Pros: A wide cast of character to choose from, the simultaneous turn based feature is pretty unique Cons: Currently only a small handful of maps, focuses on a single gameplay mode Recently we were invited to check out Atlas Reactor's new Alpha testing sneak peek, given our own account we were provided with full access […]
We're checking out Atlas Reactor, the free to play simultaneous turn based strategy from Trion World where players duke it out as mercenaries in a futuristic world in team based matches. The game has gone into an early Alpha "sneak peek" and we got a chance to give it a look over. The game features […]
Perfect World Entertainment Inc. and Cryptic Games announced Neverwinter: The Maze Engine is coming to PC on March 15, 2016 and Xbox One at a later date. The ninth expansion to the Dungeons & Dragons-based MMORPG pits players against the newest threats to Neverwinter, demon lords Baphomet and Orcus. In the last expansion, Neverwinter: Underdark, […]
CBS News reports that the iPhone used by alleged San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook could have been unlocked by using mobile device management (MDM) software that the county purchased but never used. Had the software been installed, the FBI could have easily unlocked the iPhone remotely and gathered all the information stored on the device. The phone was actually owned by the county and provided to Farook, who served the county as a public health department inspector.
The iPhone in question is the iPhone 5C, released in September 2013 as a colorful-but-cheaper version of the meatier iPhone 5s. Most of its innards are similar to the older iPhone 5, meaning it doesn't provide the Touch ID feature offered in the newer models. As the report points out, because the iPhone 5C lacks this technology, the FBI can't unlock the device using the dead suspect's thumbprint.
The FBI, along with San Bernardino county officials, reset the iPhone's iCloud password after the government was able to acquire the available device backups. Unfortunately, the last backup took place on October 19, a few months before the shootings. Thus by resetting the password, the FBI is unable to gain access to any other backups that could have been created later.
Essentially, the FBI wants a tool to bypass the iPhone security feature that will wipe the device if the passkey is entered incorrectly 10 times. If this feature could be bypassed, then the FBI could use a technique called "brute force" to enter an unlimited number of passcode combinations.
Mobile device management software is typically used in a corporate or government environment. It's installed on work-issued smartphones and tablets by IT administrators to manage, monitor, and secure mobile devices connected to the network. Thus, administrators can perform remote over-the-air updates, remote device wipes, track the device's physical location, control specific settings, and more.
John Dickson of security consultancy Denim Group Ltd. told CBS News that the "big question going forward" is why Farook had access to an "uncontrolled device" in the first place. As the report points out, MDM services can cost as little as $4 per month per phone. The whole public dispute between Apple and the FBI could have been avoided had the county installed the purchased MDM software.
Last week, Apple was ordered to provide the FBI with software that would allow the agency to gain access to the shooter's phone. The FBI implies it would be a simple tool that would be used on that particular phone, but Apple CEO Tim Cook says it would be an entirely new operating system void of specific security features that would essentially provide a back door to iOS. Apple indicates that it has the means to create such a tool but is reluctant to do so.
"The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor," Tim Cook said in an open letter. "And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control."
Cook added that Apple is fighting the FBI's demands "with the deepest respect for American democracy," but creating such a "tool" would be wrong. He added that everyone needs to take a step back and "consider the implications."
It's the season of tax refunds, and if you're looking to splurge on a PC upgrade with all that money Uncle Sam returned to you, your graphics card might be a good place to start. Need ideas? Check out today's top deal for a EVGA GeForce GTX 980 6GB SC+ Gaming w/ACX 2.0+, Whisper Silent Cooling for $630 with free shipping (normally $670; additional $20 Mail-in rebate). The 980 Ti is an awesome card made even better by EVGA's custom cooling solution and overclocked specs.
When last we looked at Ashes of the Singularity, it was one of the first DX12 titles with a benchmark that we could test, but it was also very early. Six months later, the second playable race is in place, and Oxide has had a lot more time to work on refining the game—and refining the DX12 rendering engine. And it's that latter aspect that we're going to be focused on today.
The idea of a low-level API isn't really new, as the modern 3D graphics era was kicked off by 3dfx and their Glide API. All it really means is that developers have a lot more access to the hardware, and they can take full control over managing resources like memory, shaders, buffers, etc. In theory, that means they can improve performance and increase the graphics quality, but there's a dark side to all of this: Programming a low-level API means you have to be a lot more careful about what you do, as if things go wrong you could end up with all sorts of problems.
Oxide isn't new to the low-level API game; they were one of the first to have a public demo of AMD's Mantle API with their Star Swarm demo. Later, Star Swarm was been ported to DX12, and then the engine got turned into a full-blown game. This is an important step, because where Star Swarm was basically just throwing lots of draw calls at various APIs to show the superiority of a low-level API for certain tasks, an actual game has a different goal. To wit, it must be playable and enjoyable or it is unlikely to be successful.
We'll leave the evaluation of the actual game to our cohorts at PC Gamer (with a review presumably coming once the game leaves beta), but the basic idea is a modern take on Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander, with DX12 offering the potential for even more units and detail during the battles. And of course, since DX12 requires Windows 10, which is currently sitting at somewhere around 10 percent of the total market, Oxide is also supporting DX11 for users of older versions of Windows. We're skipping all of the DX11 stuff this round, however, as the focus is clearly on DX12.
Let's talk adapters
So what does it actually mean to use a low-level API? This is where things get a bit convoluted. On the one hand, we have Oxide talking about optimizing for algorithms rather than hardware, and stating they're not receiving any funding from AMD (or any other hardware vendors). That strikes us as a bit odd, considering their previously mentioned involvement with Mantle, but whatever. Let's just go with the idea that Oxide is making the best gaming engine they know how to make for Ashes of the Singularity; that means they want it to run well on the broadest range of hardware possible, and frankly ignoring Nvidia hardware would be practical suicide considering they have a much larger slice of the graphics hardware pie these days.
Actually working with a low-level API gives the developer the control of all the core hardware resources, and this is where things can get a bit crazy. If you know that every single person has a specific set of hardware—for example, let's say they all have a Core i5-6500, R9 390, 16GB RAM, and a 512GB SSD—you can make use of every one of those resources. That means you have the CPU, discrete GPU, processor graphics, plenty of RAM, and fast storage. This is what it's like to create games for a console like the PS4 or Xbox One, and the things the developers can do with a far more limited set of hardware are quite impressive.
The Xbox One for instance has eight of AMD's Jaguar cores running at 1.75GHz, 8GB of shared system/graphics memory, 32MB of high-speed eDRAM, and 768 graphics cores running at 853MHz. In the world of PCs, that would be about one-third the CPU performance of an AMD FX-8320 (Jaguar cores aren't nearly as fast as Piledriver cores of the same clock speed), with something approaching the performance of an R7 260 graphics card. If developers can make impressive looking games that work reasonably well on an Xbox One, thanks to the low-level hardware access, just imagine what they could do with a low-level API on a modern PC!
That's the basic promise of the low-level APIs like DirectX 12, Mantle, and Vulkan, and at first it all sounds rather compelling—who wouldn't want vastly superior graphics quality and performance? Well, let us tell you who doesn't want that: a lot of developers are more interested in making games that tell fun or amazing stories, or take you to a different place, and they don't need photorealistic graphics to get you there. Case in point: Fallout 4 is still only using a DirectX 9 engine, and Valve likewise hasn't used anything beyond DX9 for their Source games to date (more or less). We could name others as well, like the Mass Effect series (all DX9), StarCraft II (all DX9), and tons of indie titles.
Which isn't to say that there aren't developers clamoring for low-level APIs, but this is a great time to link to the Croteam developer's post on the Vulkan port of The Talos Principle. Here's a key quote:
Yes, [Vulkan] has downsides. For one, it's quite hard to program for. You have to do a lot of things manually, instead of relying on drivers to do the work for you. This is both good and bad at the same time. Good for performance reasons, because the driver doesn't assume what the game wants to render (I won't go into any more details here, sorry). Bad because there's a lot more coding and in general; it's a more complex approach. You better know what you're doing, because you won't get any help from the driver. You're on your own. It's really great to have that much control. If you know what you're doing!
For the Vulkan port of Talos, performance right now is lower than D3D11 by 20-30 percent. This is a new API running on a just-ported to Vulkan engine, though, so give it some time. Long-term, performance on Vulkan should eventually surpass DX11, hopefully. But that's probably only going to be on some subset of hardware—you can't possibly plan for every piece of hardware you might encounter, unfortunately. Ashes, meanwhile, has been running on DX12 hardware publicly for at least six months, and the earlier work on the Star Swarm demo is over a year old now. So Oxide has had a lot of time to improve things, and they're doing some advanced techniques as well.
Basically, you have to be a rock star developer to get good results with low-level APIs. If you're not pushing the boundaries of computer graphics with your games (see that earlier list of DX9 titles for examples), you probably don't want to bother with low-level APIs. Let the GPU drivers people do the heavy lifting, and focus instead on making a good game. Because even if you want to cover just a subset of the potential hardware combinations, the rabbit hole runs deep. Think of the Xbox One hardware, and now consider the modern PC space: dozens of potential CPUs, dozens more GPUs, memory ranging from 4GB to 32GB and more. Now throw in the potential to mix and match GPUs, and that brings us to today's topic.
Explicit Multi-Adapter rendering
One of the crazy things that you can do with direct access to hardware is to support any and all compute resources as you see fit. In theory, you could use all of the CPU cores, run some additional calculations on the processor graphics to help out, and if there are multiple GPUs, you can have each one help with rendering.
There are three ways of doing this: Implicit Multi-Adapter (basically, the DX12 version of CrossFire/SLI), and Explicit Multi-Adapter (EMA)—in either linked or unlinked modes. Implicit depends on the drivers distributing the work between the GPUs, and it's the easy route to supporting multiple GPUs; Ashes has not yet implemented this. EMA is the reverse, where the resources of all GPUs are available, but it's up to the developer to access them. The linked version is a more restrictive subset, where the two GPUs have to be pretty close to the same hardware; unlinked allows for any GPUs to be used, and that's what Oxide is supporting right now.
That's a Sapphire R9 390 sitting above a GTX 980. Prepare for the coming apocalypse!
We've restricted our testing to dual-GPU configurations, though in theory three or more GPUs could be used. There would be diminishing returns, naturally, just as with SLI and CF. Even with just two GPUs, there are questions to address: Which card is the primary GPU and which card is the secondary GPU? With just twelve GPUs, you'd have about 144 potential combinations (including single GPU results) to support, each one at least slightly different, with certain pairings being massively different.
Looking at the latest graphics cards, we have 2GB, 4GB, 6GB, 8GB, and 12GB VRAM—and 1GB, 3GB and 3.5GB as well, depending on how you want to count. Graphics core counts on AMD's R9 300/Fury and Nvidia's GTX 900 series and can be 768, 1024, 1280, 1664, 1792, 2048, 2560, 2816, 3072, 3548, and 4096. How do you go about balancing all of those potential combinations properly? In Oxide's case, the developer did their best to create good algorithms, and then they warn users that some combinations simply aren't going to work that well. Their general advice is to use cards of "similar performance levels," which means you'll want to know the baseline level of performance, and then you'll typically want to have your faster card as the primary GPU.
If it feels like the world of PC hardware has suddenly gone crazy, with mortal enemies suddenly teaming up to take on a greater threat, that's because it's exactly what Oxide is doing. This happens all the time in comic books and movies, so why not? But from a practical standpoint, there's still the question of whether or not this will actually prove useful to end users. At Maximum PC, we have lots of modern GPUs available for testing, and as hardware reviewers our job is to tell readers which cards are the best options. Reviewers everywhere are going to be all over Ashes of the Singularity, and we'll draw our conclusions about what card/cards are best able to run the game (spoiler: AMD). But just because we happen to have a GTX 980 Ti and an R9 Fury X sitting nearby doesn't mean any normal gamers are going to have that option—or an R9 390 and GTX 980, or GTX 960 and R9 285, or...you get the point.
Think about it: Right now there is exactly one game where you can harness the combined power of an AMD and Nvidia GPU. For every single other game, your best bet (outside of single GPUs) is going to be pairing up identical GPUs in SLI or CrossFire. And even with matching GPUs, users of SLI/CF will tell you that there are plenty of occasions where things don't quite work right. Our general advice is to move up to a faster single GPU before branching out to dual GPUs. Sure, two GTX 970 cards will often outperform a single GTX 980 Ti, and they'll cost the same amount…but there will be times where a game doesn't support SLI/CF properly, or you'll get lots of micro-stuttering.
If AMD and Nvidia can't totally address these problems in their drivers, who out there really thinks that most game developers will do better with a low-level API? At best, they might code for a few specific cases, but in the real world gamers will want to stick with our above advice of buying a fast single GPU, or two matched GPUs. And if you happen to switch teams, you're still unlikely to benefit, unless you move more laterally than up. How many gamers have both an R9 290X and a GTX 970 sitting around, waiting to be used in a single system? More likely would be someone owning a previous generation HD 7950 and buying a current GTX 970, or skipping a generation completely and going from GTX 670 to R9 390.
The likelihood of each combination working well is going to decrease based on the difference in age and features. Oxide acknowledges as much, which means this second beta of Ashes is more for the hardware fanatics and the honor of sounding a barbaric yawp of "FIRST!" than it is about covering every possible base. Then the next generation of graphics hardware will come out, and some of the algorithms may break, or at least not work optimally. Long-term, it seems like EMA is a huge can of worms waiting to devour developer resources—or waiting for future generations to shake their heads.
But damn, it's a hell of a "first!" That this works at all is impressive, practicalities notwithstanding.
Performance testing
Okay, let's hit the numbers and talk about what you can expect. First things first, we need to set the baseline performance expectations, so we're going to test single-GPU performance on a rather large collection of cards. It's already overwhelming, so please excuse us for not managing to grab R9 Fury and Nano, or most previous generation hardware. Outside of a few exceptions, we're looking at the R9 300/Fury cards and the GTX 900 series.
Oxide also advises testers to go high-end on the CPU, recommending 6-core and 8-core processors. Having spent the better part of a week testing just one CPU on all of the following combinations, we frankly didn't have the gumption to repeat everything on several more processors. This is basically a best-case look at performance scaling, though; users of slower processors will likely hit other bottlenecks than graphics.
Finally, without digging too deeply, it looks like Ashes is only using Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) when using more than one GPU. This is the easiest way to support multiple GPUs, and it also explains why Oxide recommends using similar performance GPUs—you wouldn't want one GPU rendering at 30 FPS paired with a second GPU running at 60FPS, as the result would be every other frame stuttering. DX12 EMA allows for other options, like Split Frame Rendering (SFR), but Oxide has not implemented anything like that for now.
That's twelve GPUs we're testing, though we only performed limited testing with the R9 290X (we paired it up with the R9 390 for pseudo-CrossFire testing). For the game itself, we limited testing to one resolution (1920x1080) with three quality presets: Crazy, High, and Standard (with AA disabled on Standard, though it normally defaults to 2xAA). The test sequence is similar to the earlier GDC_Demo, only with the Substrate now present instead of showing humans vs. humans. Graphically, the game is definitely looking better than last year—bullets and other effects seem to connect better, and there are lots of other details that weren't present before.
Ashes: single-GPU DX12 performance
A quick note on the graphs: We're including both average and 97 percentile frame rates, as usual. We've colored Nvidia cards in blue and AMD cards in red, but sorting presents a problem. Do we sort on the average, the 97 percentile, or a combination of the two? We've elected to sort based on the geometric mean of the average twice and the 97 percentile once, or Geomean(avg, avg, 97p). Basically, we're weighting the average more than the 97 percentile, but we're still including minimum frame rates.
Starting with the 1080p Crazy performance, how's this for a sobering thought: Not a single GPU is able to break 60FPS. Cranking up the resolution will only serve to drop performance even more, though the name of the setting says it all. There's also an Extreme setting that's probably a better target for most high-end configurations, but we wanted to see what would happen with Ashes at its most demanding. What's interesting is how big the gap is between the Fury X and the Titan X, with AMD leading by a solid 20 percent—and 25 percent over the 980 Ti. If this happened in more games, the Fury X launch would have been an entirely different story. The R9 390 is also ahead of the GTX 980 by nearly 10 percent, and that pattern continues down all levels of GPUs, though 970 and below all drop under the 30FPS mark.
Of course the question has to be asked: Is this a case of AMD's hardware being superior, and their DirectX 11 drivers basically sucking it up? Or is Oxide's game engine simply better tuned for AMD's hardware? Most likely it's a little of column A, and a little of column B. I've often wondered what AMD's performance would look like if they had the driver team resources of Nvidia. Even now, there are times where AMD's GPUs seem to stutter more than they should, and frankly their drivers often feel a step or two behind Nvidia. There are other tests out there that seem to confirm AMD's implementation of asynchronous compute in GCN has more potential than what's in Nvidia's Maxwell architecture, but the reality is most games don't show any benefits.
Our two other charts and settings don't generally show a big difference in performance, but we'll see some differences when we get to the multi-adapter testing. Basically, the High setting still needs more than 2GB of VRAM to really shine. And remember what we just said about drivers? Look at the difference between the R9 285 and the GTX 950/960. What's going on that AMD's 2GB card doesn't scale as well as their 4GB cards? There's a massive gap between the R9 380 4GB and the R9 285 2GB, as well as the GTX 960/950 2GB cards; but the gap between the 380 and the 960/950 narrows quite a bit at the High setting compared to Crazy, with the 285 dropping to the bottom of the pack. Everything else basically stays reasonably consistent with the Crazy numbers.
It looks like the big factor with Ashes appears to be having at least 4GB VRAM, unless you're running at low quality settings. 4GB vs. 8GB VRAM on the other hand doesn't show much of a separation, judging by the R9 290X and R9 390. The R9 390 is always the faster card, but the lead is a steady 5-10 percent, regardless of settings. Things might change if we pushed for a higher resolution, but it would make sense to target 4GB VRAM, considering that's where a lot of these higher-end cards sit.
With the single GPU stage complete, we now have a better idea of how to pair up cards for our multi-GPU testing. This is barely the beginning, with only twelve configurations tested. We're going to break things up into two categories for multi-GPUs: Homogeneous, where we use two AMD or Nvidia cards, and heterogeneous, where we mix AMD and Nvidia cards. Just how many more configurations did we manage to test? Fifty. Nine. We do the hard work so that hopefully, you won't have to!
Homogeneous dual-GPU DX12 performance
Even though we're pairing up AMD cards with AMD cards, and Nvidia cards with Nvidia cards, note that the vast majority of configurations are not at all like what you would normally see with an SLI or CrossFire setup. In fact, outside of R9 390 + 290X and R9 390X + 390, we don't even have any pairs of AMD cards that would normally run in CrossFire. We also didn't have our Nano or vanilla Fury cards on hand, which further limits some of our combinations, but we've tested what we currently have.
Before we get to the charts, one more item of information is worth pointing out. Normally when we use a game to test performance, we see some variation between benchmark runs, but it's pretty small. Ashes follows that same pattern when testing single GPUs, most of the time, but when we switch to multiple GPUs things can get a little messy. There are times when adding a second GPU actually drops performance compared to using just the faster of the two GPUs, typically when the two GPUs aren't very closely matched. There are other times when a configuration that by all appearances should perform better doesn't work as expected.
With DX12—or any other low-level API—the developers are responsible for far more of the rendering process. Algorithms that work great on one combination of hardware may behave erratically with only a seemingly small change in hardware. We've also noticed quite a few cases where rendering would totally break, and usually we'd expect something that doesn't work right once to always be broken. That doesn't happen either. Most of the rendering issues we encountered were on the Crazy preset, but there were a few anomalies on High and Standard as well. We did try verifying any unusual results, though one or two may have slipped through the cracks, but we'll comment on some of the more consistent issues as well as unexpectedly high performance combinations below.
With 1080p Crazy, AMD's Fury X paired with the 390 takes the lead. Average frame rates are slightly lower than the Titan X + 980 Ti, as well as the dual 980 Ti setup, but minimum frame rates are much better. If that's all there was to the story, we'd move on, but check out the Nvidia pairings where the second card is a 970 and you'll notice something unusual. The 980 Ti, 980, and 970 all work quite well when the second GPU is a 970; this seems like a pattern, but then we find the Titan X + 970 sitting way down the charts. It doesn't really make much sense, but our best guess is that Oxide's algorithms or whatever don't do so well when the primary GPU has substantially more RAM than the secondary GPU.
There are other clear performance issues as well. A dual GTX 980 Ti has good average frame rates, but the 97 percentiles are comparatively poor. Dual GTX 980 is slightly slower on both average and 97 percentiles, but dual GTX 970 does really well. Given the GTX 970 is arguably one of the most popular GPUs right now, it could be that Oxide has simply optimized better for that Nvidia card. But what you really need to understand is that there are lots of cases where things just aren't consistent. One run a particular pairing could run smoothly, but the next four runs it might stutter horribly. Rather than trying to run each particular set of cards enough times to get a statistically meaningful distribution of performance, we're using the current results to show that there is plenty of work still remaining.
All of the oddities from testing the Crazy settings largely disappear at the High preset. We're also pretty clearly hitting some system bottlenecks at this point, where many configurations have average frame rates in the mid-90s, with 97 percentiles in the low-to-mid 60s. Perhaps using the Crazy preset was a bad idea, or at least it tends to break down more than the High preset. Matched or nearly matched GPUs now take the top spots, with Nvidia just barely edging out AMD (at a much higher price point). In terms of bang for the buck, the two best options we tested are the nearly matched Hawaii cards, 390 and 290X, and the matched GTX 970 cards.
At the Standard preset (without AA), performance is mostly in line with the High preset. The major difference is that cards with 2GB VRAM don't struggle nearly as much. That makes sense, considering we saw the same thing in testing with single GPUs. Our CPU also continues to struggle to break the 100FPS average, and for the faster GPUs we actually see several cases where performance is worse here than at the High preset. Yeah, how do you get hardware to do less work more slowly?
If we get a chance, we may see about benchmarking a few of the better pairings on one or two other CPUs and see what happens. Running a 6-core i7-5930K at 4.2GHz should normally ensure the CPU isn't much of a bottleneck, but DX12 might be changing the status quo. Could a quad-core Skylake system end up delivering better overall performance, or will it be worse? What about AMD's FX series of CPUs, and their Kaveri APUs? We had hoped to check those out, but time has not been on our side.
Heterogeneous dual-GPU DX12 performance
And this is where the gloves truly come off. "Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…. The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!" (Thanks, Ghostbusters.) There are so many comparison points that the charts are a bit of a mess. We've color-coded things according to the primary GPU, with AMD in red and Nvidia in blue, but obviously the secondary GPU is from the other team. Where the homogeneous testing at least seems somewhat plausible for end users to own, our heterogeneous configurations mostly come from the realm of science fiction.
In general, we've started at the top of the performance ladder and paired each GPU with the other vendor's closest three or four offerings. In many instances, we've tested both A + B and B + A configurations, and there are very few cases where swapping the primary and secondary cards doesn't end up changing the performance standings. We can't possibly discuss everything the charts will show in the text, but if there are any particular pairings that are of interest (or missing), let us know in the comments.
Drivers are also a bit wonky, as if you're using a single display, both vendors don't tend to let you access the control panel for the secondary GPU. Plug in a second monitor to the other GPU and you can open up the settings options, but in practice it's not actually necessary. It's a bit weird to have AMD's Crimson drivers tell you there's "No AMD graphics driver installed, or the driver is not functioning properly," only to find everything working more or less as expected when you launch Ashes. Nvidia's control panel gives a similar message that's more helpful: "Nvidia Display settings are not available. You are not currently using a display attached to an Nvidia GPU." The net result in either case is the same: You can't open the settings dialog without a display attached to the GPU.
We're seeing plenty of strange behavior, like the Titan X and Fury X claiming the two top slots, but having the Fury X as the primary produces better average performance and substantially lower 97 percentiles, while the Titan X as primary tends to be more consistent. Having 12GB VRAM seems to compensate for a lot of potential problems, as the 980 Ti + Fury X doesn't do nearly as well, despite the Titan and 980 Ti generally performing within a few percent of each other in our individual test results.
Frankly, we're not quite sure what to make of the overall standings. They're crazy, just like the preset name. The good news is that we have at least 12 pairings breaking the 60FPS mark for average frame rates; the bad news is that 97 percentiles on those 12 pairings range from just barely over 30FPS to as high as 55FPS. Mass hysteria indeed! Perhaps the less said, the better.
1080p High starts smacking into CPU limits again, only a bit lower now thanks to the mixed GPUs. There are still oddities with various test configurations as well. Even though we exit the game between each benchmark setting, sometimes the GPUs seem to end up in a messed up state, or at least something is causing degraded performance. The GTX 960/950 paired with the R9 380X/390/285 should all fall within a cluster, but depending on luck of the draw, sometimes a particular combination will do well (e.g., GTX 950 + 380) while another combination will do poorly (GTX 960 + 380X). Remember that quote from earlier, about low-level APIs being hard to program for, doing a lot of things manually instead of relying on drivers? Some of that is clearly coming into play here.
The same story continues at 1080p Standard, where most of the higher end configurations are hitting CPU bottlenecks, while the 2GB cards in particular have confusing and unreliable results. And now is as good a time as any to talk about some of the rendering errors.
On the Crazy setting, many of the 2GB pairings didn't render properly—or at least, they didn't consistently render properly. Some were always full of corrupted graphics and missing textures, like the 380/380X with the 285; others would look okay one run and then have flashing textures or missing objects on the next run. Most of the time, things looked okay with 1080p Standard, but then scaling from a single GPU would sometimes not work properly, with performance regressions in several instances.
If you're hoping to run some of your own tests, the second beta for Ashes should be publicly available on Steam Early Access tomorrow. Obviously, Windows 10 is required for DX12 testing and EMA support, but if you meet that requirement and have a few GPUs sitting around, give the benchmark a shot. There may be some particularly good combinations of GPUs out there that we didn't test, but be prepared for the occasional wonky behavior.
Frankenstein's monsters
Just looking at what Oxide has accomplished so far with DX12 and Ashes of the Singularity causes us to imagine scenes from the various Frankenstein movies. It's hard not to think of the developers roaming around the labs like mad scientists, playing with forces mere mortals can barely comprehend. And then after countless hours of debugging and head smashing, lightning strikes and there's a cackle of glee: "It's alive! It's aliiiiiiive!"
With life in his limbs, the misshapen beast lurches from the table, bangs its head, and falls to the floor. "Oops…back to the drawing board," thinks the mad doctor. More tests, a change in formulas, and more than a few uttered curses later, he tries again. Sometimes the creations are almost human, other times they fall well short, and still other times the laboratory is lucky to be in one piece after a particularly bad experiment. Maybe that's not quite how it went down, but it's probably not too far off the mark.
Ultimately, Oxide's monster is coming to life, and the official release date is currently set for March 22. There's obviously a lot of room left for fine tuning, but at some point you just have to take what you've got and hope no one holds a flame in front of your creation. Oxide looks to have spent most of their EMA efforts tuning for high-end cards, with lesser cards sometimes causing more harm than good. When things work properly, you end up with this crazy AMD + Nvidia graphics solution that by all rights shouldn't even exist. And for even trying to do that, and being the first out of the gate with working EMA support, Oxide deserves props.
Will we one day live in a world full of gaming engines that scale to properly utilize any and all compute resources in an intelligent fashion? If so, it will be thanks to the pioneering efforts of companies like Oxide—and AMD, Nvidia, and Microsoft as well, since without their support, most of what we're seeing today wouldn't be possible. But we're many years away from such a graphical utopia, and if I were a betting man, I'd guess we'll experience plenty of struggles en route.
If we ever do arrive at that destination, sporting VR headsets or whatever it is the future holds, we'll be able to look back fondly and tell our grand kids, "I remember the first time a game tried to support multiple graphics cards from different vendors." We'll raise a glass to the memories of Oxide and Ashes, and then we'll jack into the matrix and get back to our virtual entertainment.
Amazon Dash, the nifty replenishment service that smartly and automatically reorders products and supplies for you, now works with select Samsung brand printers. Once you have it setup and configured, your Samsung printer will place an order for more ink once it detects it's getting low.
This is an opt-in service, so if you'd rather your printer focus on printing rather than placing orders on your behalf, you can certainly have it that way. For everyone else, you can select what kind of ink you want through through Samsung's Mobile Print app or with Samsung's Easy Printer Manager, a desktop print management app for Windows and Mac.
Once it's setup and configured, the printer will monitor its ink levels and automatically ping Amazon for more once it runs low. The printer doesn't wait until the ink is completely gone, so in theory so you should never run out of ink.
At present, Amazon Dash works with the following four Samsung printers ranging in price from $100 to $350:
Samsung SL-M2885FW/XAA Wireless Monochrome Printer with Scanner, Copier, Fax
Samsung SL-C480FW/XAA Wireless Color Printer with Scanner, Copier, and Fax
Samsung SL-C430W/XAA Wireless Color Printer
Automatic ink replenishment isn't a new concept by any means—HP and Epson will both happily sell you new ink when you run low. Where this is different is that Samsung is nudging its customers to Amazon.
Amazon's Dash Replenishment Service also works with select Brother brand printers.
We're seeing a growing number of mini PCs emerge, and with good reason—technology has evolved to the point where you can have a fairly potent (or at least serviceable) setup in a small space. So it goes with MSI's new Cubi 2 Plus, a handheld-size PC with Skylake inside.
Inside the Cubi 2 Plus is a new mini STX (5x5) form factor motherboard. It's the smallest mobo available with a socket design that allows users to swap out or upgrade the CPU.
There are three processor options available, all Skylake. They include the Intel Core i5-6100T, Core i5-6500T, and Core i7-6700T, each with Intel HD Graphics 530.
The Cubi 2 Plus sports a pair of DDR4 DIMM slots with support for up to 32GB of DDR4-2133 memory. There's also an M.2 SATA slot with support for up to a 256GB SSD and a 2.5-inch bay for a slim-size HDD or regular SSD.
Other features include 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, four USB 2.0 ports, three USB 3.1 ports (one of which is of the Type-C variety), GbE LAN, HDMI and DisplayPort output, and a 3.5mm mic/audio combo port.
MSI isn't really targeting home consumers with this one. Instead, it's taking aim at businesses and kiosks. As such, MSI points out that the many USB ports on the Cubi 2 Plus can be used for things like connecting barcode scanners, credit card readers, receipt printers, and so forth.
Whatever the application, the Cubi 2 Plus can be put out of sight—you can mount it to the back of a monitor using the VESA standard.
MSI didn't say how much the Cubi 2 Plus costs or when it will be available.
Asus has settled charges with the FTC alleging that critical security flaws in its routers and cloud services put the home networks of hundreds of thousands of consumers at risk. As part of the settlement agreement, Asus will establish and maintain a comprehensive security program subject to independent audits for the next two decades.
"The Internet of Things is growing by leaps and bounds, with millions of consumers connecting smart devices to their home networks," said Jessica Rich, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "Routers play a key role in securing those home networks, so it's critical that companies like ASUS put reasonable security in place to protect consumers and their personal information."
Asus drew the FTC's ire by marketing its routers as having numerous security features that it claimed could "protect computers from any unauthorized access, hacking, and virus attacks," yet failed to live up to the claims. One of the FTC's complaints is that Asus didn't dole out patches quick enough, nor did it sufficiently alert users of its routers of the threats involved when running dated firmware. Even worse, the FTC says that in many cases, the software update tool for Asus' routers often told consumers that they were running the latest firmware, when in fact newer software with critical software updates as available.
The FTC also chastised Asus for allowing customers to retain the same default login credentials on every router with username "admin" and password "admin," and it took issue with a vulnerability in its AiCloud service that allowed hackers to bypass the login screen and gain compete access to a consumer's connected storage device without any credentials.
So by now you've probably determined that I'm really into audio. As in, really serious about audio. Audio is a touchy subject because well, it's highly subjective. Everyone's ears are different, everyone's preferences are different, and the fact of the matter is, no two headphones or speakers are exactly the same. That's why this time around, instead of relying on what my brain tells me, I'm going to rely on scientific instruments to determine what should and shouldn't be on my list.
Ossic VR's Ossic X 3D headphones for VR
A decade and a half ago, I was floored when I first listened to Aureal 3D. The company was revolutionary in terms of what it brought to the consumer market. Sound cards that used Aureal's chips were able to produce realistic and believable 3D positional sound from just two speakers sitting in front of you. The method? Head-related transfer functions, or HRTFs for short.
HRTFs measure the way sound responds to your ear, its shapes and features, as well as your head dimensions. Applying these calculations to the output of speakers trick your brain because the sound it hears are mimicking what would otherwise by accurate responses to how sound behaves when they reach your ears, allowing your brain to identify location. As you may know, Aureal 3D is dead.
Ossic VR's final design of its amazing Ossic X 3D HRTF headphones.
But Ossic VR is bringing back HRTFs in the form of headphones that automatically calibrate to your head and ears. With custom calibration, you're not limited to a one-size-fits-all HRTF model. I was lucky enough to be able to try Ossic VR's prototype in its lab just recently and was blown away by how realistic things sound. I could pinpoint any sound in true 3D space, and I reacted naturally to where I heard things. I want an Ossic X headphone, and I want one today.
What would the Ossic X do for me that I couldn't do now?
Stereo headphones don't have "imaging," period. Real imaging is only achieved by speakers that are placed appropriately and are in front or surround you. Headphones have drivers that sit directly facing your ears, so you get sound that exists in your cranium. That's not real imaging, no matter what the stereo headphone guys say.
I was so impressed with the demo I heard on the Ossic X that I started wondering if the sounds that were realistically modeled with true HRTFs were what they would actually sound like if I was standing in the environment where they were recorded. A pair of headphones may sound "good" but is it what you hear? No one listens to a guitarist play his instrument with their heads placed next to the strings, which is where the recording microphone would be. But that doesn't take into account the actual listening environment. I want to hear things as though I were present. The bottom line is, I never felt more present than I did wearing the Ossic X. It took the VR experience I know to a whole new level of immersion—true immersion.
The HP 3325A tone generator
What in the world is the HP 3325A? It's a tone generator. It creates sine waves, square waves, saw waves, etc. You choose the frequency, it creates a tone.
This thing was built to last. It'll probably outlive me.
The HP 3325A is also old. It's practically a relic. But it works and it works really well. It generates a pure tone with little to no distortion and it was build to last. The thing is made like a tank, and you literally can't find anything like it today. In fact, the buttons are mechanical and clunk hard when you push on them, delivering a sense of quality and physical satisfaction. Think of it like typing on a membrane keyboard and then switching to a Cherry MX mechanical keyboard.
So, what can the HP 3325A do for me that I can't do now?
Since it's so old, I actually don't have to lust for one, technically. You can find them on eBay for a bit more than they cost to ship. I'm starting to do a lot of serious audio testing, and the HP 3325A would be very cool to have.
I could generate tones using software, such as the very popular NCH Tone Generator, and there are online generators available as well. But generating a good pure tone isn't easy. Plugging the output into an oscilloscope will show you what's really happening. The HP 3325A is built well, and doesn't require a PC. It's reliable, and you can count on it to perform well because that's all it was designed to do.
The Rohde & Schwarz UPV audio analyzer
This one's a bit of a stretch, but it's a true dream machine. The R&S UPV audio analyzer has everything a professional audio engineer needs. Scope, spectrum analyzer, phase and impulse response, single-ended and differential balanced inputs, etc.—the UPV's got it all and more.
The UPV is the replacement for the UPL, which is expensive. A used UPL can be had for $10,000 and a brand-new UPV goes for over $40,000—yeah, that isn't a typo. But the UPV is state-of-the-art. It's incredibly accurate, clean, and versatile. In fact, the UPV is so stable in its measurements that you don't have to recalibrate it for over two full years.
My ideal setup for testing headphones look like this:
What you see above is the full Rohde & Schwarz analyzer and testing system paired with a Bruel & Kjaer Type 412BC HATS (head and torso simulator). With the software package from Listen Inc. called Soundcheck—used by manufacturers and engineers—the cost of this setup comes to a mind-numbing $100,000.
So, what could I do with the Rohde & Schwarz UPV that I can't do now?
It would allow me to test things with incredible accuracy. I could do it all from the interface, without worrying about the PC adding any delays. Of course, you can overcome this with ASIO-enabled testing software such as Soundcheck. But seriously, just look at that thing. It's drool-worthy.
In reality, I've been upgrading my testing platform all along to do headphone and speaker tests. How does it look right now? Wait until you see my next installment. If you're interested in how it's coming along, check out my guide on upgrading your PC audio experience.
I've been spending a lot of my free time on the PTS playing the Thieves Guild, so much that when I logged into the live servers today I had been removed from my Trading Guild. Perhaps, I need to properly manage my game time a bit better. While playing on the PTS I've come to realize something, something that I'm not particularly happy about and it's more of an observation than a realization but it's still upsetting. Zenimax hates healers.
Players around the world may be interested to hear about a new product launching today called Forge. According to the press release, Forge is developed by WeGame and allows players to share short-form gaming clips. Players are invited to take part in the public beta by signing up on the official site.
The ARK: Survival Evolved team has released the latest update to the game that includes the new giant Beaver that can, as would be expected, build dams, harvest and carry wood, act as a mobile crafting station and swim. In addition, players can get hold of handcuffs to keep enemies and prisoners don't escape.
The Trinium Wars site has been updated with a look at the three classes that will ship with the game when it launches into Steam Early Access on March 2nd. Each class comes with unique abilities and weapons.
We have toppled empires and dethroned kings. We killed Cesar and sabotaged elections. We've shifted politics and routed countries. I'm talking about the vocal minority who, in this day in age, are often the most loyal fans their favorite entertainment. We have as many names as faces but we are not many ourselves, yet it is often our opinions that get heard over the silent majority.
EVE Online is a delicate game, and sometimes I have to wonder how CCP can ever make changes because comprehending how drastically those changes can affect its ecosystem would probably require its own degree. Yesterday during the EVE Online Nottingham (EVE_NT) meetup, it was revealed that a fairly major, and much asked for, change is finally being implemented into the game: The watchlist is being removed.
Neverwinter players have a lot to look forward to with The Maze Engine expansion. Perfect World Entertainment and Cryptic Studios have announced that the ninth module expansion to Neverwinter will be released on March 15th.
Neverwinter will be expanding again soon with The Maze Engine. We took the opportunity to speak with Lead Designer Scott Shicoff to find out more about the retooled dungeons and to learn more about the Maze Engine itself. Read on!
Creating a top 3 memorable MMORPG list wasn't too challenging because the number of MMOs to choose from is so small. This week Rob's back with an even more difficult challenge. Picking his top 3 RPGs.
A new developer blog penned by Senior Story Designer Gary Astleford has been published on the WildStar site to give players an in-depth look at Arcterra, the newest zone headed to the game soon. Arcterra will feature deep lore and two new factions, Operation: White Storm for Dominion or The Arcterra Expedition for Exile. In addition, there are dynamic events running nearly constantly across the zone that can include any number of activities to complete.
Let's talk adapters
Which isn't to say that there aren't developers clamoring for low-level APIs, but this is a great time to link to the 
With 1080p Crazy, AMD's Fury X paired with the 390 takes the lead. Average frame rates are slightly lower than the Titan X + 980 Ti, as well as the dual 980 Ti setup, but minimum frame rates are much better. If that's all there was to the story, we'd move on, but check out the Nvidia pairings where the second card is a 970 and you'll notice something unusual. The 980 Ti, 980, and 970 all work quite well when the second GPU is a 970; this seems like a pattern, but then we find the Titan X + 970 sitting way down the charts. It doesn't really make much sense, but our best guess is that Oxide's algorithms or whatever don't do so well when the primary GPU has substantially more RAM than the secondary GPU.
