General Gaming Article |
- You Can Finally Pre-Order Samsung Gear VR
- Newegg Daily Deals: Recertified Razer BlackWidow Ultimate, Acer 23-Inch Monitor, and More!
- Tim Cook Thinks iPad Pro Signifies End of Traditional PC Era
- Unreal Engine 4 Gains Nvidia GameWorks VR Integration
- Valve Announces Availability of Steam Hardware Devices
- Steam Link Review
- Steam Controller Review
- Razer Kraken Pro Review
| You Can Finally Pre-Order Samsung Gear VR Posted: 10 Nov 2015 03:36 PM PST Samsung announced this morning that customers can now pre-order the Oculus-powered Samsung Gear VR headset here in the United States. Costing a meager $100, Gear VR can be purchased from online retailers including Amazon.com, BestBuy.com, and Samsung.com. Shipping will begin on November 20, and Best Buy stores are slated to get the VR headset sometime around that date. T-Mobile will also carry Gear VR in its stores and online starting November 27, followed by AT&T on an unspecified date. According to Samsung, this version is 19% lighter than the previous VR Innovator Edition model. Improvements include a refinement of the touchpad for easier navigation and greater control during video playback, gaming and "experiential" Gear VR content. Samsung says this time, the Gear VR is more comfortable to wear thanks to new and improved cushions. We'll see when we get our hands on some. Of course, to actually get the "VR" out of this, you'll need one of the latest Samsung "Galaxy" phones in order to use the headset. If you've got one, the Note 5, the S6, the S6 Edge and the S6 Edge+ are all compatible. The Gear VR provides a 96 degree field of view, an accelerometer, a gyrometer and a proximity sensor for mount and unmount detection. The headset comes in Frost White only although we suspect additional colors will be made available once Samsung starts making money off the current model. The headset also comes with two fixed lenses providing an IPD coverage of 54 to 70mm. Some of the apps that are compatible with Gear VR include Netflix, Hulu and Jurassic World: Apatosaurus, which allows you to get up close and personal with dinosaurs. There are also plenty of games to enjoy including Deer Hunter VR, Snow Strike, BombSquad, Rocket Toss, Steam Crew VR and loads more. Samsung said that it's working with wireless providers now to launch an update for the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ and Note 5 that will make them compatible with the new headset in time for the November 20 launch. Customers can pre-order the Gear VR headset from Samsung by heading here. | ||||||||||||||
| Newegg Daily Deals: Recertified Razer BlackWidow Ultimate, Acer 23-Inch Monitor, and More! Posted: 10 Nov 2015 02:04 PM PST Top Deal:Imagine that you're about to run a marathon, only instead of a proper pair of running shoes, you slapped a pair of $10 sandals on your feet. Insane, right? We agree, and we also think it's crazy to peck away at a regular keyboard day in and day out. If you do a lot of typing, a mechanical keyboard is where it's at, and they don't cost a fortune. Case in point, today's top deal for a Recertified Razer Blackwidow Ultimate Mechanical Keyboard for $60 with $1 shipping (normally $108). Yes, it's recertified, but it's also backed by a 90 day warranty and 30 day refund/replacement period, giving you ample time to pound away at the keys to make sure it works as it should. If you've been looking for a cheap way to upgrade to a high end mechanical plank, this is it. Other Deals: WD 2TB WD Elements Portable USB 3.0 Hard Drive Storage for $70 with free shipping (normally $80 - use coupon code: [EMCKKAX22]) Asus VC239H Slim Bezel Black 23-inch 5ms (GTG) HDMI Widescreen LED Backlight LCD Monitor IPS for $115 with free shipping (normally $120) Samsung 850 Evo M.2 250GB SATA III Internal SSD for $78 with free shipping (normally $88 - use coupon code: [ESCKKAX23]) Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5-inch Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive for $86 with free shipping (normally $101) | ||||||||||||||
| Tim Cook Thinks iPad Pro Signifies End of Traditional PC Era Posted: 10 Nov 2015 01:49 PM PST Initiate reality distortion field Apple CEO Tim Cook is convinced that the future of computing will take place on a tablet. Not just any tablet, mind you, but the iPad Pro. In other words, we're entering the post-PC era, according to Cook. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? That's because Steve Jobs said almost the same exact thing back in 2010. Jobs was convinced that we were entering the post-PC era, and that the concept was "going to make some people uneasy." Instead of traditional PCs, Jobs envisioned the masses using Apple's "magical" iPad to get work done. The problem with his vision is that the iPad has always been better suited for content consumption and entertainment than real productivity. Hence why Apple is now pushing the iPad Pro, a larger size tablet for the professional crowd to do professional things with, or so that's the intent. There's just one problem. Scratch that, there are several problems, but the biggest one is that the iPad Pro runs a mobile operating system -- iOS instead of Mac OS X. You can do more on iOS today than you could five years ago, but the fate of the iPad Pro -- at least for this generation -- has been sealed, and that's true whether Mr. Cook sees it or not. Apparently he doesn't. "I think if you're looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore?," Mr. Cook stated in an interview with The Telegraph. "No really, why would you buy one?" The simple answer is that you can do certain things more easily on a PC -- be it Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux -- than you can on a tablet running a mobile OS. No really, you can. But this is Mr. Cook's reality we're venturing into, and in his reality, the iPad Pro is going to bully past traditional PCs for a lot of people. "Yes, the iPad Pro is a replacement for a notebook or a desktop for many, many people," Cook added. "They will start using it and conclude they no longer need to use anything else, other than their phones." Mr. Cook's remarks come as the iPad Pro gets ready to go on sale -- it will be available to purchase tomorrow (Wednesday) starting at $799 for the 32GB Wi-Fi model. And just like that, we'll have entered the post-PC era (this is where you roll your eyes). | ||||||||||||||
| Unreal Engine 4 Gains Nvidia GameWorks VR Integration Posted: 10 Nov 2015 10:36 AM PST An Unreal upgrade Nvidia has partnered up with Epic Games to integrate its GameWorks VR technology, including multi-resolution shading and VR SLI, into the Unreal Engine 4, the GPU maker announced at the VRX 2015 conference in San Francisco today. This is a win for both sides. UE4 software powers hundreds of games on PCs and consoles, which gives Nvidia a wider audience for its GameWorks VR technology. And for Epic Games, the inclusion of GameWorks VR into its UE4 software could help attract developers who are looking to stake a claim in what could be a VR gold rush next year (and beyond). According to Nvidia, its GameWorks VR technology can help developers speed up performance by up to 50 percent on the UE4-based games and applications. One of the key ways it accomplishes that kind of performance boost is with the aforementioned multi-resolution shading scheme. What MSR does is render a higher resolution visual at the center of an image where a viewer's eyes are focused, and lower resolution at the periphery. "Because VR headsets 'warp' or distort the periphery of an image, multi-res shading saves graphics workload without sacrificing image quality," Nvidia says. Nvidia also believes that the performance improvements introduced by GameWorks VR will prove essential in pushing the VR category forward, which it says is currently in a chicken-and-egg state (but not for long). "We're working hard to bring the power needed for VR to more PCs, with products like our GeForce GTX 970 graphics card and performance-enhancing technologies like multi-resolution shading. Through a combination of advances in our GPUs and software, we expect the installed base of GeForce VR Ready PCs to grow from 5 million today, to over 130 million by 2020," Nvidia added. Getting back to UE4, it remains free to use for things like game development, VR applications, education, architecture, film, and whatever else. If you build a product and offer it commercially, Epic will take a 5 percent royalty after the first $3,000 of revenue per product each quarter. Exceptions are film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation, and visualization. | ||||||||||||||
| Valve Announces Availability of Steam Hardware Devices Posted: 10 Nov 2015 10:14 AM PST Full Steam ahead Here's a quick heads up that the Steam Machine movement has officially begun with the availability of Steam Hardware, including dedicated systems (Steam Machines), a custom controller (Steam Controller), and a streaming device (Steam Link). This day was supposed to come a long time ago, but Valve decided to delay things a bit so that it could tweak its Steam Controller and Steam OS, both considered key cogs in the Steam Machine experience. If you haven't done so already, check out our review of the Steam Controller and Steam Link. Or if you'd rather the Cliff Notes version, the Steam Controller feels rushed to market (believe it or not) but has the potential be awesome, and the Steam Link works great with a wired connection but could use some developer TLC on the wireless side. Both are now available in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Europe. You'll find them in dedicated Steam sections at most GameStop, GAME UK, and EB Games store, as well as on Amazon and direct from Steam. The Steam Controller and Steam Link each retail for $50 -- a price point that might make you overlook their respective shortcomings as gift ideas for the holiday season. | ||||||||||||||
| Posted: 10 Nov 2015 12:00 AM PST At a glanceWired connection (+) Affordable; can connect multiple controllers to it. Wireless connection (-) Wireless is awful; lots of bugs at the moment. Wireless connections need not applyIn case you already had a capable gaming PC, and didn't want to pony up cash for an expensive Steam Machine for your living room, Valve has made an affordable device for you. The company calls it the Steam Link, and it's a passport-sized peripheral that allows your to mirror games from your desktop PC using Steam's In-Home Streaming feature. In terms of tech specs, the Steam Link supports HDMI for a 1080p/60hz output to your HDTV. The little box measures 4.8x3.6x0.7 inches and other connections include power, 100Mb/s Ethernet, and three USB ports. We would have preferred four USB ports for more wired controllers, but the Steam Link does allow you to connect up to four Steam Controllers without any USB dongles and the device also plays nicely with USB hubs. Underneath the hood, the Link supports Bluetooth 4.0 and wireless 802.11ac along with your b/g/n variants. The Steam Link supports up to four Steam Controllers without a USB dongle. Setting up the Steam Link is easy. As it says on the product page, you simply need to "connect your Steam Link to your TV and home network, where it will automatically discover any computer running Steam." While it works best with the Steam Controller, which is sold separately, we've also been able to hook up Xbox 360 controllers, Xbox One controllers, and even a keyboard and mouse to it. Oddly enough, it didn't play nicely with Microsoft's new Xbox Elite controller or its wireless dongle, but that can be forgiven since they're so new. How does it perform? Sadly, if you go down the wireless route, not well. We were initially thinking of providing you a benchmark chart tabulating distance from router and latency, but decided instead to just cut to the chase: the Link really shouldn't be used wirelessly—in our experience, it's that bad. We'd say anything under 50 milliseconds of latency is fine, and while the Link was able to stay under that for most of our wireless time with it, the compression, audio dropoffs, and lag spikes just killed it, even when we were just a dozen feet or so away from our Asus RT-N66U router in the next room. Here, the milliseconds would shoot up to over 400 on occasion. We tried playing around with all the latency settings, but nothing we did resolved the issue. The experience is better when you have the device right next to the router, but even then, we experienced weird issues where it kicked us out to our PC's desktop menu. When we tried to open Steam Big Picture mode again using the Steam Controller's mouse emulation here, it launched us back into the game that was already in progress, but shifted commands from our controller to our desktop's keyboard. That's not good. To be fair, even Valve says on its product page that a "wired network is strongly recommended," but a lot of people don't have Ethernet strewn about every room in their homes. Valve should have implemented an external antenna on the Link to extend its range. When you go down the wired route, the situation improves dramatically, but it's still not perfect. We experienced lower latency, hovering around the 20 millisecond range, which is perfectly playable. We also set streaming quality to beautiful, and compression wasn't an issue either. Because it's streaming from your gaming PC, it brings some unwanted features along with it. For instance, we had an antivirus update prompt pop up on our desktop and this caused the Steam Link to freeze and we had to go back to our computer to close out of it. The Link also pumps unwanted noise over from the desktop, so expect to hear things like chat notifications or other sounds that your PC produces. Plus, games that load in Windowed mode look pretty funky, and sometimes you'll see your row of Windows taskbar icons below. The Steam Link is supposed to deliver an elegant and seamless streaming experience, but we still see a lot of dirty laundry that Valve wasn't able to tuck away in its current state. At $50, it likely won't break the bank, but we still really only recommend it for those that can use the wired option, and even then, don't expect a perfect experience just yet. | ||||||||||||||
| Posted: 10 Nov 2015 12:00 AM PST At a glanceSteamy (+) Easier to get headshots than Xbox controller; comfortable to hold; touchpad support for mouse menus. Gassy (-) Steep learning curve; crowd-sourced presets are a mess; controller ecosystem feels jerry-rigged. How I learned to stop complaining and appreciate the controllerWord on the street is that the Steam Machines were delayed because the Steam Controllers weren't ready. After using the device for several days now, we think it has tremendous potential, but as crazy as it sounds, we think Valve took it out of the steamer a little too early. The first thing you'll notice about the controller is that it's weird as hell. It has two circular touchpads on the front, and kind of looks like an owl, yet it still has a left joystick and four Xbox-style face buttons that are pushed down toward the center bottom of the unit. Some people are dismayed by the smaller buttons and the placement of these traditional inputs, but those things didn't bother us too much. The left touch pad is hardly ever used for movement. What was initially bothersome were the touchpads, which offer varying levels of haptic feedback. Unlike the Xbox One controller, which has concave grips, the largely plastic Steam Controller has convex sides, which lead your thumbs to the center of these oddities. Suffice it to say, the touchpads have a steep learning curve and will probably take you hours to get comfortable with. If you're willing to put in the time and effort to get used to the controls, however, you might be able to tap into the controller's true potential. That's not to say it's perfect, however, but we'll discuss those tidbits later. On top of the controller are four shoulder buttons; the bigger pair offers dual-stage triggers. There are two customizable paddle buttons on the back, which are a welcomed addition. Front and center of the controller are buttons for start, select, and Steam Big Picture mode. The SBP button is also the gateway to controller configuration, and allows you to force quit out of games. Speaking of configuring your controller, because it was designed to be backward compatible with the entire library of Steam games, Valve is relying heavily on the community to make custom game presets. The highest-rated community-made preset will be the default control scheme for each game. While this sounds great in theory, at the time of this writing, many games either lack presets or the ones they have are garbage. For instance, there are community-made presets for shooters that have no movement controls mapped. In addition, the touchpads can act widely different from preset to preset. We're not just talking about sensitivity, though that varies greatly as well, but sometimes the trackpad will be programmed to emulate a joystick, trackpad, mouse, or trackball. It's like a box of chocolates—you never know what you're going to get. Luckily, there are generic presets that you can choose from to emulate a standard Xbox controller or mouse/keyboard combo, but sometimes these presets don't allow you to navigate game menus and you have to switch back and forth between presets. This feels really janky. In addition to that, you'll often get on screen button prompts which correlate to either an Xbox controller or a keyboard/mouse combo, but these prompts will mean little on your Steam Controller; worst yet is when you're scratching your head trying to find out which button it's mapped to, only to discover that the button hasn't even been mapped at all to begin with. To be fair, pretty much all of our testing was done before the community at large got their hands on the controller, but as of right now, Valve doesn't even have presets for its own games. Team Fortress 2, for instance, handles pretty well using the default, generic controller input, but it doesn't have buttons to switch characters or classes. That's kind of a big deal. The Rockstar-supplied GTA V preset is damned near unusable when it comes to shooting. Thankfully, you can tweak just about everything with the controller, but the dizzying array of customization options may well be overwhelming for many. The modding community will definitely get a kick out of it, but we suspect many more casual gamers will be intimidated by the process. Once you get the controller working, however, it really flies. Some people are of the opinion that Valve is trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist, but we don't subscribe to that notion. Trying to use an Xbox controller against a keyboard/mouse user in a shooter is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. While the Steam Controller will never replace the keyboard/mouse combo in our eyes, it at least closes the gap. In Counter Strike, we were able to press down on the right touchpad on a user-created preset to go in for tighter headshot controls that felt way more accurate than an Xbox controller and we can see Steam Controller users being competitive with casual keyboard and mouse gamers (top tier players will always use keyboard and mouse for shooters, though). We imagine that the Steam Controller has the potential to age like a fine wine once more of the community gets their hands on it, but we unfortunately can't review a device based on potential. As it is right now, the controller will allow you to get more headshots in if you've got the patience to tame its wildness, but if you're not into the tweaking scene, we suggest you hold off until more user presets are made and the bugs are steamed out. | ||||||||||||||
| Posted: 26 Oct 2015 05:45 AM PDT at a glance(+) Cracking (-) Cracked This article was published in the December 2015 issue of Maximum PC. For more trusted reviews and feature stories, subscribe here. All about the buttery biscuit bassRazer hasn't done as well as it maybe should have in our reviews lately. As far as peripheral manufacturers go, it's certainly put plenty of time and effort into research and development -- so you'd think it should probably be winning the hearts, minds and wallets of us all. However as far as the Kraken Pro is concerned, that's simply isn't the case. Not the way the cookie crumbles, no sir. Headsets have come a long way over the last decade. And even though this variant of Razer's prestigious Kraken series is priced competitively, at around $80, it just doesn't hold its own when compared to solutions from other competitors such as QPad, Steelseries or Asus. The reason for this judgement? It suffers from "gamer's syndrome." Simply put, it offers up too much bass. For some reason, many peripheral manufacturers have a tendency to lean too heavily on the bass production side with their headsets. And although this is great if you're looking to have dubstep playing at maximum volume constantly, it just doesn't cut it if you're looking for high-quality audio fidelity. This may be news to Razer, but a well-rounded headset consists of mastering not only the lows, but also the mids and the highs. The treble and the mids are just as important as the bass. Even in gaming, you need to hear the crunch of the explosions, the crack of gunshots, the clash of swords, not just the dull thud of the bomb going off as it reverberates around your eardrums, slowly caressing them into oblivion. If you're looking to get a set of headphones for well-rounded sound reproduction, then these shouldn't make the cut. Unless, of course, bass-heavy noise is your thing. In which case, don't let us get in the way. It isn't all doom and gloom for Razer. The headset is a lovely fit. There's just enough tension, meaning that even after long periods of listening to music or gaming, it's still exceedingly comfortable. The earcups are a little small, though they do surround your ears well-enough. Razer also provides an extension cable to ensure you have plenty of room to maneuver. Could Be WorseThe headset looks pretty stylish, too. The white finish for this particular special edition version makes it a solid-looking headset. Although, we have to add that you still wouldn't want to wear these things in public. Even with the retractable microphone, the unsubtle Razer typeface littered across the top of the headband makes you feel like a bit of a donkey—not a design choice we're fans of here. The retractable mic is a fantastic inclusion, and has extensive noise-cancelling features, so much so that in some cases we couldn't actually get it to register any sound at all. You might need to tweak it to actually get it to pick up your own voice, but all in all, it's quite the challenge just to register any noise on the poor thing, even in a busy office environment—maybe that's the problem. Razer has assured us that this is a problem with our review sample, but until we try a different unit, we can only report our experiences here. Ultimately, these headphones just don't provide a compelling offer to anyone who's looking at Razer for more than brand worship. The sound reproduction isn't great, the microphone is flaky, and, if you have ears even slightly more than average-sized, you're going to struggle to fit them comfortably around your lugs. The extension-capable, retractable mic, and four-pole adapter for mobile usage are nice additions, but they're just not enough to redeem its prior sins. When there are far better, cheaper alternatives available—such as the Kingston HyperX Cloud Gaming or QPad's QH-85, we're genuinely confused to see how we could recommend the Razer cans over the alternatives. $80, www.newegg.com
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