Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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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