When it comes to developer Rockstar Games, PC gamers tend to wait a while before their IPs are brought over to the platform. This holds true for the developer's popular Grand Theft Auto franchise. So it shouldn't surprise us that Grand Theft Auto V for PC has been delayed to April 14.
"Our apologies to PC gamers worldwide who have been counting down the days until the launch of the game," writes Rockstar on its website. "A bit more time is needed to ensure that the game is as polished as possible, and to make certain that both Heists and the GTA Online experience are ready to roll out on day one for PC."
This isn't the first time that the game has been pushed back. Originally slated for release on January 27, 2015, the developer delayed the PC version's release to March 22. A move that wasn't welcome considering that GTA V had been released on September 17, 2013 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. However, Rockstar has been working on an updated version of the game for the current generation of consoles, released last year in November, which also meant a PC version at last. Now, PC gamers will have to wait until April 14 to finally pick up a copy of the game.
However, the updated version of GTA V will include a new first-person mode, a first for the series, along with enhancements and additions to the game. So a delay this time around is understandable given the scope of the updated version.
At this point, though, we are used to getting games from Rockstar much later than the consoles. Hopefully, the PC version of GTA V will be optimized for the platform. Until then, we still have GTA IV with all of its mods.
When it comes to DirectX 12 we have been cautiously optimistic. Early tests have been promising and we are curious to see what else Microsoft has to say about its API. However, it appears that DirectX 12 will allegedly have Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU Capabilities according to an unnamed source who spoke to Tom's Hardware.
According to the source, the API will be able to combine different graphics resources and pool all those resources together. Rather than having multiple GPUs rendering an Alternate Frame (AFR) each, there is a new method called Split Frame Rendering (SFR) that is being introduced. With this feature, developers will be able to automatically, or manually, divide texture and geometry data between GPUs that will be able to work together on each frame and be designated a separate portion of the screen for each GPU. Unlike AFR, that requires both cards to have all of the data in their frame buffers and leaving the user to have a 4GB frame buffer even though there are two cards with 4GB of memory each.
This will, says the source, significantly reduce latency.
Yet SFR isn't new, as AMD's Mantle API supports it and applications out there that do as well (see how Mantle performs against DirectX 11). What is surprising is that the source went on to say that DirectX 12 will support all of this across different GPU architecures allowing AMD Radeon and Nvidia GeForce GPUs to work together to render the same game.
However, while this sounds great, it will still be up to developers to make use of, and utilize, Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU Capabilities for their games and software.
Microsoft is bringing back the Start Menu in Windows 10, though it won't look exactly the way you remember seeing it in Windows 7. If that's what you're after, you might be interested to know that Stardock is putting the final touches on Start10, its Start Menu replacement for Windows 10 that makes it look like it did in Windows 7. If you're an Object Desktop subscribers, you can try out the Start10 beta today.
"Now that we know where Microsoft is going with the start menu, we will support our Windows 10 customers with a more familiar and feature rich start menu the same way that we did with Start8 for Windows 8," said Stardock President and CEO Brad Wardell.
Start10 is the first Windows 10 compatible addition to Stardock's Object Desktop library. It's also a work in progress -- Stardock hopes users will provide feedback on the beta as it readies a final release for this fall when Windows 10 launches to the public.
What's different about Start10 versus the native Start Menu in Windows 10 is that it gives users the option of simplifying the interface by removing the metro tile section.
I built my first PC when I was 12 and believe that if you have any love for the platform, you should learn how to build one yourself. Having said that, however, I realize that not everyone has the time or patience to learn how to build a rig (even though it's really not hard to do). I've been doing a lot of research lately, as I've picked up the system reviews beat for Maximum PC, and notice that there's a negative stigma against people who buy pre-built machines. "Just build it yourself," these judgmental commenters say. As much as I want everyone to know how to put together their PCs, I'd rather them buy pre-built PCs if it might be their only entrance into our awesome clubhouse. In essence, I think it's OK to buy pre-built.
Now, I'm not talking about your grandfather's old Dell or HP towers here. Yuck, am I right? But boutique system builders have come a long way. One argument you hear against buying pre-builts is that it's cheaper to build your own PC, and in many cases this is definitely true. It might cost you a little bit of time, but financially, it can add up. This isn't always the case, however. I recently reviewed CyberPower PC's Syber Vapor; the little Mini-ITX box is equipped with a GeForce GTX 980 and an i7-4790K CPU and retails for $1,638. While that doesn't sound cheap, when we tried to replicate the build ourselves using prices from Newegg, the tab came out to $1,807. That means you're saving nearly $170 buying pre-built. In addition, you're getting CyberPower PC's one-year warranty. A lot of these vendors can get away with this via buying power. Consider it the Costco method of computer shopping.
CyberPower PC's high-end Vapor SKU is cheaper than its individual components.
Speaking of which, warranty and customer service can be a big factor, especially for the newbie PC buyer. I've built several gaming rigs for friends by cobbling together spare parts and whatnot, but I've also been approached by friends who depend on computers to make a living, like full-time jobs editing video. My gut reaction is to direct them to vendors like iBuyPower and CyberPower because these companies put together machines for pretty cheap and have solid one-year warranties. As much as I like building PCs for friends, dealing with their support calls (especially if it pertains to their livelihoods) is not something that I want to have to contend with.
Moving on, there are certain awesome form factors that you can't build into even if you want to. Take, for instance, Alienware's Alpha. While the PC has its issues, at 4.5 pounds, the computer is little larger than an Xbox 360 controller and works great as a living room PC that's easy to take over to a friend's house. Seriously, the Alienware Alpha and its 10-foot UI can do wonders for PC gaming in the living room, and that's not something you can duplicate exactly.
The Alienware Alpha is a super portable living room/gaming PC.
And if you want to build into beautiful chassis like Digital Storm's Aventum III or Origin PC's Millenium Genesis, you can't, as those system vendors design their cases just for their PCs. And let me tell you, if you haven't seen them up close with their awesome lights and custom loop coolers, I'll tell ya, they are things of beauty. I mean, I don't know about you, but I certainly couldn't machine and build PCs that beautiful myself. In addition, these system vendors take the time to overclock the internal components and spend hundreds of hours running vigorous tests to make sure they run stable.
The Aventum 3 is a beautiful pre-built PC that most people can't build.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we should all buy pre-built PCs. I know I'll be building PCs until the day I die, but in my humble opinion, if someone wants to buy a pre-built PC, they have their reasons, and in this day and age, there are plenty of good reasons to buy pre-built. Hopefully, they'll spend the time to upgrade their pre-built PC over time, and take it upon themselves to build their next one. After all, didn't most of us DIYers start off with a pre-built?
Free Office 365 for education offer extends beyond the U.S.
Microsoft had already been doing teachers and students living in the U.S. a solid by offering them free Office 365 subscriptions, and now that same offer is extending beyond the border. How far? Try all the way around -- if you're an eligible teacher or a student living in a place where Office 365 is available, a subscription is yours for the taking once you provide a valid school email address.
"That includes the 5.5 million eligible students in Australia, the nearly 5 million eligible students in Germany, 7 million more in Brazil, 1.3 million at Anadolu University in Turkey, every student in Hong Kong and millions more," Microsoft stated in a blog post.
If you're a student and you want to check if you're eligible, go here an enter your school-provided email address; teachers can go here and do the same.
Those who qualify and take advantage of the offer will have access to the latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access, and Publisher, all of which can be installed on up to five PCs or Macs and up to five mobile devices. They also receive 1TB of storage on OneDrive and access to Office Online for in-browser editing.
Corsair's Vengeance K70 RGB mechanical keyboard is supposed to deliver a color palette that's precisely 16,777,216 wide, which the industry rounds up to 16.8 million. However, a curious user who often works with Arduino LED projects noticed that something seemed off with his plank, so he did a bit experimenting. What he discovered was that Corsair's K70 RGB was only displaying 512 colors instead of the nearly 16.8 million advertised.
"As someone who works with Arduino LED projects I'm very familiar with the software and the hardware going on under the hood. I figured I'd test this systematically just to make sure I had some hard data," Corsair forum user "Digital.Zilla" stated in a post. "For those reading this thread that aren't aware, you can generate any color of the spectrum with the three primary light colors - red, green and blue. 'True color', what we use in computers, is 24 bit color; that is to say each light has to produce a value between 0 and 255 (8 bits) giving us a total of 24 bits for all three channels. Thus, 256 * 256 * 256 = 16,777,216 or the 16.8 million colors advertised on the box.
"Testing each color was a matter of clearing every key (turning their background color to off) then making a simple fade from 255 of that color (0 on the other channels) to 0, running it over 10 seconds and counting the unique steps of brightness it produced. If a light could produce a full 256 levels of brightness I shouldn't be able to count them in real time. I could.
"Testing each channel produced the same results: 8 steps of brightness each. 8 * 8 * 8 = 512 colors. That leaves us a whole 16,776,704 colors short of the advertised color range."
Others in the thread noticed the same thing, but what made the situation more mysterious is a video from CES 2014 that appears to show the K70 RGB using all 16.8 million colors. Check it out below and skip ahead to the 1min12sec mark to see the smooth transition between colors:
So, what's going on? The short version is Corsair ran into some USB stack size and performance issues that left the company with two choices -- delay the keyboard's launch or gimp the color palette while it works on a fix. The company chose the latter, though here's the full statement from Corsair:
During development of the keyboard and prior to the release of the RGB keyboard, we came across an issue regarding the possible color combinations. In an effort to get the product out to our customers as committed, we made the tough decision to resolve the issue in a future software release as we believe our customers would enjoy the product as-is.
Here are the specifics that detail the issue:
Due to USB stack size and performance issues, we had to reduce MCU processing overhead in the best and quickest manner. The LED controller gives us greater than 8 bits of color depth but we use the 8 bits that give us what we believe to be the best color granularity. Our controller architecture provides for over 100 million color combinations out of which we select 16.8 million to display. We devised a color palette scheme to encode and compress the RGB color data and the data to select and control the 'current sources' that drive the LED array. An unfortunate side effect is that it prevented us from utilizing the full color depth available from the LED controller.
We are in the process of making the necessary improvements so that we can send the uncompressed RGB data to the keyboard. Additionally, we are optimizing the data protocol and LED driver/display algorithms through the display control firmware to handle the uncompressed data, and to more efficiently program the 'current sources' that drive the LED array. This should give our most "resourceful" customers an easy way to identify the data and be able to easily send standard RGB 8 bit values.
This enhancement had already been planned and will be implemented in a few weeks by the release of a software update, which will be announced and be made available to download here and at Corsair.com.
- Corsair Team
The bad news here is that if you own the K70 RGB, you're not getting anywhere near the advertised colors. But the good news is a fix is coming, hopefully soon. In the meantime, 512 colors is still a lot to play with, albeit some of the transitions and effects might not be as smooth until a fix is issued.
Nividia ticked off a lot of people when it came to light that its GeForce GTX 970 graphics card was suffering from performance issues when games tried to access onboard memory above 3.5GB. Turns out it's the result of an architectural design, one that doesn't exist on the GTX 980, and one that wasn't communicated to Nvidia's internal marketing team or externally to reviewers. There's been a lot of negativity surrounding the issue ever since, and in an attempt to diffuse the situation, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has offered up an explanation of the GTX 970 memory issue.
Before we get into that, we suggest reading this, this, and this as primers to what's going on. If you're crunched for time, the Cliff Notes version is that the above scenario, along with the discovery that the GTX has less ROPs and L2 cache than advertised, has led to a class action lawsuit.
Seeing that the contempt is growing bigger, not smaller, Huang tried explaining away the issue as a "feature" that should have been bragged about.
"We invented a new memory architecture in Maxwell. This new capability was created so that reduced-configurations of Maxwell can have a larger framebuffer – i.e., so that GTX 970 is not limited to 3GB, and can have an additional 1GB," Huang stated in a blog post.
"GTX 970 is a 4GB card. However, the upper 512MB of the additional 1GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth. This is a good design because we were able to add an additional 1GB for GTX 970 and our software engineers can keep less frequently used data in the 512MB segment," the CEO continued.
According to Huang, the expectation was that users would be "excited" about this, but were ultimately "disappointed that we didn't better describe the segmented nature of the architecture." He also admitted that the "new feature of Maxwell should have been clearly detailed from the beginning."
Perhaps so, though looking at the comments to his blog post makes me think this was a ticking time bomb no matter how you slice it. For those holding Nvidia's feet to the fire over this, the bottom line here is that the GTX 970 is gimped compared to the GTX 980, which doesn't have an issue accessing all 4GB of VRAM, and that they were misled, both by the impact this would have and by the advertised specs.
"Yes, a 'new feature,' a 'good design' not included on GTX 980 because [it] decreases performance," a reader commented. Another stated, "I will most likely never buy from Nvidia again, they care nothing about their customer. And blatantly lie to our faces."
Others took to posting memes and doctored videos, like this one:
It's hard to watch the above clip without busting a gut, though for Nvidia, this is no laughing matter. To Nvidia's credit, the performance issue seems to only crop up when gaming at high resolutions and shouldn't bother folks gaming at 1080p. And based on the benchmarks when the performance issue doesn't creep up, the bang-for-buck here is pretty high.
But in the end, Nvidia is finding out that none of that matters, as their fan base feels it's been lied to. It's going to take more than a blog post to win back their trust and/or make this go away.
We're all friends here, right? Good, because friends don't let friends run aging mechanical hard drives when they could be rock and rolling with a speed solid state drive, especially when there's a deal involved. What kind of deal? Today's top deal, which is for a Samsung 850 Pro Series 256GB SSD for $150 with $3 shipping (normally $200; Free Assassin's Creed Unity online gift came code, limited offer). Armed with Samsung's 3D V-NAND architecture, which stacks 32 cell layers on top of one another, this is about as fast as it gets on the SATA 6Gbps interface. And the free game? Well that's just icing on the cake!
The DC Universe Online team spent the end of last week addressing an exploit in one of the raids that shipped with Amazon Fury Part II. According to the post on the forums, players who took advantage of the exploit to gain high level items will have the gear removed. The team will also be exploring achievements earned through the exploit also possibly resulting in their removal from offending players.
Gaijin has announced the successful deployment of the latest War Thunder update called "Big Guns". As the name implies, a pair of military vehicles have been deployed in the form of the B29 Superfortress aircraft and the Maus super heavy tank. The update also features map improvements, graphical enhancements and more.
The MMO community is a weird one. We demand that games take a chance and do something new and innovative, yet we get upset when those new things aren't what we're used to. The Elder Scrolls Online received a lot of this attention even before the game was being released. ESO's User Interface (UI) is minimalist. If you asked me my opinions of it two years ago, I would have told you it sucked.
The Star Citizen team has kicked off a brand new video series that will celebrate player and fan creations focused on Star Citizen. The series is hosted by Jared "Disco Lando" Huckaby who will shine the spotlight on podcasts, fanfics, videos, sites and more. Check out the first episode to see what it's all about.
Bioware has partnered with ESL to announce a brand new tournament called Operation Victory. Teams of eight will be challenged to complete a story mode operation from Shadow of Revan as quickly as possible. Teams will have two weeks in which to complete the run and submit the time to Bioware. The fastest teams will advance to the finals to compete for both in-game and real world swag.
It's no secret any more that Minsc and Boo will be returning in the Elemental Evil module for Neverwinter. We had the opportunity to ask a few questions of Lead Content Designer & Loremaster Randy Mosiondz. See what he had to say in this exclusive mini interview.
MMORPG.com has acquired exclusive gift codes for Pirate101 that will give you one of many special statue housing items for Pirate101! These codes can give you cool items such as the Guard Centurion Statue, Statue of Apollo, Dancing Statue and many other cool statues! Get your gift key now while supplies last!
MMORPG.com is pleased to announce our Wizard101 exclusive housing item giveaway. We have special gift keys that will give you one special housing item including Overstuffed Postbox, Carved Pew, Brick Fireplace and many other items. Get your gift key now!
This week Chris and Ryan take to the mics with special guest and new/returning writer, Beau Hindman! We cover the week's news -- including the "business as usual" layoffs at Daybreak Studios and more -- before getting to our main topic: What is the State of MMOs in 2015? We break down exactly where the industry is at, from business models to designs to the ultimate question of whether MMOs are long for this world.
One of the ongoing debates in the games space these days centers around the artistic vision of the developers and is one that has been ongoing for the past ten years or so.
As Dying Light prepares to launch in the UK, Techland has announced a special £250,000 Collector's Edition, truly a one of a kind CE. The lucky buyer will receive four Steelbook copies of Dying Light and a brand new zombie-proof house...that's a real world house, folks.
Fans of Lords of the Fallen will be pleased to hear that the much anticipated Ancient Labyrinth DLC will officially launch on Tuesday, March 3rd. The DLC will bring a plethora of new monsters, weapons, armor and quest material to the game.
Perfect World Entertainment and Cryptic Studios have been hard at work preparing Neverwinter for deployment to the XBox One. With a successful beta behind it, the XBox One version of the game is slated to be released on March 31st and will come with all content through the Tyranny of Dragons update. The Oathbound Paladin and the Elemental Evil module will be added at a later date.
The Gods of Crowfall will be a major component of the game. In a new interview, Creative Director J. Todd Coleman talks about the Pantheon of Gods, its inspiration and influence on Crowfall.
Red Thomas takes a look at character creation and advancement in Crowfall. Then, Red previews warfare and speculates on what players can expect on the battlefield.
They say patience is a virtue
When it comes to DirectX 12 we have been cautiously optimistic. 
What's old is new again
Stop the PC shaming
Free Office 365 for education offer extends beyond the U.S.
Where did all the colors go?
Here come the memes
