Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Equitable though Her Majesty’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland may largely be, a few isolated injustices still stalk the land. That I have to work for a living hardly seems fair, for instance. But even more odious is the fact that consumerist tat like smartphones, ultrabooks and tablets now have better screens by many metrics than our hallowed PC monitors. What gives? A recent interview I did with monitor maker Iiyama for ye olde PC Format mag dug up some answers. I also discovered why things aren’t likely to dramatically improve any time soon. Meanwhile, the roller coaster ride for AMD’s fortunes continues. This week, I predict survival! Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t sling your old CPU on eBay just yet. Too many Rumsfeldian known unknowns remain, never mind the unknown unknowns. But the known knowns suggest Intel is bringing back at least a slither of overclocking action to its budget CPUs. It’s arrives with the incoming and highly imminent Haswell generation of Intel chips and it might help restore a little fun to the budget CPU market, not to mention a little faith in Intel. Next up, local game streaming. Seems like a super idea to me. So, I’d like to know, well, what you’d like to know about streaming. Then I’ll get some answers for you. Meanwhile, game bundles or bagging free games when you buy PC components. Do you care? I’ve also had a play with the latest bonkers-wide 21:9-aspect PC monitors… Read the rest of this entry »

Here it is, folks. The answers to all your AMD questions. Well, not all of them. Dropped some, reworded others, added a few twists of my own. The usual. The senior AMD suit in question is Roy Taylor. His official title is Corporate Vice President, Global Channel Sales. That’s right, Corporate Vice President, Global Channel Sales. Soak up the seniority. He’s been at AMD for 12 weeks having spent the previous 12 years at arch enemy Nvidia. So let’s just say he’s got plenty of insight into graphics, CPUs and gaming. Did I mention he is indeed quite senior? Read the rest of this entry »

Bit of an experiment this, but I’m meeting up with some senior AMD suits later this week. So instead of standing around looking plausible and pretending I know stuff, I thought it might be fun to give you lot the chance to put whatever queries you might have to AMD, makers of Radeon graphics cards and FX/Phenom/Athlon processors. It might not, of course, but what with the PS4 and next Xbox (allegedly) going all-AMD and the PC component market in something of a transition – oh and with the very future of AMD in question – well, there’s plenty to ponder.

Whether we get any answers worth having is another matter. But don’t ask, don’t get. Fed up with AMD drivers? Want to know what’s next for the FX CPU? Sound off below and I’ll lay it on Paxman-styleee later in the week.

I’m not sure how amazeballs this really is in practice, as PC Tomb Raider code is being witheld until the end of the week because reasons, but I dig the concept. Game hair’s not great, by and large – some engines certainly do OK by it, but the hair-helmet approach very much remains the norm. AMD’s come up with some tech to try and make locks more lustrous. Instead of taking two anti-aliasing systems into the shower, they’ve devised TressFX (oof), intended to make hair flow and change more convincingly. This will apparently first be seen in the impending Tomb Raider re-reboot, which has “the world’s first real-time hair rendering technology in a playable game”, it says here.
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Do you care about anti-aliasing? Do you dream of snuggling up to its sort of crisp edges and mild performance hit? Or are jaggies an acceptable compromise in the name of RAW INCREDIBLE SPEEDY SPEED? It’s one of those things I find it increasingly hard to go without (though not as much as anisotropic filtering, missus) yet it’s always the first thing to go if a game’s not running so well on my ageing PC. Also, so many games don’t include a decent/any option for it in their settings, requiring me to have a fiddle in driver settings with variable results. Both NVIDIA and AMD are trying to change that, with newer anti-aliasing tech and the option to force it on globally in driver settings.
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News that an eyebrow-raising 3 million Steam activation codes for natty racing title DIRT 3 had been leaked online broke earlier today, and now has an official oh-dear air to it as a result of confirmation from AMD that, yes, the codes were intended for vouchers that shipped with their Radeon graphics cards and yes, a database file containing them was purloined by bad eggs. I’m sure no-one at AMD or DIRT 3 publisher Codemasters is terribly calm right now, but at least it doesn’t appear to be the case that either of their sites or servers were directly hacked.
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Here’s an interesting about-face. Last week we told you of AMD spokesman Richard Huddy’s comments regarding the DirectX API (I now type “API” with an undue confidence), and specifically how it gets in the way of PCs realising their ability to be ten times faster than consoles. Well, now they’re saying words to the effect of, “Um, we didn’t say that, and even if we did, we didn’t mean it.” More specifically, they’re claiming the bit-tech story took the quotes out of context, and according to CRN, “exaggerated” them. Update: bit-tech responds to this below.

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Much like I am ten times more powerful than Quintin, the PC is ten times more powerful than the consoles, according to AMD spokesman Richard Huddy. Which leaves him, and us, wondering why the PC version of games often feels more hobbled than bounding ahead. In fact, in some ways the PC is running at a tenth of the ability of consoles. He told Bit-Tech,

“To a significant extent that’s because, one way or another and for good reasons and bad – mostly good – DirectX is getting in the way.”

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