Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Ahhh, the quest for PC games with graphics so good, they look pre-rendered. When will it end? Actually, it’ll end when PCs are capable of graphics that look pre-rendered. It’s going to happen. And say what you want about the gameplay or narrative, but Crysis 3 is a reminder that we’re getting ever closer. Think it’s also worth a recap on the Sony PS4 launch now that its beating, PC-derived heart has been officially revealed and tell you why I’m increasingly convinced it’s good news for the PC.
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A high quality LCD panel. Or high refresh rates. Take your pick. Because you can’t have both. Well, not unless you think BadgerJump Monitors (or whatever they’re called) sounds like a sensible consumer electronics brand and you’re thus willing to roll the dice on a dodgy Korean panel off eBay. But wait. One of the footnotes to NVIDIA’s recent Titan graphics card launch is a new monitor overclocking feature. Yup, monitor overclocking. But will it give you 120Hz for free? Will it fry your panel? Do you need NVIDIA’s £800 Titan? Should you actually care about high refresh? I’ve got the answers… Read the rest of this entry »

Bit late with this installment due to a near-death experience with pharyngitis. But that’s actually allowed a few things shake out into the public domain. And the overall upshot is that PC hardware took an odd turn this week. The launch of a new high end GPU from NVIDIA really only served to confirm 2013 looks odds on for slim to no progress in graphics technology. More than that, it’s basically the end of the graphics refresh cycle as we know it. Sounds grim, but actually means now is a great time to buy a new pixel pumper. Meanwhile, Dell wheels out a crazy 21:9 aspect ultra-wide display and ye olde graphics benchmarks get an update. Read the rest of this entry »

There are five stages of grief you go through when your laptop screen breaks. There’s ‘No!’, ‘God no!’, ‘Come on!’, ‘What? You were fine an hour ago!’, and ‘Muuuuuuum!’. Laptops aren’t like desktops. They’re not easy to pop open and fiddle with. When my laptop broke, I experienced all those stages all at once, and it came out like a sneeze with tears. My gaming laptop. Dead. No warranty. No insurance. Just a terrifying block of expensive plastic with a fuzzy screen. My bank account giggled and pointed when I checked it to see if a replacement was feasible, because that’s what you do when a laptop dies. You don’t fix it. They’re too slidey and shiny. Then I got to thinking. At first it was mostly about Cuddy from House, but after I got my breath back I wanted to know if the screen was replaceable? After all, phone screen replacement is all the rage nowadays. And what’s a laptop if not a bigger, less phoney phone?

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Let’s shake off the downbeat vibe from our last installment involving console toyboxes with some promising prospects for PC display tech. For starters, ultra high-res LCD panels look fairly likely to transition to the PC. If that’s an incremental step, could virtual reality in the form of the Oculus Rift headset deliver a real-world rendering revolution? I’ve also got a little something known as frame latency for you to think about regarding graphics performance. Read the rest of this entry »

Happy new year all ye hallowed RPSers. It’s time to get hardware back on track. This week, the theme is consoles. We’re talking next-gen Playstation and Xbox. We’re talking Steam Boxes. We’re talking hope for beleaguered AMD. Just maybe.

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Long-haired lover from Liverpool David Valjalo speaks to ex-Relic art honcho and founder, Rob Cunningham, about his new project: a planet-spanning free-to-play RTS called Hardware. Oh, and he also discusses how he’s building giant, working robots in his spare time.

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Update: OK, we’ve now had correct answers to both questions, so please cease your frenzied entries now. Thanks for getting involved, all. Now updated with answers. Well done to our two winners! And for the avoidance of doubt, our two winners know who they are!

This is it, folks. Your chance to live the dream and kick off 2013 in style. I’ve scratched backs, pulled strings and fiddled with knobs. The result is that we’re giving away a pair of gaming rig kits composed of RPS’s favourite clobber. So, that’s an Intel Core i5-3570K processor, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 graphics and some Z77 motherboard action. And it can all be yours. All you have to do is riddle me these questions three. Well, two and a tie breaker… Read the rest of this entry »

Graphics, graphics, graphics. It’s all you lot care about. Actually, it’s what I care about most when it comes to PC performance. So why fight it? Instead, I’ve got a couple of graphics-related titbits for you this week. Firstly, I’ve had a chat with Intel’s graphics guru, Richard Huddy. Odds are, you’ll be gaming on Intel graphics one day. What’s more, the mere fact that Intel has snapped up the likes of Mr Huddy, previously known for his dev-rel uberness at ATI, when there was an ATI, is symptomatic of Intel’s increasingly full-on attitude to graphics. The other part of this week’s awfully exciting package is NVIDIA’s new GeForce Experience. It’s an automated game settings optimisation tool. The idea is to take the headache out of graphics settings and give you the holy grail of PC performance and visuals with console levels of setup pain, which is to say zero pain.
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Couple of questions for you hardware freaks to ponder this week. Is it time to think the unthinkable, to do the undoable and ditch the hallowed keyboard n’ mouse control interface for PC gaming? Oh, and is the desktop PC dead? The former’s something I’ve wondered for a while in relation to PC interfaces in general, but now somebody is actually having a proper stab at bettering ye olde rodent and fiddlestick. The latter bombshell, meanwhile, follows rumours Intel will stop selling desktop CPUs in a little over a year. That sounds bad. Fortunately, the reality isn’t altogether catastrophic. Read the rest of this entry »