Kaspersky spoke to an audience, Apple invited the company to have a look at its code and help secure the operating system before more malware grabs hold of their customer’s computers. Is it possible that all Macs could ship with Kaspersky in future like McAffee and Norton do for Windows? I sure hope so.

Source: TechpowerUp!

Discuss this in the forums: Linky

I’ve never seen so much pizza in one place. It’s like somebody slayed a Level 100 Infernal Pizza Beast in here, and it dropped all this loot everywhere. It’s probably a good thing, though, because the nice people at Kalahari.com have paid up the bar, and all that free beer demands a punishing tummy toll. Pizza for the pizza gods.

Kalahari gaming overlord Ramone Pickover won’t tell me how many punters have actually turned up, but I’d put it at a guess of about a zillion or so. Gandalf’s on Lower Main in Observatory is absolutely packed, and between the dim lighting, the reddened stony walls, and the people dressed up in battle gear, the place has an appropriately hellish ambiance.

First up is local bard Tombstone Pete, who gets things going with the opening lick of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck… on an acoustic guitar. I could totally have joined him on a banjo but nobody asked me to, and I suppose there’s a limit to just how hellish that ambiance should be anyway before everybody runs wailing into the streets outside, ghashing and beating their breasts in despair. It’s a pretty fine line.

Stay a while and listen. YES, I WENT THERE.

Next are the power metal warriors of rock, Strident, who have added a Diablo tune into their set to keep everything on theme and show off how many chords they know. I’m sure many geek tears are shed in the secret dark of the club. It’s okay, I won’t tell if you don’t.

As the band finishes up, Ramone takes to the stage to announce the announcement of a special announcement from Blizzard HQ, and that everybody should move back downstairs to hear what it is. The announcement: Blizzard has given permission to hand out the games at 11 PM already, so everybody can get their stuff, get home, and get prepped for the witching hour. There’s a whole lot of queuing up as everybody gets into the serious business of the night – saving the world. Or at least getting ready to save the world. Queuing is an important part of war too.

And this lucky guy won a Diablo III Collector's Edition and a Steel Series mousemat.

Big thanks to Ramone and the brilliant staff at Kalahari.com for this super event and for treating me like a queen. It’s the first time a South African online retailer has done an event like this, but I do hope it’s not the last. HINT.

Were you at BT Games Fourways Mall last night? Did you enter our competition to stand a chance to win this cool swag? No? Well I’m sorry about that, but Nicole Pireu won’t be, as she was drawn this morning as the lucky winner! Congratulations! Please contact Jacqui Jacobs at jacqui@nag.co.za to claim your prize.

Bonus prize for everyone who didn’t win: here are two of our favourite photos from the event last night:

Some of you may also need something that falls between the two for photographers and professionals who need some monstrous computing power to enable to you do your work while you’re moving, because you’re always moving. Today I’ll be looking at Ultrabooks, Ultrabook alternatives and laptops up to R15,000 and I’ll try to cover all the bases as to what you, dear reader, have been looking for.

R9000 Budget:

Lenovo IdeaPad Y570 15.6″ @ R8307 (SSD Option: ADATA S510 120GB @ R1347)

HP Probook 6465B (LY432EA) 14″ @ R8946 (SSD Option: ADATA S510 120GB @ R1347)

Lenovo ThinkPad T420i 14″ @ R8548 (SSD Option: ADATA S510 120GB @ R1347)

Acer Aspire S3 Ultrabook @ R8999.95

ASUS U36SG-RX046X 13.3″ Ultrabook @ R10723

Apple Macbook Pro 13″ MC700 @ R9999.95

Now I think you kinda get the idea here. Between R9000 and R11,000 there’s mainly full-fat notebooks and Ultrabooks to consider. There are also 15.6″ Ultrabooks as well, but what’s the use of that? It doesn’t work as a desktop replacement nor as a mobile alternative, so they’re rubbish in the interim. For the gamer, the Lenovo Y570 is easily the cheapest mid-range gaming option out there, with the combination of a 15.6″ HD-Ready screen and a Geforce GT555M, which should allow most games out there to run at medium to high settings depending on the game, the game’s age and the engine in use.

Road warriors have three options here: HP’s AMD quad-core toting notebook with 3G, the Lenovo ThinkPad T420 (the T-series being the original road warrior’s choice) and the ASUS U36SG Ultrabook. While I heartily support shoving an SSD into the former two, the latter would end up being way over budget. Its a good alternative and even has a discrete Nvidia graphics card with Optimus, and a much longer battery life than most Ultrabooks out there. Its value as a light, easy-to-carry Photoshop and Lightroom-capable companion necessitates some consideration, especially if you were looking at Apple’s Macbook Pro anyway.

As for Ultrabooks, Acer’s Aspire S3 leads the current crowd, being cheaper than competing brands and also offering a full three-year warranty. It also ships with a regular-sized 320GB hard drive, with a 20GB SSD used for caching your frequently-used data. In real life scenarios, the differences between this setup and a single SSD are negligible for most users. Note the lack of a Macbook Air here – Apple has pulled all stock out of the country’s retailers in preparation for the imminent Ivy Bridge refresh across the board.

R12,000 Budget

ASUS U36SG-RX046X 13.3″ Ultrabook @ R10723 (SSD Option: ADATA S510 120GB @ R1347)

Samsung Series 5 14″ Ultrabook @ R10999.95 (SSD Option: ADATA S510 120GB @ R1347)

HP Envy 17 (LF123EA) @ R11999

Apple Macbook Pro 13″ MC700 @ R9999.95 (SSD Option: Intel 330 180GB @ R2299)

When shopping around the R12000 mark, its a little more difficult to discern what’s actually good value and what’s fluff. This is the domain of Ultrabooks, offering thin-and-light laptops to those who don’t actually need all the bulk for the relatively low workload they’re going to do. I chose two Ultrabooks that could actually be useful outside of media consumption. I’m recommending the ASUS E36SG again along with the Samsung Series 5 14″ notebook. Both have discrete graphics cards, both are equipped with more powerful processors than you’d normally find in Ultrabooks in the retail sector and the ASUS in particular will have a much longer battery life with the SSD installed. You might even find some playable settings for your games on the Samsung as well.

For gamers there’s not a lot of choice here, as most manufacturers tend to have the same specs but vary on the graphics card in use. While you’d find the GT555M in most laptops here, the HP Envy  lineup was designed to compete with Apple’s Macbook Pro 15″ lineup, and this one I’ve listed ships with a Radeon HD6850M. You will have very little trouble running any game at high settings here and the better build  quality of HP’s product revamp needs to be seen to be believed. For gamers, this is your baseline. Oh, the keyboard’s also backlit for you night owls.

For graphic artists, photographers and the guys and girls who are deeply involved in content creation, the Macbook Pro 13 is again an option, but will be a lot more efficient and useable with an SSD installed. If you’re squeamish about doing this yourself, have the techies at Incredible Connection do it for you. Sorry, Air fans, nothing here for you yet. Wait a bit longer.

R15000 Holy Cow Budget

Alienware M14x 14″ @ R14999.95 (SSD Option: ADATA S510 120GB @ R1347)

Alienware M11x 11″ @ POA

HP Envy 17 (LF123EA) @ R11999 (SSD Option: Intel 330 180GB @ R2299)

Apple MacBook Air 13” @ R13700

Apple Macbook Pro 15″ (MC721) @ R13999.95 (SSD Option: ADATA S510 120GB @ R1347)

Again, we have a lack of options for gamers at the high-end where the lineup usually includes Alienware, ASUS and MSI. With many manufacturers and retailers trying to get on the Ultrabook bandwagon, its no surprise that high-end gaming laptops are not so much advertised and finding a bargain means knowing in which places to look. With the launch of Ivy Bridge you’d expect a slew of high-performance laptops geared towards the gamer, but I’ve seen nary a squeak from anyone beyond Alienware upgrading all its customer’s current orders to Ivy Bridge at no extra cost. Mayhap the NAG staff can chip in with some insider information to the contrary?

For the gamers, you’ve got the Alienware M14x and M11x as your options. Both are excellent value for money and I challenge you to find a manufacturer that shows off build quality as good as these units. The only one that comes close is the HP Envy 15, which when fitted with an SSD, comes close to being the best personal choice you can make.

For Apple fans, the Macbook Pro 15 is still in stock in a few Incredible Connection stores in the country and are great workhorses. With the AMD Radeon HD6750 inside, gaming is also an option and you’ve got Steam to thank for that as well. There’s finally a Macbook Air, but the price of the unit shot up once other competitors came into the market and Apple began to freeze stock to prepare for the yearly refresh. There’s a possibility of an 11.6″ Air in the works at $800 but we’ll have to wait and see.

Next week I’m going to set on the final episode of this series this month looking for purely gaming-orientated options starting from R18,000 and landing up at R25,000. I warn you, its going to mostly Alienware-dominated as there are very few competitors in that segment. With high prices like that and the diminishing returns you get with a high-priced laptop, perhaps its better at that point to get an ITX chassis and lug that around. Tune in next week!

Discuss this in the forums: Linky

Yes, the video above shows a set of eight floppy drives performing the tune of the opening of the show. There are many examples of people using these old floppy drives for music. There’s one for Skyrim’s opening done by the same guy, as well as other popular hit songs and video game soundtracks. Give MrSolidSnake745′s page a visit, won’t you? Its the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

Discuss this in the forums: Linky

I had a quick look online and through the major retailers that I usually rely on for prices. Other retailers might have stock as well and you might be lucky if your brick-and-mortar local shop has them in stock. Price levels of the GTX680 have dropped a bit and general availability is improving. The GTX690 is a bit of a rarity and is still very hard to find. Impresively, the GTX670 has finally reached our shores, astounding considering the card only launched four days ago. Nvidia is trying very hard to regain market and mind share and that effort is very noticeable in the amount of cards available online today. Have a look for yourself. 

REBELTECH

MSI GTX670 OC 2GB DDR5 @ R4432

Gigabyte GTX670 OC 2G DDR5 OC @ R4699

Gigabyte GTX680 2GB DDR5 @ R5990

Gigabyte GTX680 OC 2GB DDR5 @ R5990

PROPHECY.CO.ZA

Inno3D GTX680 2GB DDR5 @ R5660

KFA2 (Galaxy) GTX680 2GB DDR5 @ R5685

ASUS GTX680 2GB DDR5 (Can be overvolted) @ R7416

NIVO

KFA2 (Galaxy) GTX680 2GB DDR5 @ R5669

Gigabyte GTX680 2GB DDR5 @ R5990

SYBARITIC

Gigabyte GTX680 2GB DDR5 @ R6269

IKONIC IT

ASUS GTX680 2GB DDR5 (Can be overvolted) @ R7061

Inno3D GTX680 2GB DDR5 @ R5549

KFA2 (Galaxy) GTX680 2GB DDR5 @ R5399

MSI GTX680 2GB DDR5 @ R5740

LANDMARK COMPUTERS

Gigabyte GTX670 OC 2GB DDR5 @ R4704

KFA2 (Galaxy) GTX670 OC 2GB DDR5 @ R4923

KFA2 (Galaxy) GTX670 2GB DDR5 @ R4800

MSI GTX670 2GB DDR5 @ R4554

ASUS GTX680 2GB DDR5 (Can be overvolted) @ R6647

EVGA GTX680 2GB DDR5 @ R6154

Gigabyte GTX680 OC 2GB DDR5 @ R6524

Gigabyte GTX680 2GB DDR5 @ R5889

MSI GTX680 2GB DDR5 @ R5908

MSI GTX680 OC Twin Frozer 2GB DDR5 @ R6589

Gigabyte GTX690 4GB DDR5 @ R13049

Discuss this in the forums: Linky

For your reference:

Nvidia GTX680 Analysis Part One

Nvidia boggles the mind with the GTX670

Nvidia GTX690 Analysis: Should you buy one?

Cue those "Winter is Coming" puns. Yes, I know you want to.

So now for those of you who don’t want to toy with a wanna-be flagship for the gaming graphics card industry, there’s the GTX690 to consider. Go on, click that “More” button! You’re going to want to know what’s inside this analysis…

Ah, you’re here! You were expecting something interesting? Well in a sense the GTX690 is extremely interesting, but I’ll first have you read the GTX680 Analysis that I wrote in three parts looking at Kepler and how it functions and how its going to blow socks off. The architecture is both complex and simple to understand at the same time and even launch prices for Nvidia’s GTX680 and GTX670 have undercut the competing offers from AMD.

Had Nvidia sorted out their issues with TSMC and their 28nm process before this launch, AMD would have a lot more to worry about today. The GTX680 is the competitor for the HD7970, but in reality it punches above that line and very often goes straight up to insult the HD6990 and GTX590 in the face. However its not such a rosy situation for Nvidia – AMD had finished with their 28nm issues a while ago and has had the market for themselves in the last five months. Price cuts to the popular sells like the GTX560 Ti haven’t helped. Winter was coming, and Nvidia had to do something.

The company recently posted a 55% profit loss. Note that they still made a profit, but they really weren’t selling anything towards the end of Fermi’s production run. The main reasons were the lack of 2012-era Tegra design wins with various third-party manufacturers like ASUS and the financial setback that Kepler created. I don’t know why Nvidia didn’t turn to other fabrication-capable companies like Samsung or Intel earlier on, especially considering the latter is actively renting out fab space in its production lines for other companies who need 28nm dies made. Regardless, they’ve decided to tackle the situation with paper launches and hope to hell that their fans will still hold out while things return to normal.

Its an incredibly handsome card, IMO.

And the second of their paper launches was the GTX690. The teaser on Nvidia’s Facebook and Geforce.com pages showed a cropped image of the dual-slot, all-aluminium shroud that covers the dual-GPU monster. There’s plexiglass on both sides of the fan to show off the heatsinks and the LEDs when the card is operating. Its a great way to get that euphoric feeling out when you’re holding an incredibly expensive piece of kit in your hands. The card employs a central blower fan that exhausts heat out both sides of the chassis. It also uses a combination of heatsinks and water vapor chambers to move heat around and out the shroud. Enthusiasts who buy this, however, are going to have a headache dealing with getting rid of the heat going into their chassis, as you’re getting all of the heat off of one GK104 chip.

Its not the most ideal solution, if one has to be honest. Nvidia could have gone the same route as Intel and AMD with their processors, shipping a high-end, top-of-the-range graphics solution with a closed-loop, low-maintenance water cooling kit; but then that would have created headaches for quad-SLI setups. How about custom-designing a reservoir, pump and fan that would fit in unused hard drive bays? A good idea, but the majority of chassis that gamers employ have their drive cages mounted sideways, so that idea goes out the window. You only really see something like that in a dedicated water-cooling setup and you’d actually want the reservoir to be higher than the thing its cooling. 5.25″ bays, then? Too much clutter.

But regardless, the important thing is that it looks like a high-end piece of kit. That first impression is everything and Nvidia even went through the trouble of packaging review units of the cards in boxes that needed a crowbar to open it. Its worlds and away from the feeling you get with the plastic shrouds on the HD7970, for instance. I’d like to see how AMD gets the HD7990 to look better than this (and they will have to, make no mistake). Moving around to the back of the card, we see three dual-link DVI outputs and one mini-Display Port connector. (be sure to tune in on Wednesday, I have something to say about this)

Going under the heatsinks, we finally see the two GK104 chips sitting alongside each other, with a small green chip in the middle. That there is the driving force behind the card’s ability to scale performance well with the two chips in SLI. Its manufactured by PLX Technologies and its a 48-lane PCI-Express 3.0 switch manufactured on the 40nm process. Most motherboards wouldn’t be able to afford the kind of PCI resources that this chip could and we’ll see later that it was a wise decision. Using SLI on most modern motherboards requires eight lanes per GPU with the other eight per 16-lane port used for two-way communication between the cards in addition to the PCI bridge on the top. Nvidia’s GTX590 used the ageing NForce200 chip which didn’t provide any significant benefits to running two GTX580s in SLI. The PLX PEX 8747 provides 16 lanes to each GPU and 16 for use in PCI-Express 2.0 or 3.0 slots. All of the benefits of SLI, almost none of the drawbacks.

Moving right along we see the two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors used to power the beast that lies before you. While the GTX590 required two as well, it was a full-fat implementation of Fermi and was so close to its power limit of 375watts that overclocking it was a big no-no. The GTX680 sits comfortably at 300watts thanks to Kepler’s redesigned architecture and lower power requirements, giving owners more headroom in future for overclocking and possibly allowing companies like ASUS to really go full throttle and give their CU II lineup a dual-GPU option. The card achieves such a low TDP thanks also to its lower clocks of 915Mhz for the core and the same 6Ghz speeds found on the GTX680.

I would also like you to stop for one moment on the image that shows the naked front of the GTX690. Use your hand to cover roughly half of the card on the left-hand side. What’s left on the right, sans the PLX chip, is essentially the same plan as the redesigned circuit board also found on the GTX670, flipped horizontally. It might not be exactly the same but the maximum TDP of 141watts points to the very same thing. The fact that the core clocks are also the same might be a clue as well. With the disabled shader, two GTX670s in SLI would fall just under the GTX690 and would consume the same amount of power and have the same amount of overclocking headroom.

But I’ve babbled on enough already, lets see some tests! In Battlefield 3 at native 30″ resolutions we see the card drawing up next to the GTX680, but not quite beating it. That’s thanks to the higher clocks on the flagship, and there’s an even smaller gap when you’re looking at a multi-monitor setup. When I said in my analysis on the GTX670 that the disabled shader was possibly not being used that much, the results here further surprise me – about 100Mhz separates the clocks of the GTX690 and GTX680, yet there’s very little difference between them performance-wise. Take note of the HD7970s in Crossfire, that’s roughly what you can expect from the HD7990 as well. Not a bad showing from AMD, all things considered. Crysis 2 shows the same results but is a texture-heavy game, showing off Nvidia’s improvements with the bindless textures I talked about in the GTX680 Analysis.

Skyrim shows the two SLI options battling it out again, both pushing neck-and-neck for the performance crown. The HD7970s in Crossfire still lands up in third place, but isn’t far off in the multi-monitor test. FXAA performance at the native 30″ resolution needs to be looked at though, and I’m assuming that’s down to driver issues more than anything else. DiRT3 shows the same three-place finishers, with the slightly higher clock speed of the GTX680s matching the dual-GPU king every time.

WOW: Cataclysm has proven itself to be mostly processor-limited and has a very mixed ending for all contenders here. Again showing a lack of GCN optimisation, it allowed the GTX590 to finish in third place for once at the native 30″ resolution, while the game allowed the single GTX680 to hang with the big boys when no AA was applied. Crossfire scaling in the game is horrible and definitely one for the driver team’s To-Do list later for Catalyst 12.5. The Radeon team finally take the lead in Metro 2033, showing Kepler’s single biggest flaw – low Compute performance.

Speaking of Compute performance, what’s really going to bake your noodle later on is the results Anandtech posted with their review – two GTX580s in SLI would come close to matching or beating the GTX690 in any game that relies heavily on Tesselation and Compute performance. Games like that, Civilisation V in particular, favour the raw power that Fermi offered to gamers and is the main reason why professionals who couldn’t afford the high prices of Quadro cards ended up buying GTX580s instead. AMD’s GCN architecture is miles ahead of what Fermi and Kepler could deliver but as long as Nvidia has a stranglehold on the market with Quadro and Tesla, I don’t see many enterprises switching to AMD anytime soon. If you still play Civilisation V, Alien vs Predator or Crysis 2 with the High Res textures and Tesselation pack, you don’t need to upgrade yet.

Temperature-wise the card holds its own, idling under 50 degrees on the Windows desktop. Windows 7′s desktop is inherently a 2D interface and the card is likely to stay at that level while you’re interacting with the regular environment. At load Nvidia’s power enhancements to the card keep temperatures under 80 degrees and actually ends up being cooler than the GTX680. Its interesting because the GTX680 spends nearly all of its time in boosted mode and one would assume the GTX690 does the same, staying mostly at its max boost of 1045Mhz for the duration of your game.

Idle power consumption on the desktop is a little higher than the single GTX680, signaling that perhaps one of the chips are completely powered down in idle more. AMD does much the same with its ZeroCore technology, powering down one or more graphics processors when they’re not in use. You can see this working in the idle test with the screen turned off – Crossfired HD7970s consume 20watts  less while Nvidia’s cards only lose three, suggesting that their power-saving technology isn’t being put to good use by the drivers yet. That certainly seems to be the case with the load test, where the GTX590 consumes about 50watts more on average than the GTX690. Its also telling that Nvidia’s GPU Boost settings by default are very restrictive – all the cards power down to the same level in exactly the same spot, but the GTX690 returns to full load power very quickly. By turning up the boost power limit by 20%, we might see a bit more flexibility in how the GPU responds to alternating workloads.

So in conclusion, what do we know? We know that, given the 28nm yield and supply issus and TSMC’s public announcement to concentrate on getting Nvidia’s products sorted out, we can only expect general availability of this beast in about two months. Delays for the GTX680 should be the same, while the GTX670s worldwide supply should be sorted in about a month’s time. Nvidia expects to sell the GTX690 in far greater numbers than the GTX680 where SLI setups are concerned. The dual-GPU solution has clearly shown its more than up to the task of replacing a complicated setup while consuming less power and producing less heat.

In fact, anyone still running a single or dual-GPU setup that’s outdated by at least two generations should really have a look at this especially if they’re looking at triple-monitor gaming. For one its kinder to your power supply and those of you still on Nehalem processors and even those stuck on LGA1156 shouldn’t have many bottleneck issues – its a good bargain and the first time ever that a dual-GPU card has been the better choice by far than two of its lower-class brethren together. The only distinct disadvantages are heat generation and the price, as well as the requirement for a high-end Intel chip to get the most out of the card. As of this writing, its near impossible to get one in the country, as they’re all immediately sold out the moment they land in supplier warehouses. Since there’s such a low yield and a lot of people want one, expect the retail price to bump up about R1000 or so while stock levels even out.

For those of you still running two GTX580s, a GTX590 or two HD6990s, its a little less clear-cut as to whether you should upgrade or not. Fermi’s not too outdated and will hold its own for the rest of the year, at least until the Geforce 700 series arrives. Considering the power savings seen in this card, you can definitely expect a Ti version of this baby, especially if AMD’s HD7990 ends up being a better card and competitor (and I expect it won’t, given the need to have a 250watt TDP for the HD7970).

All in all, a great showing by Nvidia and something you could definitely expect to land up in the NAG Dream Machine next month. Who’ll be buying one? (that’s a joke, in case you didn’t know)

Source: Tom’s Hardware, Anandtech, Guru3D, TechpowerUp!

Discuss this in the forums: Linky

Cloud places you in the role of a nameless, bedridden little boy who spends his time daydreaming of flying high up in the sky. The entire game takes place inside his imagination and focuses upon manipulating the clouds. The boy can gather clouds, absorb them, stack them and rearrange them into elaborate shapes and patterns.

Not all the clouds in the game’s world will bend to your whim immediately. Some need to “converted”, and this is accomplished by letting them touch clouds already under your control. Smog clouds cannot be converted and must be eliminated by crashing them into bright clouds, resulting in pretty rainstorms.

It’s impossible to die in the game, but various levels have objectives, be it forming clouds into specific shapes, using rainstorms to extinguish runaway fires on islands, clearing smog or converting all the clouds. The overall atmosphere is extremely tranquil and Cloud is quite possibly one of the few games that is almost entirely devoid of any stress or frustration. It’s all wrapped up in bright colours and mellow music, although one cannot escape the feeling of melancholy bubbling just below the game’s surface, however subtle it may be.

The game is sadly a bit too short and could definitely do with more missions. Nonetheless, if you’re looking for a different gaming experience with nary a shred of frustration to be found, give Cloud a try.

Get it here (for Windows only).

Following a tedious but mercifully short-lived disagreement over the use of the DotA name, Valve and Blizzard have come to an agreement. Valve retains full rights to using the title for commercial purposes, while Blizzard may only use the title for its community – whatever that means.

As a result, Blizzard has agreed to rename its forthcoming Blizzard DotA game to Blizzard All-Stars.

“Both Blizzard and Valve recognise that, at the end of the day, players just want to be able to play the games they’re looking forward to, so we’re happy to come to an agreement that helps both of us stay focused on that,” commented Blizzard exec Rob Pardo.

“We’re pleased that we could come to an agreement with Blizzard without drawing things out in a way that would benefit no one,” added Valve boss Gabe Newell.

“We both want to focus on the things our fans care about, creating and shipping great games for our communities.”

Valve is currently working on Dota 2, after acquiring the rights to the DotA brand in 2009. Neither Blizzard nor Valve have announced a release date for their forthcoming DotA-style games.

Remember on Monday when a domain registration alerted the world to the existence of a thing called The Avengers: Battle for Earth? It was tied to Ubisoft’s servers and initially outed for Fusible. Fast-forward to today: Ubisoft, along with Marvel Entertainment, have made the whole game official.

Now, remember how we were all dreaming that this would be an Avengers game worthy of the more recent film; the same film that made people’s eyes explode from the military-grade awesome that was pumped into them? It’s totally not going to be anything like that! How do we know based on having not actually seen the game in action? It’s being made for Kinect and Wii U only.

According to Tony Key, senior VP of sales for Ubisoft US: “We are excited to team up with Marvel Entertainment to bring some of the most iconic comic book characters from the Marvel line-up to life in motion-gaming. Fans of the Marvel universe and superhero games are going to love the extensive combinations of characters, motion-controlled moves and competitive gameplay.”

The game won’t necessarily be based on the recent film, but will draw on the “Secret Invasion” story arc of comic books. Twenty playable characters are planned for the final game. If you want to keep up to date on this crushing disappointment upcoming game, then head on over to the official website, which is still very much in “place holder” mode.

Source: Marvel.com

Like the GTX680 and GTX690, the GTX670 is based off the GK104 design, which is essentially an upgraded GTX460 with parts chopped off, parts added together and parts made smaller to make today’s Frankenstein. The chips boast a smaller node process to 28 nanometers and are much more efficient than their predecessors in the outgoing Geforce 500 series. But what’s really interesting that we’ll see in the coming months is exactly how Nvidia plans to differentiate their chip lineup. After all, today you’ll see Nvidia’s equivalent of the HD7950 – a card performing a hair’s breadth away from the flagship, costs far less and once overclocked takes the performance crown easily.

But first, the interesting thing to take away here is that TSMC is still having yield issues with Kepler and the 28nm process. Nvidia’s actually gone and re-branded their GT540 parts as the GT640, producing a few different versions but having two of them – the GT645 and the 144-core GT640 - manufactured using the 28nm process to allow Nvidia to sell off dies that would have otherwise been tossed out. The breakdown between TSMC and Nvidia gets more tense because there aren’t any known reports of other manufacturers having fault with 28nm yields. Either their designs are more fault-tolerant, or something is wonky with getting Kepler tapered out properly.

One shader disabled, the rest left intact.

Whatever the case may be, today is another paper launch. Nvidia still can’t get enough GTX680s out the door and into the right regions. Yes, you read that right, regions. There are tons of shops online and in other countries that have stock of the flagship, but aren’t selling either because of high prices, AMD’s bundle of three games with their HD7000 series or simply because the customers are waiting for the GTX670. Well you’ll have to wait a bit longer, as TSMC’s assumed outputs of Kepler units per month is only 10,000. What you will see today isn’t a different card that would have been a GTX670, its actually a GTX680 with a disabled shader module.

Looking at the chip layout, the GTX670 ships with 1344 CUDA cores and 112 Texture units, making up seven out of eight possible shaders, the extra one being fused off by laser. I expect that these weren’t perfectly functioning GK104 units and Nvidia changed their plans for the lineup in the interim. If you’re getting one of these puppies, it’s best you save up for one now before Kepler’s yield issues are sorted, as Nvidia may change the chip later for whatever reason. The GTX670 is now only a slightly slower GTX680 and fits in the same space in the market, fighting off the onslaught by the HD7950 and HD7970 for the high-end and enthusiast segments. Clocks stand at 915Mhz for the core and 6Ghz for the memory.

But anyway, onto the card itself. Its covered by a dual-slot cooler and features a blower fan on the far right exhausting all heat out the vents. But wait, that PCI-Express power slot in the middle HAS to be a shop, right? I mean, that’s completely the wrong place to put it. Yeah, if you flip the card over, the PCB is dwarfed by the 10″ shroud, measuring only 6.75″. Disabling the shader module allowed Nvidia to adjust core circuitry and focus on cooling the card and getting power consumption down (remember what I said about this being a faulty/disabled GK104 chip? Looks like I’m right). What’s really impressive is that with a shortened PCB to begin with, third-party OEMs might figure out a way to produce a single-slot and much longer GTX670.

The card requires two six-pin PCI-Express power connectors and has a typical power draw of 141watts. This card will end up being the overclockers choice because the board now has a maximum power limit of 225 watts including the 75w that the motherboard provides through the PCI-Express slot. With extreme cooling and more aggresive BIOS and clock settings, I can see quite a few vendors creating their own version of the GTX670 in a “Ti” guise. The back of the card reveals two dual-link display ports, one full-size display port (pity, should have been a mini-connector) and a HDMI 1.4a port. All four can be used to drive a screen each for Nvidia’s Surround feature. This previously required two cards in SLI to achieve a three-monitor setup.

Moving onto the benchmarks, its apparent that the disabled shader doesn’t reduce performance that much, even though it also cuts power consumption down by 30w. In Battlefield 3 the GTX670 finished within a ten-frame margin behind the GTX680 and you can see it easily showing the HD7970 its tailpipes. Running at native 30″ resolution, it sticks even closer to its bigger brother to within 5fps, drawing equal with the HD7970. Its the same story with Crysis 2, drawing up with the competition in DX9 and blowing past them in DX11. Its a really tremendous thing to see, and Nvidia must be commended on their design of Kepler – even with the loss of a limb, it still keeps up. The card loses out at 30″ resolution in Crysis 2, but this is more to the HD7970 having a bigger framebuffer.

I’m only going to show 30″ resolution tests for now because all other games produce 70+ frames per second at 1080p. What you saw in Crysis 2 and Battlefield 3 basically plays out everywhere else. Performance in Metro 2033 splits the cards by less than four frames – was that extra shader core being unused in games? In Skyrim the card draws up again next to the HD7970 and the GTX680, showing playable performance even with FXAA enabled. DiRT3 gets close to the magical 60fps barrier, easily beating out the HD7970. DiRT2 favoured AMD cards, but this time round the tables have turned. WOW Cataclysm finally gives the HD7970 the boot, clearly showing that the game isn’t optimised for GCN yet.

So now, you may be wondering what kind of knock Direct Compute performance has on the GTX670. I mean, if shaders aren’t used in the game that’s fine, but if CUDA cores aren’t being fully exploited, then that’s another thing altogether. Look below the the MediaEspresso benchmarks where video files are recoded into a high-quality clip that an iPad could play. Recoding to MPEG2 shows Kepler-based cards finishing the recode in half the time of AMD’s offerings. Changing to H.264, the GTX670 draws up neatly with its bigger brother, producing idential results. Anandtech’s Civilisation V Compute benchmark shows the GTX670 only slightly behind the GTX680. Honestly, for most games and applications, it looks like disabling that core didn’t much damage the card’s ability to perform well.

Finally, moving into temperature and power consumption, the card keeps temperatures in really well, idling at 41 degrees and maxing out at 80 degrees on load. Power consumption is reigned in , roughly matching the HD7950 for performance. You’d only need a decent, stable 550w power supply at this point to power the beast, just like the GTX680. What’s really going to boggle your mind, though, is the SLI scaling. That, right there, is GTX690 performance. Two cards that are cheaper than two GTX680s, hanging with Nvidia’s fastest card to date. Even dual HD7970s stand a chance, the scaling is just phenomenal at an average of 80% improvement across the board.

So, here’s the drill. Its cheaper and better to get the GTX670, overclock it and have GTX680 performance for approximately R1000 less.  Even if it sells for R4500 here, you’d be mad to choose the HD7970 over this because it wipes the floor with it, all things considered. Those of you considering a dual-GPU solution, you’ll only need a 700watt power supply to get GTX690 performance for less than you’d pay for an actual GTX690. This card will also effectively cannibalise GTX680 sales unless Nvidia reveals that drivers weren’t optimised and bla bla bla and fixes everything. The card is crippled, for heaven’s sake, and it still plays tag with the flagship costing considerably more. And uses more power.

But, there’s a crucial flaw in Nvidia’s plan for dominance and that’s TSMC. Without a supply, a healthy one at that, of 28nm dies and good yields, their entire lineup of Kepler’s derivatives will be starved. Obviously they’re going to focus the majority of development and supply to the GTX660 (when it arrives and kicks the HD7870 aside) and the GTX670. Only ten GTX690′s arrived in the country this week. Ten.  Those are using good dies that could have been put to better use in the GTX680 or even the 670 to give fans more than another stupid paper launch.

I said before the reveal of the GTX690 that I wondered if Nvidia had developed some common sense what with all the problems they’re having. Giving gamers in the mid-range a good supply while they worked on the real flagship would have been just fine – AMD’s HD7990 is only showing off at Computex, after all. When the GTX670 lands, it’ll likely sell for much higher than its suggested retail price and stocks will be limited.

A paper launch for what will become the gamer and overclocker’s card of choice? That deserves  an honorary mention, not an award. The recommended retail price is $400 (approx R3244), so all that’s left is to wait for the obligatory price drop from AMD in the coming weeks. And we’ll probably see the GTX660 with another shader module disabled in three or less weeks.

Source: Tom’s Hardware, TechpowerUp!, Anandtech

Discuss this in the forums: Linky

Irrational Games’ BioShock successor was supposed to be arriving in October this year. That’s no longer the case, which makes all of us here at NAG very sad boys and girls. Instead, we can expect to shoot holes in things and run around the sky city of Columbia on 26 February 2013.

Irrational bossman Ken Levine broke the news about the delay, but likened it to a similar delay that the original BioShock experienced: “We had a similar experience with the original BioShock, which was delayed several months as our original ship date drew near. Why? Because the Big Daddies weren’t the Big Daddies you’ve since come to know and love. Because Andrew Ryan’s golf club didn’t have exactly the right swing. Because Rapture needed one more coat of grimy Art Deco. The same principle now applies to BioShock Infinite.”

You see, when he puts it like that, the delay doesn’t seem all that bad, does it? Levine also confirmed that BioShock Infinite will not be making appearances at E3 or Gamescom this year because they feel any public appearance will not reflect the final product. Sounds as if they’re making some serious alterations then. Still, if the news leaves you absolutely devastated then head over here to make yourself feel better.

Source: Kotaku

Before we even tell you anything about this most awesome competition, you NEED to know this: to win you must attend the BT Games Midnight Launch at their Fourways Mall branch in JHB on Monday 14 May 2012. There’s no other way to enter. Right, got it? Good, then let us proceed.

BT Games are giving away this awesome prize to one NAG reader. All you have to do to enter is print out the image above, write your full name on the back of that piece of paper, come to the BT Games Fourways Mall Midnight Launch which happens on Monday 14 May from 9pm – 12.30am, put your “entry” into the box which will be inside their store, and wait for the esteemed Editor of NAG to do the prize draw at 11.30pm. It’s that easy. Aaaand you get to meet the NAG staff, ’cause we’ll be there.

A few years ago there was a rumor doing the rounds that Valve was working on a port of the Steam client for Linux operating systems. At the time there was already confirmation of the client being ported to Mac OSX back in 2010. The natural train of thought landed on a Linux version as well, since OSX is based on Unix, and shares kernel changes occasionally with Linux. Likewise, many of the improvements to the custom Unix kernel found in OS X have also been implemented into Linux (albeit through reverse engineering, but I digress), so its not like the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

In fact, there were even screenshots that showed a semi-working native port of the Steam client, but unfortunately those developments were cancelled when the group doing the unofficial port dropped the project. And then they disappeared. Where on earth did they go? Who took the work and project with them? I speculated on another forum at the time that Gabe must have hired them to continue work for the client with Valve’s support and backing. And two weeks ago I was proven right (well, I still don’t know where the hell they went). There’s even a job listing for it still up.

Pictured above is a copy of Left for Dead 2, running natively on Ubuntu 10.04LTS. The game is running without any back-ports, without WINE and just behind the game window is a customised version of AMD’s Catalyst Control Center. If Valve is this far ahead with getting things to work properly, we can assume one of two things:

1) Gamers who buy titles exclusively over Steam with a Windows machine can, in future, run Ubuntu or any other distro and save money over the license costs associated with Microsoft’s proprietary software. Linux has come a long way since the original Red Hat, Fedora and Debian variants, and ranks up there with the leaders in terms of ability. Many software companies nowadays have at least a semi-updated Linux port of their software, so its certainly getting some attention.

2) If Valve does something, usually the entire industry stops, looks sheepishly at their investors, curses under their breath and begins a catch-up process right away. They’re not always the trend-setters, but they usually hit the nail on the head with their games. Once a Steam client for Linux lands, both EA and Microsoft need to think long and hard about how much that 1.3% of desktop users on Unix is worth to them. Yes, currently they don’t support the OS, but no-one really has any idea how this would take off. Out of forty-plus million gamers worldwide, Valve could have as many as an eighth of those move over to Linux as time passes, assuming they aren’t already dependent on Windows.

Currently work is being done to port over the Source Engine, rather than try to get the games running as the WINE project has done for years. Once the engine works natively in Linux with OpenGL, porting them over should be much quicker. Which Source-based games could be available?

D.O.T.A. 2 (still to be released)

Half-Life 2 (and all expansions/episodes)

Left 4 Dead 1 and 2

Portal 1 and 2

Team Fortress 2

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (still to be released)

If you’re still wondering, Source is a game engine that Valve created to be compatible with multiple platforms and operating systems. Source currently runs on Windows, OS X, Xbox and PS3 systems, with the Xbox running a customised version of Windows CE and Sony’s Playstation 3 on a custom Linux kernel (see, all the code was there from the start). The titles I’ve listed are all Source-based and have been Valve’s best sellers for years (with two exceptions, but I expect those to sell really, really well).

Steam also supports and acts as a retail system for games based off other engines, and it’ll be up to those publishers and developers to make sure their games are up to date when Valve releases the client. Valve’s CEO, Gabe himself is working on the port. The porting project had been running for a few years already, but Newell joined the team and is looking to speed things up. Gabe has been a big proponent of Linux in previous interviews and it’ll be interesting what the company can bring to the open-source (see what I did there? Har har) community.

Source: Phoronix

Discuss this on the forums: Linky

Well, that didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would; it seems that Ubisoft’s call for people to do its marketing for them was answered by thousands and thousands of loyal fans. The full gameplay trailer for Assassin’s Creed III is now available for you to ogle – it is pretty spectacular.

The trailer is made up of pre-alpha footage. In fact, it’s made up of three separate internal videos that Ubisoft showed us just over a month ago at the game’s unveiling in London. The three different clips were meant to highlight three different aspects of the game: one of the cities (you can see Boston in the trailer); exploring the snow-covered Frontier; and the Battle of Bunker Hill. Some of the most exciting bits of all three clips have been spliced together to give us this debut trailer.

Assassin’s Creed III is the cover feature for this month’s edition of NAG, so if you want to read all there is to know about the trailer you’re about to watch, then grab a copy if you haven’t already. Hit the jump to get a taste of that Rope Dart in action – I can’t wait to use that thing.

So I’m using an old laptop for my long-term review. I’ll have to hook it up to my keyboard and mouse because there’s no way in hell I’m moving back to a trackpad for work, but its going to take place of my desktop for now. I’ll be exploiting the OS as much as I can and learning more in-depth about it at the same time. Its not enough that I just use it for writing and editing photos (that much is easy enough to do on any platform) but I’m going to start learning how to administer it, how the new Universal Search bar takes over everything you do in a menu and how extras like Ubuntu’s Cloud and third-party music and movie services work for the average Joe.

So to the laptop, its an old Sahara model that I fixed up myself. Its got a miserly 1024 x 768 screen, 768MB RAM and a 40GB HDD. Linux has a reputation for being fast even on slower machines, and I’ll be testing that out as time goes by. I last tried running Linux permanently when I was in college which ended up failing spectacularly. At that stage the Linux environment was in a bit of a fritz over itself and hardware vendor support was a pipe dream. Of course, using hardware this old would feel like a crime, wouldn’t it? Not from where I can see right now. Its snappy, but not in the same way that my desktop is/was.

Will this benefit me in the long run, or am I wasting my time? I often ask that of others who question whether open-source is worth the effort and its a different answer everytime. No-one in the NAG office, I’m sure, could use it because their jobs require Windows to be pre-loaded on all machines. Were Microsoft’s DirectX API not so ubiquitous, we’d certainly see more gamers on Linux than there are now (more on that tomorrow). I’m comfortable with it so far, but only time will tell how much I’ll like it when this review comes to an end.

Testing it on an Ultrabook would be sweet, but beggars can't be choosers.

“When’s the end?”, I hear you ask. That could be in a month, three months or even six. As it is, my standing with Linux has waned over the years and I haven’t touched it again in over three until I started with 12.04 in the virtual machine. I’m planning to cover the hardware at rAge this year and I’ll need to buy myself a netbook to go along with me. If I can skimp out on the R800 for Windows 7 Home Basic, so much the better. If I can get one with built-in 3G, that’s even more swell. The point is, though, that I’m trying to save money for myself and potentially for you, dear reader.

See, we’re going to have Windows 8 this year on every single consumer machine money can buy and although I’ll also be giving that a shot in a review concurrent to this one, I’m not sure I’ll buy it. That should apply as well to millions of other computer users who want to know if its necessary to upgrade to it or not. On the forums, someone mentioned, quite accurately I think, that Windows 7 is going to land up as the XP of its time. To prevent OSes from getting long in the tooth, Microsoft is going to start blocking updates and support from them far quicker, one by one until you’re almost forced to upgrade to the new and shiny because X feature has been included. You have to pay for that privilege.

Linux is free and I’ve watched online as Ubuntu turned from the ugly ducking to a beautiful swan (with the exception of Unity, some people still hate it as do I). Its become one of the most widely-used distros by default and every year it gets updated twice to the current bleeding edge, all for free. That’s a bargain, if I may say so myself, and worth one checking out. Follow me as I do!

Source: Canonical’s Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

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Which brings us to Risen 2: Dark Waters. In many ways, Risen marked the clear beginning of a move away from the dedicated, hardcore RPG market into something more amenable to those with less sharpened dungeon-crawling skills. Risen 2 pretty much completes this journey.

Going into the game I was dead-set on investing myself in the story, but after a few hours I literally lost the plot and stopped caring. The 17th-century Caribbean setting went from intriguing to tiring, and the tireless reverting to tried and tested Hollywood pirate tropes began to grate my nerves.

Right, I don’t feel like writing any more about the setting and story. Suffice to say they are both sadly lacking and disappointing, and I wasn’t even expecting all that much. Fortunately these things don’t necessarily make or break a game, and I can think of a few modern classics that were loved despite failing in these areas. Sadly, Risen 2 is not quite destined to join their ranks, although the gameplay is at least a step up from the aforementioned shortcomings.

The third-person combat is nothing new, but in its defence, it works and is moderately enjoyable. Sword fighting consists of slashing, blocking and parrying, while marksmanship requires you to keep your aiming reticule firmly on your designated target. What results is a combat system that, despite being ultimately inane, is somehow engaging. It’s a bit like getting caught in a stare, or drifting off in thought – before you know it, time has passed and you are somehow left with a vague sense of satisfaction.

One of Risen 2’s strong points is the character progression, which manages to be both compelling as well as surprisingly unique. There are some genuinely interesting character skills, with one of my personal favourites being throwing salt in your enemies’ eyes! There are various different gameplay styles, from weilding powerful rifles, to sword combat and of course magic; the spectrum is sufficiently broad.

Structurally, the game is similar to pretty much every action RPG you have played before. There are story quests and side quests, and they are there in abundance. As you progress through the game, you unlock new areas, with more difficult enemies, and, of course, greater rewards. While this method has its advantages, it also prevents you from feeling like you’re part of a larger, unified world.

The game’s tone is at face value quite light and almost cartoony, so it comes as a bit of a surprise when brightly rendered NPCs tell you to f*** off. There is a degree of humour injected for good measure, but it’s not done well enough to really count as one of the game’s strengths.

Risen 2: Dark Waters is available on PC right now. You can grab it on Steam right now if you’d rather not lift your ass off your chair to visit a nearby physical retailer. The Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game are presently due for release in August of this year.

On the consumer side, the Pavilion series gets a major design switch to  a very stylish range of colours and new brushed aluminium panels for various parts of the chassis. HP calls the new lid design “Mosaic”, and HP says that it combines rich colours, premium materials and purposeful shapes to create a work of art. Speaking of art, if you had to put all the lids from the newly-design laptops together, you’d be able to lay them out to complete a much bigger mosaic. 

The Pavilion M6 is the first up which comes close to Ultrabook slimness, but includes a DVD drive, 15.6″ LED HD LCD (yes, that’s right, an HD screen, not this 1360 x 768 crap), a choice of AMD or Intel processors and up to eight hours of battery life. There’s also an optional backlit keyboard, Beats Audio by Dr. Dre with a subwoofer and a discrete graphics card (think Nvidia GT640M) for light gaming, video and photo editing. Note the tapered end of the lid, allowing the screen a much larger angel of tilt than most laptops. Pricing is yet to be determined, but it’ll compete favourably compared to the high price tags of Ultrabook devices. This might not land on our shores as I’m told its exclusive to Best Buy and Amazon, but anything’s possible.

The rest of the Pavilion series gets a revamp as well. The DV6, DV7 and DV4 get the new brushed aluminium chassis, with the DV4 coming in black, white and red colour options. There are soft-touch plastics at the bottom of the lid to improve grip when carrying the notebook and Beats-approved speakers integrated into the display’s bezel at the top and sides. The DV range offers Intel processors at the moment, but AMD options will become available throughout the year. Standard is an HD Webcam and HP’s ProtectSmart technology, as well as discrete graphics options. Pricing starts at $549.99 for the DV4 and DV6, (approx R4415.29 before import taxes and levies) and $799.99 for the DV7 (approx R6422.28). It doesn’t help adoption rates here in S.A. though, as the current retail price of the entry-level DV7 stands at R14,000, quite high for most buyers and easily within range of the Alienware M14x.

Small, but the DV4 makes a statement at its low price tag.

The Pavilion G6 and G7 get  a new touch as well, upgrading the plastic chassis with more shiny options and a range of colours to choose from. The G6 range is more popular with home users and professionals who don’t have the cash for the DV range of laptops, yet still need some decent power to get work done. The G-series follows the same basic cues of the M6 with the tapered bottom and of the laptop and the slimmer DVD drive, bringing the laptop’s design closer to 2012-esque ideas. It might not compete with the Ultrabooks, but its a great choice in its own right. Some are even practical gaming options. The other optional colours are black, white, purple and pink. The G6 starts at a retail price of $449.99 (approx R3612.50) while the G7 starts at $499.99 (approx R4013.89) for the lowest-spec version.

In the Ultrabook segment, HP’s Envy range is geared towards both high-powered home users and business professionals. The Envy range has been selling so well for business-use that HP can’t keep up with demand, and this revamp will hopefully make the brand more prominent in the market that’s getting very slowly swamped with Ultrabook options. The Envy SpectreXT tops out the range  with a 13.3″ HD LED LCD, eight hours of battery life, a range of Intel Ivy Bridge chips, 128GB solid state storage, USB3.0 and HDMI-out.

In a way, the Ultrabook market is shaping up a lot like the current state of the Windows Phone offerings – same OS, same basic hardware design inside, with the OEMs allowed to customise their designs as long as they’re within specific limitations. Like the M6 and the Pavilion range, the SpectreXT features Beats Audio, an HD webcam and an all-aluminium chassis. The SpectreXT also comes with free editions of Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 and Premiere Elements for video and photo editing on the go, as well as a dedicated support line for SpectreXT buyers. The SpectreXT will begin retailing for $999 (approx – oh just sell my kidney, okay? Seriously, R8019.92) from the 8th June in the U.S. There’s also the XT Pro, designed for businesses (but essentially the same thing).

The rest of the Envy lineup for consumers comes in 14″ and 15.6″ flavours (take that, Macbook Pro 15!) and comes with all the upgrades seen today along with mSATA, up to nine hours battery life, Intel’s Rapid-Start Technology and a different finish on the lid, further taking the Mosaic concept through HP’s entire lineup. If you’re an eager Apple fan waiting to see what the new Macbooks will offer this year, this is roughly what you can expect Apple to bring to the table. One crucial difference – these both have DVD drives, slot-loading ones, on the top left side of the notebook. The Envy 14t starts from $749.99 (approx R6020.88) and the 15t (pictured below) will retail for $799.99 (approx R6422.28).

Also in the works is a new model, the Sleekbook. Now while it may come with Intel processors and for all intents and purposes look and feel like the regular Envy range, the Sleekbook family will also offer AMD’s Brazos 2.0 and Trinity APUs as options for buyers. It includes the updates from the rest of the family, but comes in two paint jobs – the boring grey steel and the undoubtedly sexy Hero Black and Red. There’s just something about that colour scheme that leaves me at a loss for words. Laptops and Ultrabooks of late have looked very boring, but this could be a sleeper hit. No mention is made of which processors or APUs will be available, but its going to end up as the spiritual replacement for the Alienware M11x anyway thanks to Trinity’s promised graphics prowess. Prices start at $699.99 (approx R5619.48 and I’m so hoping local pricing is similar) for the 14-incher, while the 15.6″ model will hit U.S. stores in mid-June at $599.99 (approx R4816.69).

Finally, for those whose IT departments haven’t gone crazy over the Dell XPS13, have them look at the HP Folio 9470m. Yes, its an Ultrabook again, but HP is creeping up on Dell’s market share in the business and enterprise segment with their “Software as a Service” motto. The Folio range (yes, there’ll be more) comes with optional 4G modems, VGA and Displayport connectors, new docking stations, a nine-hour battery life and the option for a second extended battery to fit under the Ultrabook, giving it up to twelve hours of operating time. Its different because the battery is user-replaceable and the back panel can be opened, a must-have for businesses who have to support multiple devices which need fixing in a short period of time. Ordinarily Ultrabooks have to be sent back for repair by the manufacturer due to their high level of complexity and extreme price.

The Folio range also comes with HP-approved Enterprise management and tracking apps, and also comes with Smart Card and TPM security measures, as well as HP Bios Protection and HP’s Business set of Antivirus software which doesn’t require CD keys and auto-manages all viruses and potential threats to provide peace of mind. Price? If you’re asking, you can’t afford it, period. You have to be an enterprise-level business to even get prices quoted for you.

Source: TechpowerUp and TechpowerUp

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The game is pretty simple. You get stuff, and you make stuff with it. Most of the time, the stuff you’re getting is to make stuff to help you get more stuff a bit easier, but that’s kind of how reality works too so there’s not much of a conceptual barrier to entry. Until the monsters come, anyway, and even then, I’m sure there’s a metaphor for the human condition in there somewhere.

So every night, there are monsters in the world. It’s not a big deal if you’ve got walls around you and some sort of roof over your head, but honestly, I’m also not convinced they really add anything to the game except a pointless, and sometimes very frustrating pretence at being like other games. You know what the exact opposite of fun is? Being killed by exploding Creepers, and dropping everything you’d spent the last two hours mining in lava.

Including a diamond pickaxe.

And only then discovering you can disable monsters altogether.

A moment of silence for Picky-Sparkles. ;_;

Picky-Sparkles (pictured far right) in happier times.

The transition to console and controller has happened perhaps unexpectedly without significant catastrophe or inscrutably obvious game-breaking UI decision, although it’s necessarily somewhat behind the PC version in terms of features – there’s plenty to do, of course, but not as much as you can right now on PC. To make up for this (ahead of actual game updates, which are apparently already in the works), the Xbox version includes four-way local multiplayer in addition to eight-way online multiplayer, but how much this actually matters depends more or less on how many  of your friends want to make holes with you.

The console version also includes a tutorial stage, and while PC veterans and purists will doubtless sneer at such blatant and blasphemous HOW TOing, it beats keeping a browser page open on the official Minecraft wiki to do exactly the same thing the “hard way”.

I can’t recommend this game to everybody, ever in good conscience. I’m not even sure I can call it a “game”. But if you’ve ever dreamed of owning the world’s biggest LEGO set, then Minecraft is definitely for you. If not, you have no soul.

While there’s no left-hand version of this one announced, Razer is looking to produce the left-hand Naga for release either later this year or in early 2013. When launched, the MMO-centered Naga launched with three rows of buttons on the side with up to twelve programmable keys.

The new version ups the ante by introducing interchangeable side panels for proper pinky grip, and the three styles offered benefit both claw and grip styles. The mouse ships standard with the 17-button configuration, adjustable DPI to 5600 (really, really sensitive), Razer’s “Zero-acoustic” mouse feet (I really didn’t know mice feet made a noise) and an anti-slip, anti-fingerprinte black matte finish.

The new Naga for MMO gamers should be available now in the RazerStore for U.S. and European gamers for $79.99 (approx R640, but that’s before taxes and levies). If it ever lands on our shores, it’ll sell quite well.

Source: Tom’s Hardware

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Hey, Apogee. “Aardwolf.”

So I give you the Crystal White (no, its not a codename for a drug) Playstation Vita. 

Yes, its not that special on the inside, but it does look very good in white. The Japs and most of east-Asia will have it retailing in their stores by the end of June for around £232 (roughly R3000) for the 3G version or £193 (roughly R2500) for the Wi-Fi only edition, which is the one I’m slowly but surely saving up for. Its a pity that our ones retail for above R3000, but since we are at the bottom of the globe, its to be expected.

Surprisingly, it doesn’t cost any more than the original black version, suggesting that Sony waited to coin it a bit with the cheaper black paint and then opt for a white edition. The original PSP went through about six or seven different colours, and if the Vita sells as well as Sony expects it to, it may go through the same process. There will be matching white earphones available as well as white protective cases and other accessories.

Source: Eurogamer

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The icing on top is the HD7850 – a gamer’s friend at R2600 which clubs the GTX560Ti effectively at its price point and may force Nvidia into a major price war. As manufacturers design and price their GTX560Ti units closer to R2000, I began to wonder how AMD was going to cope with that. Behold, Tom’s Hardware may have stumbled on the answer. 

What you see above is a single-slot edition of the Radeon HD7850 which was mistakenly sent to Tom’s Hardware in Europe for testing purposes. After all, the site has a number of technical writers who could provide valuable input to AMD in the process of designing and testing out new hardware. They were told they would be receiving a test unit for a single-slot HD7850, a card that would fit even better in many gaming computers and would be perfect in that high-powered HTPC you’re planning to build.

Only 768 shaders lit up.

But it was not the card that they were expecting. The test unit has a large number of shaders disabled for a total of 768 shaders, which puts it in the half-way mark between the HD7850 and the HD7770. If there ever was a planned HD7830, I’d bet this would be the way to go. On closer inspection and with some exchange with AMD’s offices in Shanghai, Tom’s learned that the board was intended for testing purposes, to demonstrate to board partners how chip yields could affect how they’ll supply graphics cards to customers. That’s actually a normal thing, and plenty of manufacturers disable circuits of their cards to test out designs while the final product is being tapered out. But this one is special.

With only 768 shaders enabled, the card falls in line with the GTX560Ti and GTX560Ti 448-core in many benchmarks, drawing alongside and almost beating it in Crysis 2 and Battlefield 3 respectively. In the past, HD-x830 cards were praised for their value for money, straddling the bargain bin line but offering up extremely good value for money.

If AMD is making an HD7830, it would be priced closer to R2200 to make it more competitive and to secure market share for buyers who don’t want the HD7770, but can’t stump up the extra grand for the HD7850. Tom’s sadly wouldn’t go into benchmarks for power consumption or thermal performance, but revealed that on average the card consumed 10w less than the reference HD7850 – not surprising considering the PCB does belong to the reference HD7850 design, but interesting because with a few more tweaks it could easily fall to as much as 20w more under its bigger brother. Being a single-slot cooler, though, there is more heat to deal with, but that shouldn’t be much of an issue for enthusiasts with the proper chassis.

In the conclusion, Tom’s summed up that the card, if it indeed was a plan for a HD7830, would do well in its place next to the GTX560Ti and if equipped with 1GB of DDR5 RAM, would be cheaper and the better value choice. Nvidia hasn’t said or revealed how they’re planning on improving the GTX560Ti – they thankfully can’t do a rebrand this time because Fermi is old hat now. Going even further, by making this version of the HD7850 more efficient, it may actually be able to run without a PCI-Express 6-pin connector, powerful enough to combat the “Green” editions of the GTX560 that are still around.

All in all, I really hope AMD sees the potential in a card like this and releases it to the public as a cut-down HD7850. It would give gamers a choice at the lower price points the GTX560Ti is being driven to and, if nothing else, will keep the company in mindshare as well. I wouldn’t upgrade to it just yet as my HD6870 is still ticking along nicely, but for those of you still on the HD4770, HD4850 and HD4870 this would be a good deal.

Source: Tom’s Hardware, AMD Pitcairn With 768 Shaders: What is This Mystery Chip?

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I used to think that putting dinosaurs in your game would automatically makes it awesome. That was a thing, until I played Dino D-Day. The dinos made it better, obviously, but in a similar kind of way to finding chocolate in a bowl of vomit. An oddly pleasant addition, sure, but an altogether horrifying offering.

Thankfully, we’ve got Unreal Engine-powered Primal Carnage incoming sometime in the future, and it hopes to reaffirm my belief in the power that dinosaurs have on gaming. To quote the game’s official site, it’s an “asymmetrical online-multiplayer class-based game of humans versus dinosaurs” – a phrase so beautiful that typing it forced me to let out a few tears. Various class roles will be on offer in the game, allowing you to play everything from stealthy guy/reptile to heavy duty man/rex (and everything in between). If all you really want to do is loose flamethrowers on a pterosaur, there’s that too.

Alpha trailer lies below the break.

Bear in mind that that’s alpha footage right there, and yet it already looks excellent. The only real question is: who’s going to play as the humans?

If this just got you all hot for lizards, there’s always ORION: Dino Beatdown, which recently landed on Steam. I’ve not yet played it so I’ve no opinion on it, but there are certainly dinosaurs in there, and it too looks quite lovely.

Google’s project now has obtained permission from the Nevada Department of Motor vehicles after a private demonstration. The state department previously had to draft up amendments to existing road laws to allow the cars to be on the road.

Its an interesting development. We last saw driver-less cars in two recent-ish films: I, Robot (with the Audi RSQ/R8 concept that could drive itself) and A.I. Artificial Intelligence. The famous Kitt could also drive himself anywhere without Michael, and the public has always been enamoured with the idea of a car that can “think” for itself and drive without your assistance.

While it would take out the fun in driving, I suppose that’s why the Prius was selected as its possibly the most boring car on the planet (I lie, actually, that honour goes to the Morris Marina). While the cars are able to take corners, speed up and down and drive on freeways by themselves, the driver always has to be present to take control of the situation should the auto-pilot decide to have a massive brain fart or come across a paradox.

Honestly, if this kind of thing can derail an intelligent train, who knows what kind of damage paradoxes can cause elsewhere? Or dragons, come to think of it.

In addition, the cars get special license plates that alert law enforcement and other drivers on the road that the car is automated and in the testing phase. The vehicles are all privately owned by Google, and one day the company hopes to launch the system for motorcar manufacturers as an add-on option once the patent pending is awarded to them.

But here’s the thing. Given that the car uses Google Maps and the system would track your EVERY move, would you really want that? The search giant recently amended its terms and conditions of use of their services and it basically amounts to: “We now can legally know what you’re doing on our servers all the time, everytime. We will sell this off, and keep the interesting stuff to ourselves. Kthnxbai!”

Oh yeah, Google can also control the cars remotely. Is that you, Skynet?

Source: Fudzilla

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Write a review of 300-350 words on any of the 3DS games listed below. Include a summary of your review (up to 40 words), a few short pros and cons, and a score out of 100. Check it twice and then send it through to nintendoreaderreviews@nag.co.za as a Word document (.doc or .docx) or RTF. You need to do this by 12:00 on Friday the 11th of May.

List of games, prizes and competition rules after the break…

• Resident Evil: Revelations
• Super Mario 3D Land
• Mario Kart 7
• Kid Icarus: Uprising
• Tekken 3D Prime Edition
• Super Street Fighter IV 3D
• Dead or Alive Dimensions
• Zelda: Ocarina of time
• Metal Gear Solid Snake Eater 3D
• Splinter Cell 3D
• James Noir’s Hollywood Crimes 3D
• Ghost Recon Shadow Wars
• Thor: The Video Game

The best review will appear in the June issue of NAG and the entrant will receive from Nintendo South Africa three Nintendo 3DS games of your choice (limited to first-party titles), a Circle Pad Pro and Mario Kart 7 wheel accessories. Three runners-up will also be chosen, and each will receive a 3DS game of their choice (limited to first-party titles). Please note that this competition is open to South African residents only. This competition does not constitute a job offer or entitle the winner to any benefits or rights of employment with NAG. Prizes cannot be exchanged for cash.

Orwellian similarities aside, the best bit of tech seen in the movie were the touch-interface gloves Tom Cruise uses in one scene where he’s in the debriefing room. And the gloves he wears are gesture-controlled, linked to an augmented reality computer that projects images before him (in fact, this entire scene was the basis for the design of Jarvis seen in the Ironman movies). Yeah, that’s a real thing today. Well the glove, that is.

The original idea of the gloves used in the movie was concocted through a brainstorming session in which  Speilberg and his effects producers wanted to create the feeling of the technology in the movie being far more advanced than what was available at the time. Aside from the fact that the newly-released PS Vita blows my mind with its augmented reality potential, the gloves released today by Bellco are strikingly similar to those in the film.

The device has a gyroscope on the back of your palm to track movement from your hand and to differentiate vertical and horizontal adjustments. It has a wireless transmitter embedded, linked to another sensor in your index finger that has another sensor for more finely-tuned movements. The glove connects to your PC and uses a nanoUSB dongle to keep everything out of the way. The glove’s software works out of the box and is Windows, Mac OS X, Android and Linux compatible.

The Ion is designed to be mass-marketed.

The biggest thing that pains me when people do presentations is that they have to use crummy wireless presenters, These days things need to have a bit more of a “wow” factor if you’re trying to jazz up a bored audience in your AGM meetings. The gloves move the cursor on the screen as you would a physical mouse, but movements don’t have to be sweeping or made with much effort for them to be detected. If you’re thinking “cool!”, then you’re not thinking big enough.

In Ironman, Stark moves objects around his 3D holotable with his hands, manipulating 3D objects with his fingers and with hand gestures to control Jarvis’ manual interface. He grabs something and sweeps it in the direction of the “Trash” bin, and it gets deleted. One particular showcase of what Jarvis could do is test out a design of the suit’s arm on Starks right forearm – that’s a real ongoing idea, again, but the glove at least lets people get the gist of the idea when you whip it out and control your machine on a 100″ Digital-Cinema 4k monitor.

Bellco’s made no mention of whether the glove actually supports gesture-based controls. It would be reasonable to assume so, since it uses the basic controls and software as the PS/2 mouse. However, like the Neural Impulse Actuator which NAG magazine reviewed eons ago, it may be a success, or it may fall by the wayside.

Buy it now at www.3dionwirelessairmouse.com. The single glove is available for $79.95 excluding shipping and only fits the right hand. Sorry lefties, Razer didn’t design this one.

Source: TechpowerUp!

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Late last week we learnt that RTS masters Relic, along with publisher THQ, are bringing Company of Heroes 2 to the PC in 2013. A direct sequel to 2006’s fantastic strategy game, Company of Heroes 2 will see you shifting your focus to the Eastern theatre of war during World War II. You’ll be in command of the Russian army as you attempt to “push back the Nazi invaders and free Mother Russia”.

The game will make use of Relic’s proprietary Essence 3.0 Engine, earlier iterations of which powered previous Company of Heroes and its expansions. According to the official press release, the sequel will see the introduction of Commander Abilities and something else called Dynamic Battle Tactics. We’re guessing these are buzz terms to keep an eye on as development continues.

Line-of-sight will play a much more prominent role in CoH2. Instead of the usual fog of war obscuring your Russian eyeballs, your units will have to have proper line-of-sight on targets, otherwise enemy units won’t appear on screen at all. With continually shifting tactics a cornerstone of the franchise, we’re pretty excited to see what effect these new features will have. You can check out the newly launched and official website here.

Launching this May, the company’s Trinity APUs are set to improve the performance of their current lineup and perhaps give manufacturers another option for when they’re assessing their Ultrabook alternatives. Trinity packs a processor and a graphics solution in the same package, with the GPU promising a more capable option than Intel’s Integrated HD chips when it comes to gaming. 

However, will it be the better option? Intel’s HD3000 and HD4000 chips found in their Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge parts are technically just as capable, but Intel’s Quicksync technology makes the choice for OEMs more difficult. Quicksync uses the integrated graphics core to accelerate functions like Photoshop edits, video decompression and re-coding video from one format to another. In addition, Intel’s putting a lot of money behind the Ultrabook initiative – $400 million, to be exact. As it is, AMD’s Brazos platform is beaten in raw computational power by low-end Sandy bridge Pentium options.

A leaked screenshot shows the A10 chip in the hands of overclockers, with AMD clearly looking to their input for their K-series.

AMD’s mobile Trinity chips haven’t been completely specced, but TDPs are expected to be under 40w, and Brazos 2.0 chips will now boast a 18w TDP. The desktop parts scheduled for release are the  A10-5800K, A10-5700, A8-5600K, and A8-5500. All are quad-core parts, with the A10-5800K being an unlocked processor running at 3.8Ghz with Turbo Boost to 4.2Ghz. Graphics performance for the desktop parts is expected to be improved by 50% thanks to the new Radeon HD7660D, with CPU performance improving 10% over the previous generation.

While its nowhere near Core i5 2500K standards, at least AMD’s roadmap is completely on track – it was predicted at a conference last year that Trinity would yield about 10% in performance gains. Whether the same applies to the 15% improvements promised by Piledriver remains to be seen, but these chips are still sitting on the 32nm process. Trinity for the desktop is only expected to be released in Q3 of this year.

The new Brazos 2.0 processors will be named the E2-1800 and E1-1200, both being low-power dual-core APU solutions, and these will go in AMD’s much cheaper Ultrabook options that should retail for about $500 when they launch later this year.

The Piledriver-based new FX chips are already on the cards, called the FX-8350, FX-6300, FX-4320 with four, three and two Bulldozer cores respectively. AMD’s “Vishera” processors are scheduled to release much later this year, possibly close to Q4 2012 with quad-channel memory and based on the “Terramar” server chips. It won’t require a new socket but does pack no less than five (yes, that’s right, five) Bulldozer modules for a total of ten threaded cores. Its intended for parallel  and virtualised environments, although packing an extra two cores above Intel’s inevitable octo-core processors might be a better value-add for some.

Stay tuned to NAG Online for more info as it leaks. This is going to be an interesting year for AMD fans, even if they feel a little disappointed by Bulldozer’s performance.

Source: PC Perspective, TwojePC, TechpowerUp!

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In February this year, EA reported having a subscriber base of 1.7 million people for their MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic. That figure is now sitting on 1.3 million after just three months. This news comes via EA’s most recent earning statements issued to investors.

EA was expecting subscriber numbers to drop after the first 30 days of the MMO’s release, seeing as all new copies shipped with a 30 day subscription. We’re now almost half a year away and numbers are continuing to decline. That being said, EA’s Frank Gibeau admitted that the 1.3 million active subscribers is made up of “core MMO users”. He went further to explain that the 400, 000 subscriber loss was likely due to the “casual” market deciding to hang up their Jedi/Sith robes after going “through a billing cycle and decided not to subscribe to the game”.

It’s not all depressing news however, as Gibeau reiterated EA and BioWare’s intentions to expand the MMO and increase subscriber numbers. There are a number of developments in the pipeline that are aimed at keeping higher level players around for longer, thereby appealing to Gabeau’s “core MMO users”.

Source: Bothans from Eurogamer (who are still, thankfully, alive)

I hope that everyone reading this has played The Binding of Isaac. If you haven’t, you should go buy it right now. Seriously, you’ll thank me later. Its shmuppy roguelike charms still have me occasionally loading it up every once in a while to warily guide Isaac through what is possibly the most deranged basement in all of existence, giddily pissing on any and everything that I find in the hopes that it’ll somehow reward me with coins to spend on epic items and a better chance to defeat mom. True story.

I still find it hard to believe that access to the many hours of madly addictive joy that this game offers costs only $4.99 ($5.98 if you want the sountrack as well, which I recommend that you should, as it’s superb). Anyway, it looks like I (and hopefully you as well) will be spending a lot more time getting back into the game very soon, as the long-coming expansion, subtitled Wrath of the Lamb, will be available on Steam at the end of this month. It promises more of everything, and that’s just perfect.

Move past the jump for more info. And a trailer!

Edmund McMillen (one half of the game’s development team and whose name might ring Super Meat Boy bells) has handed over a useful list of shiny newness that can be expected of the expansion. It’s a lot of stuff for just $3. I’d pay $3 just for the extra music tracks. Here it is:

• 100+ new items
• 5+ new chapters
• 20+ new enemies
• 25 new achievements
• 15+ new bosses
• 6+ new room types
• 6+ new mysterious item drops (eternal hearts, playing cards, dimes and more!)
• 5+ new music tracks by Danny B
• A new item type, Trinkets
• A new challenge mode with 10 unique challenges (that unlock more content)
• A new unlockable character, Samson (The Beserker)
• A new final (final) chapter and boss with new endings
• Tons of new random happenings, curses, blessings, npcs, fortune tellers and more
• Also more super secrets than you’d probably expect… good luck finding them all.

If the promise of all this new stuff to discover and scrounge for in The Binding of Isaac: Wrath of the Lamb excites you as it does me, then keep the 28th of May in mind, as that’s when you’ll be able to snag the expansion via Steam. And now, a trailer.

Those of you who’ve been following the System Builder’s Thread on the NAG Forums will know that its almost impossible to buy a laptop for under R6000 that provides decent gaming performance. That’s certainly the case with netbooks and subnotebooks, but things are improving. For instance, AMD’s APU processors based on the Brazos platform provide capable hardware and a decent experience if you keep settings low, and are perfect for those game that are typically played – Counter Strike, Starcraft, Half-Life Deathmatch, cracked copies of Unreal 2k4 and so on. I hazard that only laptops from R6000 and upwards are  capable LAN options, so for the rest of the time I’m looking for models that offer practicality, performance, productivity and portability in as small a package as is comfortable.

With the “surge” in Ultrabooks we’re certainly seeing buyers lust after similar, far cheaper options to the Macbook Air, and I’m here to show you that they do exist, if you know where to look. I’ll offer an SSD where possible for the Ultrabook alternatives, and where I feel it would benefit performance on the notebook in the long term. Battery life is also always a concern, and any measures that can be taken to improve that will be considered.

Netbooks:

Aspire One D270 10.1″ @ R3100 (SSD Option: OCZ Agility 3 60GB @ R844)

Mecer W210CUQ 10.1″ @ R4027 (SSD Option: OCZ Agility 3 60GB @ R844)

I choose both these notebooks because they’re the only Intel Cedar Trail netbooks in stock with the Atom N2800 processor. Its a dual-core chip with two extra threads, and it helps with the minimal workloads that netbooks have to deal with on a daily basis. The improved chipset and the GMA 3650 integrated graphics allows the playback of HD content using players like VLC and the Mecer model in particular can pack up to 4GB RAM, has an option for which version of Windows you’d like to load (in case you’re wondering, always choose Home Premium) and comes stock with a 3G HSDPA network card built-in. When buying the Mecer, make sure you switch the notebook to 64-bit Windows as the Cedar Trail platform is 64-bit capable, despite what the sales guy will tell you.

In particular, I like the idea of swapping out the stock hard drive for an SSD and then using the one you originally got as an external. Netbook workloads don’t usually deal with incompressible data unless there’s video involved, so the OCZ Agility would fit in just fine here. Both feature six-cell batteries, providing up to eight hours of life away from the wall.

R5000 Notebooks/Subnotebooks:

MSI X400-WB 14″ @ R3966 (SSD Option: OCZ Agility 3 90GB @ R1132) (Ultrabook Alternative)

Fujitsu Siemens AH530 15.6″ @ R4999 (Makro Special)

Asus X54C 15.6″ @ R4561

Because there’s such a huge range of models out there, I only listed a few here for comparison, and ones that I would personally use. Most 15.6″ laptops here have decent enough specs to be productive workhorses, but don’t expect miracles from the Intel i3 processor, even though it is up to most tasks that you put to it. You would be able to play LAN games with the integrated graphics, but you’d be doing so at low-to-medium settings, depending on the game at hand.

Pay attention though, to the MSI I listed. Its essentially an Ultrabook before they were even a thing. Omitting the DVD drive and swapping in a low-power Core 2 Duo, its still powerful enough for any task you throw at it. Chuck out the HDD, throw in the 90GB Agility 3 and you should be good to go. The Macbook Air is smaller and lighter, but tops out at 64GB for the entry-level model. Granted, the laptop ships with Vista but you do get a free upgrade to Windows 7 in the box. If possible, install the 64-bit version and get another 2GB of RAM for good measure.

If you really want to get that one step closer to the allure of the Macbook Air, though, you can turn the notebook into a Hackintosh by following this guide for the X340 and by installing a compatible wireless card that works with OSX Snow Leopard. At your own risk, obviously. If you’re that serious, install Ubuntu Linux with a custom OSX skin – less grey hairs for everyone involved, and still a pleasant experience.

R7000 Notebooks:

Dell Inspiron 1090 10.1″ @ R5299 (SSD Option: OCZ Petrol 128GB @ R1276) (Letexo alternative)

HP Paviliion G6 1270Si 15.6″ @ R6999.95

Mecer W170HN 17.3″ @ R7197

I looked around and round, round and around for anything better than the options we have here. I didn’t cover any laptops between the R5000 and R7000 budgets, mainly because they’re all copy-pasta versions of each other, and each one equally as crappy in the gaming department. Here we have two decent options, starting with the HP Pavilion G6 with AMD’s quad-core Brazos-based processor, AMD Radeon graphics that end up performing the same as a desktop HD6570, 4GB of RAM and Windows 7 Home Premium. Its a sure-fit for multi-tasking users, and AMD’s APU is more than up to the challenge of playing games at medium settings.

The Mecer W170HN is by far the more capable platform, though. Seeing as its customisable, I recommend buyers move up to Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, the dual-core Intel i3-2350M, stick with the default 320GB hard drive and up the total RAM to 8GB for the cheapest gaming solution this side of the equator. The Nvidia Geforce GT540M is capable enough, though you’ll need to be playing at low resolutions and medium settings to get an enjoyable experience. Starcraft II would run really nicely here at medium settings.

Finally, I know a lot of people like tablets. A lot of people like notebooks. What about those of you who like both? Intel’s Letexo platform is a long way away, but if you’re willing to compromise and wait for Windows 8, go for the Dell Inspiron 1090. Its a netbook with a flip-touch screen, and should be more than up to the tasks you’d normally set for netbooks anyway. RAM is capped at 2GB, but that should be fine for the use case of this interesting hybrid, although an SSD is recommended to get around the hardware limitation of the weaker Atom processor.

Next week I’m scaling the walls of R9000 to R15,000 budgets, be sure to check out that if you’ve got that amount of money stuffed away in your piggy, your mattress or bank account.

Discuss this in the forums: Linky

There are pros and cons to be a gamer at this point in time. The pros are obvious: multi-million dollar games, increased likelihood of your favourite title getting a sequel, amazing visuals. The cons are just as glaring: DRM, always-on Internet requirements, your favourite title getting a sequel (after sequel after sequel), and publishers forcing you to do their social media marketing before they’ll give you trailers.

Ubisoft is doing just that! If you would like to see the world premiere gameplay trailer for Assassin’s Creed III, then you have a bunch of things you need to do. You’ll need to Like the Facebook page, obviously, but it doesn’t stop there. You’ll need to Tweet with the #AC3 tag; post things to your timeline, and piss off your friends by “recruiting” them to the cause. Collectively, all of this has to happen 1, 776, 000 times before Ubisoft will unleash the entire trailer. The strange number probably has something to do with the date 1776 – when the Colonies formally gave the British the finger and formulated their United States Declaration of Independence. The irony of this date isn’t entirely lost on me considering the context in which Ubisoft is choosing to highlight it.

Hit the jump! You know you want to, because despite it being 30 seconds, it’s still the first you’ll see of the game…

So, are you going to shed your customer independence and become Ubisoft’s marketing mule, or will you just sit back and let everyone else do it? You can head over here if you want to start doing some viral marketing.

Via: Kotaku

The next Galaxy ships with a in-house-design quad-core processor, a Note-rivaling 4.8″ Pentile Super AMOLED screen and Android Ice Cream Sandwich as standard. The phone ships at the end of May to major carriers around the world, and we may see it at the end of June. The phone comes in 16, 32 and 64GB varieties to match the iPhone 4s.

Of course, the new Galaxy is not without its drawbacks, as Samsung has chosen to reinvent its design with the third iteration in the series. Whether its appreciated or not is a matter of personal opinion, however I don’t like it. A flagship should show off the highest levels of design within the respective family, and the Galaxy S III bears no resemblance to its cheaper brethren. The chassis is entirely plastic made through a manufacturing process Samsung calls “Hyperglaze” which textures the plastic to feel like brushed aluminium.

Pictured: Fooling the world, one user at a time.

The phone retains a removable battery cover with a large 2100mAh unit to power the flagship through at least a single day of heavy use. The SD card still sits under the battery and isn’t hot-swappable. Micro-SIM use is also now standard, but there’s no reason why it should be here – the phone isn’t a unibody design like the Lumia 800/900/N9/iPhone 4 and doesn’t need a uSIM slot to save space. The handset also retains hardware front-end keys for call answering, ending and a menu button.

On the subject of space (there’s lots of it), the front is dominated by the massive 4.8″ LCD screen. Pentile displays are a common feature now in Samsung’s higher-end mobiles, and its what enabled the Note to work so well as a mini-tablet. The front-facing camera is used to track your eye movement and will switch the screen back on for you if it’s been blacked out – this is called Smart Stay, and will keep the screen brightened for as long as you’re staring at it.

So if you like looking at, say, porn, you don't have to keep touching the screen to turn it on again. Just blink.

The phone is powered by Samsung’s proprietary Exynos chipset, featuring a 1.4Ghz Cortex-A9 quad-core processor and the Mali-400 GPU. Samsung has abandoned the use of Nvidia’s Tegra in its mobiles, choosing its own ARM-based variant instead. The handset also has 1GB of RAM, although competitors are already releasing ICS handsets with 2GB of RAM for RAM-intensive tasks. In its own right, this phone is as powerful in some respects as some older Pentium/Celeron processors on the LGA478 platform.

Software-wise the phone tricks it up with Samsung’s answer to Apple’s impressive Siri, S-Voice. Now, you’ve got to understand a few things first. Apple controls its entire hardware and software platform, hence the reason why Siri has such deep integration to iOS on the iPhone 4s platform. S-Voice is a software overlay with limited commands, and doesn’t take words in context like Siri does. It can function, however, and will do things like take a picture or check the weather.

Whether it talks back to you like Siri does is another question.

It will improve though with time. S-Voice delivers answers to you just like Siri and also features a similar button layout at the bottom of the screen. You can also call it up by the phrase, “Hi Galaxy!”, although thankfully this can be changed. If I ever get my hands on one, it’ll be “Caroline” or “HAL”. Or “Otacon”, because I’m a nerd and like to nerd-freak out all my friends occasionally. Ooh, “Jarvis”, that’s an even better idea. (On a related note, download Rainmeter and apply this Jarvis skin. Feel free to stare at your desktop for hours)

Also featured is an improved version of NFC called S-Beam, which improves filesharing and speeds when using NFC. The Galaxy S III also has Smart Alert (vibrates when you pick the phone up to alert you that you’ve got a notification), Pop-Up Play (which continues playing whatever video you’re currently watching despite switching apps in a smaller, movable screen) and finally a camera app that takes photos while recording video, similar to HTC’s One X capability.

All in all, after watching the Live reveal I’m not sure what to think. On the one hand, its definitely an upgrade to the S II. Hell, its even a far better option for people who would have looked at the iPhone 4s and didn’t feel like getting sucked into the vortex that iTunes creates once you put it on your system. But design-wise I’m not convinced. We’ve already had years of the old Samsung pushing copies of successful Nokias and Sony Ericsson’s to the market.

The S3 is purposely designed to avoid those bitter patent wars but it doesn’t look like the flagship people hoped for. Its just…round. It doesn’t make a bold statement aside from its monstrous size, it doesn’t make itself noticed next to a sharp piece of hardware like the Motorola Razr. Its been transported back to the time when all consumers wanted was good hardware and great battery life, something the Galaxy S III has in spades. I’m not so sure regular consumers will want to go back there again, but only time will tell how much of a hit the phone will be. I’m quite sure the NAG team at HQ will get one for review, so watch out for when that lands for what they think given more time with the phone in regular-use environments.

Source: GSM Arena

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